ABSTRACT
The multiple roles and responsibilities of academic work lead to fragmented days and multiple interruptions, particularly when people are located in their university office. The different timescales associated with the multiple roles and responsibilities of academic professional life are hard to co-ordinate. The institutional strategies that have the most immediate effect on the writing practices of academics in their everyday working lives are usually those that aim to maintain and improve performance in a range of accountability exercises which the league tables draw on. One specific area where digitisation has led to rapid transformation is in the area of social media, where academics have many more possibilities available to them for publicising their work and constructing an online identity. Academics’ writing is multi-layered, and many of these layers are invisible and never become public.
