Reimagining academic identities in response to research demands at Universities of Technology

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.


Introduction
The development of academic identities is conditioned by institutional culture. The one can complement and enable the other or, conversely, 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.
Imagining academic identities in response to research demands 97 Our focus on the research aspects of academic work is important because five Universities of Technology refer to research directly in their vision and mission statements and all refer to research in their strategic plans as a focus of the institution. This might be unsurprising given that research is generally considered to be a key function of a university (Graham, 2013), but under apartheid, the binary divide between Universities and Technikons presented Technikons with few research opportunities or obligations (Reddy, 2006). In the Technikon sector, there was little expectation for Technikon lecturers to contribute to a research agenda (Powell and McKenna, 2009). With the institutional classification of 'University of Technology' in 2004 new expectations were placed on academics with significant effects on their identities.

From Technikon to University of Technology
Technikons had far stronger centralised control by the State over their programme offerings, budgets and curricula than universities did (Bunting, 2002) and this had effects on almost every aspect of their culture (Boughey, 2010). Technikons offered a career-focused, hands-on approach to education and training, and produced diplomates with knowledge that was immediately relevant in the workplace (Department of Education, 1997). Alongside the major formal distinction of Technikons offering nationally-developed diploma programmes and universities offering institutionally-developed general and professional degree programmes, was the distinction that universities were expected to produce research and offer postgraduate qualifications. But over the last few decades, there has been a drift as vocationally oriented programmes have been introduced in a number of strongly discipline-based universities (Gillard, 2004;Kraak, 2006) and Technikons began in the 1990s to offer postgraduate programmes. The drift accelerated once Technikons were reclassified as Universities of Technology, with these new institutions increasingly focusing on degree offerings, as can be seen from the re-curriculation process currently underway, which has resulted in a number of diplomas being converted into professional degrees.
The history of Technikons has been well documented (for example, Koen, 1989;Erasmus, 2008;Chetty, 2003) and such studies indicate that employment of lecturers in Technikons and promotion within them was largely based on industry experience. The extent to which an individual had ongoing connections to industry was considered a vital source of expertise and key to the integration of up-to-date workplace practices into the curriculum and important for the overseeing of workplace learning. Forming a research identity and engaging in research activities was neither expected nor encouraged by institutional structures. studies. There has also been much more movement of academics between institutional types carrying the norms and expectations of one type into another.

