ABSTRACT
A striking feature of the academic environment in the present day is an apparent tension between the institutional context and the personal identities of academics. On the one side, it is widely felt that institutions of higher education are coming increasingly under pressure from market and state forces with the result that individual academics feel that they have little control over the institutions in which they work. On the other side, higher education is an institutional sphere that offers many of those who work within it a considerable degree of autonomy. Academics have a strong sense of their professional identity, which has been traditionally separate from the specific institutional context. It has been widely accepted that academics have as their primary loyalty the scholarly community of which they are a part rather than the specific institution in which they work. This may be a somewhat old-fashioned professorial identity, but there is little doubt that the perception academics have of themselves is often in tension with the institutional context. Whether or not this has increased today or has taken a new form will be explored in this chapter. This tension cannot be understood without a consideration of the changing nature of academic institutions, which can be seen as the site of identity projects.
