Abstract
Background: International higher education partnerships are on the rise, yet gaps remain in our understanding of how these institutional arrangements affect participating academic actors. Therefore, Institutional logics theory offers a theoretical approach to understanding the complexities of this novel environment by unpacking how the contestation of multiple logics shapes individual behaviours.
Purpose: This research focuses on how contestation between logics, including State logic and emerging modern university logic, has reshaped individual academics’ professional identity in a new type of International higher education partnerships.
Design/methodology/approach: In total, 23 academics in international higher education partnership programs were interviewed about their views on their professional roles and responsibilities at these programs. A thematic analysis approach was used to analyse the reconstruction of individual actors’ professional identities.
Findings: The analysis found that these academics actively interpreted and dealt with logic contestations in the formation of their new professional identities. They re-constructed their professional identities using two mechanisms: (1) the re-framing of the meaning of profession logic by abandoning and keeping some selective identity elements of prevailing Confucianism logic while combining some identity elements shaped by emerging academic logic; and (2) the integration of identity elements prescribed by multiple emerging logics to characterise themselves as modern hybrid academics. The findings also suggest internal and external explanations of individual academics’ professional identity shifts.
Research limitations/implications: Longitudinal research is recommended to track partnership academics over time, answering the call to understand how the identification process is nested within changes in institutional logic as it evolves.
Practical implications: This paper equips university leaders, such as faculty and department heads, partnership program managers and program coordinators with advanced knowledge on the shifting professional identity of partnership academics, supporting their recruitment, selection and retention policies in hiring and retaining the right academics for the programs.
Originality/Value: By developing a new inductively generated framework, the paper demonstrates an understanding of individuals' professional identity in the novel environment of partnership, shaped by modern university logic. The study highlights the complexity of institutional logics at the individual level of analysis and the role of individual academic actor agency in facilitating institutional logic and professional identity transitions, specifically, the spread of modern university logic from the meso level to the micro level. These actors were seen not only as institutional carriers but also as active agents utilising their interpretations (by shifting their professional identities) to deliver modern university logic at the individual level.
Keywords: institutional logics, international higher education partnerships, professional identity.
Paper type: Research paper.