Methodology
This article is based on a larger study (Gumbi, 2017) in which interviews were conducted with fifteen Dental Technology academics from three institutions to establish their experience of the emergence of the University of Technology as an institutional type. This article hones in on the data concerning how academic identities were being reimagined specifically in response to increased demands for research. The study participants' responses are undoubtedly conditioned by the nature of the professional field of Dental Technology, as we shall discuss in more detail later, but we would argue that the coherence between our findings and those in the literature suggest that these findings are broadly recognisable beyond the field of Dental Technology and beyond South Africa (for example, Harley, 2002;Findlow, 2012).
Ethical clearance was obtained from all three institutions and the participants provided informed consent to voluntarily participate in the study. Though the institutions involved in this study are publicly identifiable because Dental Technology is only offered at Durban University of Technology, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and Tshwane University of Technology, the data is quoted in ways that anonymise each participant's institution as per the informed consent agreement. Participants were randomly allocated to a coding system of Lecturer 1 to Lecturer 15.
The fifteen academics were asked open-ended questions about their work, such as how long they had worked in the institution and where they had worked previously and what it was that they taught. The interview was largely conversational in nature with the respondents determining the direction it took and the interviewer asking probing questions to ensure shared understanding. It was planned that a question would be asked about research if the respondents did not raise the issue themselves but in all fifteen interviews, the issue of research was raised within minutes of the interview commencing.
The data was seen to describe the experiences of the fifteen academics which was then analysed with a Social Realist frame to identify some of the mechanisms from which these experiences emerged. Taking a Social Realist perspective on the data entails understanding that people's experiences emerge from a complex interplay of mechanisms. Archer (2000) shows that our identities can be understood in terms of the personal projects we set for ourselves and which we attempt to achieve. While each of us has agency, that is, the ability to act in ways that seek to Imagining academic identities in response to research demands 99 achieve our personal projects, our agency is enabled or constrained by the structural and cultural mechanisms at play in the context.
Structures refer to social arrangements whereby the goods of society are dispensed. In this study, for example, the emergence of the structure of 'Universities of Technology' is of interest as are the national and international mechanisms driving such structures. The historical structure of 'Technikons' is also seen to continue to have a conditioning effect on what happens in the institution. Culture, in a Social Realist approach, refers to the ideologies and regular practices that occur in these institutions. The extent to which individual academics develop a research identity is thus seen to be tied to their personal projects which are in turn influenced by the structures and cultures within which they work. Garraway and Winberg (2019: 42) describe institutional culture as being the 'sum total of the values, attitudes, styles of interaction, collective memories -the "way of life" of the university.
While Garraway and Winberg (2019: 42) acknowledge that the institutional culture is 'known by those who work and study in the environment, through their lived experience', they do not distinguish between institutional culture and the agency of individuals. Drawing on Archer's demand for analytical dualism (2000) in undertaking a Social Realist analysis, we consider how individual academics' agency has emergent powers and properties separately from the powers and properties of the institutional culture. Archer (2000) argues that an understanding of such a distinction is necessary where change is desired.
There are dangers in describing the institutional cultures of all Universities of Technology and the research identities of all academics on the basis of interviews from fifteen academics from a specific field in just three out of the eight Universities of Technology. This is not the intention of this study. Archer (2000) argues that the aim of social research is not to discover generalizable truths but to begin to identify the conditions under which certain social phenomena emerge. By making sense of how individuals conceptualise their personal projects, enact their agency to this end, and are enabled or constrained by the structures and cultures within which they find themselves, we are able to identify some of the mechanisms at play. Institutional cultures are complex and vary even within a single university, and individuals' personal projects emerge from a myriad of experiences. Nonetheless, this study has identified a few mechanisms which need to be taken into account in heeding Garraway and Winberg's call (2019) to reimagine the future of Universities of Technology.

Findings
This paper discusses three main findings related to structural and cultural mechanisms enabling

Research as Postgraduate Qualification
All participants commented on the demands placed on them related to research. Comments such as the following were common across the data: Moving from the Technikon to the University, of course there is a huge challenge ... to lecturers, as research now became a fundamental component of the life of a lecturer.

(Lecturer 11)
It's a University of Technology. Here the difference might be that they're prompting you towards doing a Master's, and in our era, they didn't prompt you to do a Master's. (Lecturer

