Institutional Commitments, Individual Compromises: Identity‐related responses to compromise in an Australian university

Abstract

This study explores compromises by individual academic staff, which reflect their multiple understandings of academic work. I offer a brief overview of the changing Australian tertiary sector environment and the ways in which this has had an impact on the academic role. The discussion centres around the need for investigations of academia to be premised on an understanding of the heterogeneous nature of the academic workforce. A study of the ways in which staff differently integrate the corporate‐driven activities into their conceptualizations of academia is the focus of this paper, with particular reference to the compromises described by interviewees. The multiple meta‐narratives and academic identities, which were identified from the research data, reveal diverse attempts by academic staff to reconcile preconceptions of academia with experiences of working in a corporatized university, resulting in differences in the levels and nature of compromise. Interviewees in this study indicated that the need to compromise their understandings of academic work led to a degree of role strain. Finally, the interviewees' perceptions of the presence of their narratives in the wider organizational conversations are examined.