In our work as lecturers, teachers, researchers, coaches or managers in a university of applied sciences, we do feel that the amount and variety of societal challenges on higher vocational education (HVE) is growing. Institutions in HE are in a process of transforming from traditional ‘either or’ research or education institutions into more complex hybrid knowledge institutions. Nowadays, universities of applied sciences (as institutions for HVE) in The Netherlands have three main objectives: providing education, conducting practice-oriented research to add to the professional knowledge base, and contributing to innovation in the professional fields of work. Education, research and innovation form the three pillars in the strategy of Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences (Educational Council of The Netherlands, 2015). These changing societal demands form an impetus for educational reform and innovation at both organizational and individual employee levels (Cummings & Shin, 2014). Changes in context and roles lead to questions: As a teacher/lecturer/researcher, how do I relate to the different stakeholders? What is the real meaning of being a ‘good’ lecturer or researcher in creating added values, and for whom? Some propose that the new challenges concern everybody and thus should be everyone’s job. But when everything becomes everyone’s job, how can we really realize the required added values? Others promote a more differentiated approach of accurately fitting talents and tasks to create the flow and employee satisfaction that is needed to realize the desired outcomes. But then how do we work together and cooperate with such an individualistic approach? These opposing positions in the discourse concern the question of how to define the ‘professional me’ amongst the ‘we’. In other words, the challenge is how we define and navigate our professional identities within the context of a dynamic multiple-identity organization with increasing pressures for professional diversity (Foreman & Whetten, 2002; Aangenendt, 2015).
This article proposes that identity formation and reformation are important dynamics that influence and are influenced by the course of a sustainability transition. We study identity (re-)formation in the transition of the dairy sector in a rural area in the Netherlands: the Green Heart. Soil subsidence, high emissions, and economic pressures require substantial changes in practices in the dairy sector and most importantly, the landscape that it is intertwined with. We use narrative analysis to study identity (re-)formation in two new stakeholder collectives that aim to address sustainability in the area. We identify discrepancies between the narratives in these collectives and the transition challenge. These discrepancies can be explained by the role that the landscape of the Green Heart plays in the identity (re-)formation within these collectives. The attachment to the current landscape forms a lock-in for the sustainability transition in this area.
MULTIFILE
This paper studies the productive role of innovation in organisations. Using the post-structuralist insight that innovation is an open concept that can become performative, we shift the emphasis from analysing innovations themselves to analysing how the concept of innovation affects the organisational practices through which it acquires meaning. Deploying this framework, we studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a failure. The subsequent dramatisation of this failure resulted in a new version of this innovation unit that strengthened established actors and institutions within the organisation. Our study shows how the use of the concept of innovation in an organisation can both stimulate and hamper its innovativeness. Addressing this paradox requires sensitivity to the concept's productive role and evaluations of innovation that look beyond accomplished results.