10)
While reference to research was ubiquitous in the data, it was discussed exclusively in terms of obtaining formal qualifications, with participants using terms such as 'doing research' and 'studying for a postgraduate qualification' interchangeably. There was no spontaneous mention of research engagement for non-qualification purposes in any of the interviews: I've been told to do my research, encourage is not the word that I would use. (Lecturer 15 referring to the institutional demand that he improve his qualifications.) The understanding of the participants that 'research' equated to the attainment of a postgraduate qualification suggests that the institutional culture was not one in which the university was understood to play a role as a knowledge producer for broader society. Garraway and Winberg (2019: 46) indicate that in their research, conceptions of the institution as needing to 'respond to the 4th industrial revolution, and so become a different, more advanced university' were held mainly by top management and indeed such goals seem disconnected from the identities expressed by participants in our study.
Within the participants' shared understanding that research equates to improving formal postgraduate qualifications, there was a distinction between those who drew on more instrumentalist understandings and those who perceived postgraduate study as being tied to their 'personal project' (Archer, 2000). The instrumentalist understanding saw research as an institutional requirement for the purposes of job security or promotion, rather than one complimentary to their own academic identities: ... we advertised once for two years to get a chrome cobalt lecturer and do you know why?
You get excellent people who could teach but can't be appointed as such because that person hasn't got a Master's degree or a Doctorate, he becomes a junior lecturer, and no person in his right mind who is successful, who is successful outside, is going to want to become a junior lecturer. (Lecturer 8) We are only going to appoint people who've got degrees [but] who haven't worked yet and how are they going to teach it? You see the vicious cycle? (Lecturer 12) One of the three Universities of Technology in this study had introduced the requirement that new academic appointees have to be in possession of a Master's qualification in order to lecture. The other two institutions had this as a strong recommendation and if anyone was appointed without such a qualification, achieving it was part of their probationary requirements.
Some participants saw this as meaning that departments would be less likely to be able to attract academics with strong workplace experience as such people would be unlikely to hold the required postgraduate qualification. Gumbi and McKenna 102 There was a frequent comment by those participants who had been working in Universities of Technology for some time that they were already adequately qualified and that the requirement to achieve further formal qualifications was unnecessary: For me, the value is the lecturer's expertise in industry, I believe that newbies [new lecturers] need to be exposed to industry, and you've got to have to be exposed to industry. (Lecturer   1) ... okay, the Master's is not sufficient to address the practical side, that's my little perception on lecturing (Lecturer 10) In some cases, the institutional push to undertake further study had an adverse effect on their academic identities. Their lack of a postgraduate qualification was now experienced as positioning these participants as novices despite their many years of experience in the profession and in the Technikon (now University of Technology) sector: I posed the question: if you have lecturers in your system that have got so much experience but do not have the qualification, does that mean you just kick them out? What happens to them? (Lecturer 12) For some participants, the institutional pressure on lecturers to achieve higher academic qualifications was better aligned to their personal project than for others. The data shows that some participants used their agency to make the most of opportunities offered by the institution to undertake further studies, while others experienced the pressure to improve their qualifications as a threat to their academic identities, which had emerged largely from their workplace expertise.
The equating of research with the achievement of a postgraduate qualification was evident across all fifteen interviews, and there was not a sense that undertaking research was an ongoing and integral aspect to their academic identities. There was a concern that the institutional systems were rigid and had not adapted to the call for research engagement: Despite managerialism and pressures to performativity, individuals are still able to create spaces for exercise of their agency (Clegg, 2008) but the highly bureaucratic controls in the system constrained the agency of academics to undertake research and to develop a sense of themselves as researchers. Participants complained about the 'politics' of the institution whereby it was difficult to register for postgraduate qualifications in faculties other than their own as the funding would not then accrue to their department. They described the lengthy time periods in obtaining permission to register, proposal approval, ethical clearance and so on. In keeping with the findings of Garraway and Winberg (2019), there was a sense in the data that academics were being held back in their research endeavours by onerous finance and procurement procedures.

The intersection between institutional culture and pressure to do research
Participants complained that some requests were challenged by administrators who had no expertise in the field. Academics were not able to make their own arrangements for buying materials or for travel and they needed to get multiple levels of approval which participants indicated could result in extensive delays. Only approved suppliers could be used which sometimes increased costs and led to further delays.
In Despite reference in the literature to the need for Universities of Technology to develop more supportive research cultures (Du Pré, 2010), the data suggests that the participants did not feel that it was their responsibility or within their capacity to build such a culture. There were regular calls in the data for improvements to the 'research culture' of the institution, however this was expressed as something 'the university' must do, rather than something that would be driven by the agency of the participants through academic structures such as Senate. This reflects the Technikon history where lecturers were employed specifically to teach on nationally approved programmes. It is worth noting, for example, that those teaching in Technikons were called 'lecturers' and that the designation of 'academic' only came into common usage at the time of the change to Universities of Technology. 104 The most common reason given for the resistance to undertaking research was the high teaching workload. The time and resources allocated to conduct research were argued to be insufficient and participants identified a tension between the development of a research (postgraduate) identity and the identity as an adept teacher of Dental Technology. Those interviewed in this study were generally critical of the support that the institutions provided to them to complete their postgraduate studies.
I was loaded with enough work, and sorry, you didn't have half the year [off] to do your

Master's. (Lecturer 4)
The unfortunate part about it is time, you can't be a full time lecturer and expect to do a

