Abstract
In the last volume of this journal, Garraway and Winberg called for a reimagination of Universities of Technology (UoT) within the South African higher education system. This article continues that conversation by looking at the implications that the formation of the UoT had for academics’ identities. Technikon lecturers’ identities were closely tied to workplace expertise, but demands for research in UoTs have changed this. A social realist analysis of interviews with fifteen academics at three UoTs finds that research remains a contested issue. Interviewees understood research to take the form of acquiring postgraduate qualifications, rather than as an ongoing activity tied to their identities. Echoing Garraway and Winberg’s study, the bureaucratic nature of the institutional culture was referred to as a constraint. There was also a view that for this programme, Dental Technology, a demand for research was needed from industry if this was to be a valued aspect of academics’ identities.
Highlights
The development of academic identities is conditioned by institutional culture
This article works in conversation with that piece but comes at the interplay between academic identities and institutional culture from the other direction; we report on interviews with fifteen academics from three institutions to analyse how they conceived their identities within the University of Technology workplace and in particular their research identities
The first is about participants’understanding of research to be the acquisition of postgraduate qualifications, the second relates to how the institutional culture and structures enable or constrain research, and the third looks at structures external to the university in the form of a demand for research by the relevant industry, in this case Dental Technology
Summary
The development of academic identities is conditioned by institutional culture. The one can complement and enable the other or, contradict and constrain it. In a recent issue of this journal, Garraway and Winberg (2019) reflected on the institutional culture of Universities of Technology. Their focus at the institutional level was premised on the idea that the culture of an institution emerges through the beliefs and practices of individuals. This article works in conversation with that piece but comes at the interplay between academic identities and institutional culture from the other direction; we report on interviews with fifteen academics from three institutions to analyse how they conceived their identities within the University of Technology workplace and in particular their research identities. From our analysis of these interviews, we are able to offer a contribution to the conversation about the institutional cultures of this relatively new institutional type and the possibilities of reimaging its future
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