Academic manager or managed academic? Academic identity schisms in higher education

The relationship between values and academic identity has received scant attention in the higher education literature with some notable exceptions (Churchman, 2006 Churchman, D. 2006. Institutional commitments, individual compromises: Identity-related responses to compromise in an Australian university. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 28(1): 3–15. Taylor Harley, 2002 Harley, S. 2002. The impact of research selectivity on academic work and identity in UK universities. Studies in Higher Education, 27(2): 187–205. [Taylor Henkel, 2005 Henkel, M. 2005. Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment. Higher Education, 49: 155–76. [Crossref, Web of Science ® , Google Scholar). This paper contends that the perceived need to align all academics around corporate values and goals has given rise to academic identity schisms in higher education. Central to the academic identity schism is the notion of person–organisation values fit and the degree to which the ideologies and values of academics are congruent (the ‘academic manager’) or incongruent (the ‘managed academic’) with the prevailing discourse of corporate managerialism. To reduce the prevalence of academic disengagement and make it easier for academic managers to gain the support of the managed, the paper proposes two inter-related strategies for bridging identity schisms in academe.