Boundaries, Meaning and Change: Job Crafting and Academic Identity

Messer, Laura (2025) Boundaries, Meaning and Change: Job Crafting and Academic Identity. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Over the past 50 years academic work - academically conceptualised as tasks driven by exploration, uncertainty and the pursuit of knowledge - has increasingly been shaped by market demands, performance metrics and expectations of impact. As a result, academic time and resources are being diverted into activities that support institutional priorities and academic career stability and away from more expansive forms of academic work. Academic values such as academic autonomy and freedom are under challenge, threatening the academic sense of self as captured in Winter’s (2009) “academic identity schism”.

Despite these challenges, an emerging body of scholarship is highlighting how academics are still creating new academic values and practices in their roles. Building on this literature, this study uses a reflexive qualitative approach and social constructionist framework to explore academic job crafting through interviews with 24 academics from three universities: Suffolk, Essex and Cambridge. The findings are organised around three key themes. Firstly, participants conceptualise their work in terms of playing multiple institutional and academic games. Secondly, participants link meaningful academic work to social, relational and collaborative activity. Thirdly, participants reject the term “academic”, preferring self-concepts that reflect forms of work they experience as meaningful.

Overall, this thesis demonstrates that academic game-playing creates spaces for meaningful work through which academic identities are constructed. Participants describe approaching their identities like bricoleurs, drawing on networks, institutions, activities, values, and goals to craft their academic sense of self. An understanding of academic identity is offered that emphasises collaboration and social benefit rather than outputs and funding as markers of academic credibility. Academics are recognised as navigators of neoliberal environments whilst not behaving entirely neoliberal individuals themselves, but rather aligning more with Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) concept of “altruistic individualism”. A reflexive approach to academic identity is therefore shown where, through academic job crafting, meaningful academic identities are negotiated within, alongside, and beyond, the structures of higher education (HE). Moreover, academics are shown to be not just reproducing these HE structures, but, through job crafting, are subtly reshaping their roles, identities, and the environments in which they work.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Norwich Business School
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	14 Oct 2026 08:56
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2026 08:56
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104773
DOI:

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