Master's, really. (Lecturer 3)
There are multiple reasons for the heavier teaching loads at Universities of Technology. The differing entrance requirements and the skewed socioeconomic demographics across the sector (Cooper, 2015) condition teaching and learning processes, but it is not only the nature of the student body that increases the teaching demands experienced by academics in Universities of Technology. Given the practical nature of many University of Technology courses, extensive hands-on laboratory or studio time is needed to acquire the requisite practices. The emergence of research as an additional requirement placed on academics in such institutions needs to be understood within this context of a focus on knowledge as practice.
The structure of knowledge in Universities of Technology can thus be seen to be a mechanism constraining the positioning of research as central to the institutional culture. It also affected academics' identities. Henkel (2005) argues that academics' primary identity relationship is to their discipline. But, generally speaking, academics educated in and working in the University of Technology sector do not have a clear disciplinary home from which to claim such an identity.
University of Technology programmes are predominantly focused on 'regions' (Muller, 2009). Bernstein (2000) distinguishes between 'singulars', which have fairly strong boundaries between them and clear knowledge building rules, and 'regions', which draw from multiple academic disciplines and recontextualise this selection of knowledge to face outwards to the world of work (Winberg, et al., 2013).
The Dental Technology programme faces the world of work by preparing Dental Technologists who will make fixed and removable oral and extra-oral appliances and prostheses as prescribed by a dentist (Vahed, 2014;Skea, 2010). The focus on 'regions', rather than disciplines, in the University of Technology sector holds true for the Dental Technology programme as this preparation for the world of work requires varied levels of expertise in areas as disparate as Art, Anatomy, Engineering, and Chemistry. The Dental Technology programme does not include such knowledge in its original form, but rather recontextualises selected knowledge from these areas into the workplace focused subjects taught in the programme.  (Maton, 2013). This makes the formation of an academic identity through a primary identity relationship with the discipline more challenging.
I think it is going to have to be a lot more theoretical, it will probably be a big challenge because the Dental Technology is very practical and we are going to have to change it.

Lack of industry demand for research
As we have shown, and as with most programmes offered at Universities of Technology, many of the academics in this study were experienced industry personnel who were only introduced to research engagement when the focus of the institution shifted and demands were made for them to improve their academic qualifications. The participants in this study explained that their industry, Dental Technology, did not make demands for research and this constrained the extent to which there would be an interest in undertaking Dental Technology research. This may be specific to Dental Technology and the way in which it is practiced in South Africa. Participants Technology were more related to educational, entrepreneurial or social issues, such as research on the introduction of a clinical curriculum (Mqadi, 2009), student recruitment and retention (Dlamini, 2017), the need for corporate social responsibility in the Dental Technology sector (Zondi, 2015) and the effects of the transition to Universities of Technology (redacted for review).
This was a concern for many of the participants: It is all soft things that they are doing it on, it has got no real benefit to Dental

Conclusion
Despite increases in publication outputs and postgraduate graduations, Universities of Technology continue to contribute a very small percentage of research in the South African higher education sector (Cloete, et al., 2015;CHE 2019). In this paper, we have argued that this is in part because being research active is not yet seen to be an integral aspect of many academics' identities.
Institutional structures and culture constrain the development of such identities. Heavy teaching loads associated with the hands-on development of complex workplace practices were seen to constrain the possibilities for research endeavours and the structure of knowledge in many fields made a clear research focus less easy to identify.
The hierarchical nature of Universities of Technology was seen, in part, to account for the extent to which the participants in this study understood the development of a research culture to be something that 'the institution' should provide and something that was external to their own realms of agency. Managerialist processes for running research projects were identified as constraining mechanisms.
The study also raised the issue that if the target workplace did not demand or value research, then it was more difficult for University of Technology academics to undertake research activities. There would seem to be a need for some creative work to be done in this regard in ways that allow for research to be undertaken which aligns well to the workplace identity and which has the potential to strengthen the conceptual core of the curriculum through a careful deliberation of the teaching-research nexus.
Our findings accord with Garraway and Winberg's contention (2019) that the first need is for recognition that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Paying attention to how academics' experience the expectations placed upon them as being congruent or contradictory to their identities is important if change is to be achieved (Clegg, 2008). Undertaking change at Gumbi and McKenna 108 the level of institutional structures and cultures will, we have argued, be severely undermined if the identities of individual academics are not taken carefully into account.

Author Biographies
Thobani Gumbi is a registered dental technologist and worked as such before joining Durban