Academic leadership roles and work life experiences: Improving quality by attending to professional identity

This paper discusses academic leadership from a PCP- perspective. The proposed research is part of a planned project focusing on academic teacher-researcher-leader in Swedish higher education. Drawing on Kompf & Brown’s (2005) theories of teachers’ personal and professional ideas about the practice - superordinate constructs nexus, we aim to explore and gain a deeper understanding of their core identity (Denicolo, Long and Bradley-Cole 2016). This is related to being a good teacher-researcher-leader in the current politic-economic context of higher education: tensions between reforms based on managerial logic from the business world and the pedagogic processes informed by professional academic logic (Pettersen, 2015), have an impact on all aspects of the academic role.