11757: Mirror, Mirror, Tell Me Who I Am: A PDW About the Challenges of Crafting an Academic Identity

Friday, July 25, 2025

09:30 - 11:30 CEST (GMT+2)

Location: Bella Center: Hall D- D3-m1

Session Type: PDW (workshop)
Orientation: Research
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/B8Xz46

Distinguished Speaker(s)

WS

Wendy K. Smith

U. of Delaware, United States

Panelist(s)

DO

David Oliver

Monash University, Australia
RF

Russell Fralich

HEC Montreal, Canada
JP

Jeanine Pieternel Porck

Oklahoma State U., United States
IB

Ignas Bruder

-, Germany

Organizer(s)

SJ

Sophie Elizabeth Jané

Umeå School of Business, Economics, and Statistics, Sweden
FC

Fannie Couture

HEC Montreal, Canada
RK

Renate Kratochvil

Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
MW

Molly L. Weinstein

Northwestern U., United States
BS

Bonnie Stanway

The U. of Sydney Business School

Inspired by three years of success (and one award), this interactive Professional Development Workshop (PDW) provides tangible advice to doctoral students and early career scholars on how to successfully craft and communicate an academic identity. This year, we will dive into the challenges of crafting who we are and what we do as academics: How do you authentically distinguish yourself from the crowd? How do you move from student to post-doc to tenure-track position? How do you create and sustain positive relationships and collaborations with colleagues and mentors? Crafting an identity narrative is a central strategy to overcome these hurdles (Ibarra & Lineback, 2005). Yet it is not without difficulties. For instance, how can early career scholars strategically weave their research, teaching, and service work into a coherent and compelling identity? How can they work through the inherent tensions between identity maintenance and change (Bloom, Colbert, & Nielsen, 2020; Sugiyama, Ladge, & Dokko, 2024)? How do they create coherence and continuity when academia is, by nature, full of transitions that can feel quite discontinuous (Linde, 1993)? Our panel of international organizational scholars will explore the paradoxes academics can face as they look to uncover, solidify, and communicate a cohesive identity. Panelists will share the challenges they faced throughout their own academic identity crafting, and some ways they navigated these difficulties (Brickson, 2011). Panelists will then exchange with session participants directly, providing them with bespoke feedback and advice grounded in participants’ own academic journeys.

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