Current Science Policies and their Implications for the Formation and Maintenance of Academic Identity
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Current Science Policies and their Implications for the Formation and Maintenance of Academic Identity Mary Henkel Centre for the Evaluation of Public Policy and Practice, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
The paper draws on communitarian theory to suggest that the traditional strength and stability of academic identities are strongly associated with membership of communities, primarily the discipline and the university, that together constitute a coherent, bounded world. It analyses how science policies have helped to weaken these boundaries over the last 30 years. It then examines the implications for academic professional identities, focusing on natural scientists, and considers, in particular, how they are reflected and taken account of in policies for doctoral education, which has in the past constituted a key form of induction into academic community membership. It argues that these policies have the potential to help students to continue to build the foundation of a strong epistemic identity in the context of change but that they contain contradictions that must be confronted. Higher Education Policy (2004) 17, 167–182. doi:10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300049 Keywords: identity; community; boundaries; research skills; doctoral education
Introduction Towards the end of the 20th century the concept of identity came under intense scrutiny by social theorists. The character of change in late modernity was seen as generating degrees of fragmentation, dislocation and discontinuity in social institutions and patterns of life that challenged the central meaning of identity (Harvey, 1989; Laclau, 1990; Giddens, 1991; Hall, 1992). At the same time, new expressions of collective identity were seen as strong and important counter forces to the onward march of globalization and cosmopolitanism (Castells, 1997). It can be argued that debates about identity are particularly pertinent for studies of higher education and science. The concept of identity has been of central symbolic and instrumental significance in the lives of individual academics and in the workings of the academic profession. Traditional academic reward systems, centred on reputation, reflect the cultivation of an
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institutionalized individualism within a self-regulating community of peers. Advancement is a matter of acquiring a public identity, sustaining and enhancing it. Public identity feeds into the sense of an individual professional identity and self-esteem, and for successful academics a virtuous, if often fragile, circle is created between reputation and self-esteem. One of the foundations of academic identity is to be found in postgraduate research education, which has been shaped by, and for the primary purpose of reproducing, the academic profession. This paper aims to examine how far changes in the contexts and expectations of the academic profession have impinged on doctoral education and what implications they have for this as a critical stage
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