Macro-Structural Change in Relation to Micro-Discursive Storytelling: Qatari Nationality as a Resource for the Construction of Professional Identity

Abstract

Combining insights from the sociology of education and from discourse-based work on identities within contexts of organizational change, we aim to tease out how top- down structural changes can be related to micro-discursive identity work. Selecting the case of the Qatari university context – which currently takes up a pivotal position in a nation-wide transformative agenda that targets both society and economy – we engage in an empirical investigation of a corpus of interviews with Qatari junior academics. We draw on ‘positioning analysis’ (Bamberg, 1997) to scrutinize the linguistic specificities of the interviewees’ individual stories and their construction of professional identities. In the analyses, we show an emergent pattern of similar identity work in some of the interviews in our dataset. In particular, these interviewees explicitly draw on their nationality when discussing their career journeys, thus constructing a very specific version of their professional identity. We argue that this can be considered as emblematic of the academic profession as it is being shaped in current-day Qatar, and we claim that this type of analysis can reflexively capture some of the complexities of the dynamic change processes in higher education institutions as well as in organizational contexts in general.