Inside Out? Individual Agency and Professional Identity in the Era of Internationalisation in Higher Education

Universities expose higher education professionals to complex organisational
environments, expecting them to comply with structures, policies and practices.
A university is not so different in this respect from other Communities
of Practice (Wenger, 1998), in which the pressures to conform are often
greater than the inducement to be original, and in which being different
may be implicitly discouraged. The relationship between the individual and
the established power structures becomes even more complicated when a
university is going through the transitions and challenges that are inherent
to internationalisation. This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities
experienced by academics who are cultural and linguistic outliers
within the setting of a European university, showing how the assumptions,
values and expectations of the university environment can affect individuals’
ability to perform agentically. We consider how these academic outliers
make meaning of being professional within the context of internationalisation
and consider how such efforts can contribute to new understandings
of interculturality. We further examine how alternative ways of being can
result in new modes of engagement with colleagues. Drawing on interviews
with six academics within a single institution, this chapter offers a version
of the truth that is ‘woven from an amalgam of raw data’ (Clough,
2002), resulting in an exploratory narrative in the voices of fictionalised
protagonists.