Metaphors of Identity and Professional Practice

Abstract

Historically, professional identity was viewed as a singular construct, and the boundary-spanning dynamics of subidentities remained unexamined. More recently, identity scholars have paved the way to consider the multiple personal and social identities that comprise an individual's professional identity. These dynamics are exemplified by the unique challenges that scholar-practitioners regularly encounter. To deepen understanding of variations in how scholar-practitioners enact their professional identity, we interviewed young scholar-practitioners who completed their doctorates in the past 7 years, as well as seasoned scholar-practitioners with at least 20 years of experience. We elicited metaphors from the interviewees to explore the complexities of their professional identity and subidentities and the challenges that scholar-practitioners face at different stages of career development. We offer implications for the future socialization of scholar-practitioners and others in boundary-spanning roles.

The construction of professional identity by physiotherapists: a qualitative study

“…The United Kingdom (UK) national government's health policy of efficiency savings, quality improvement, and patient safety is challenging the national, publicly-funded, * Correspondence: Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, 14 healthcare system [1]. A public inquiry into the failures of statutory organisations to properly monitor the provision of care at a large hospital which resulted in poor care for many patients, made many recommendations for changes in statutory, regulatory and professional conduct [2].…”

“…[6,[11][12][13]). This effort has introduced the notion of individuals' engaging in 'identity work', as they seek strategies to enact their professional identity in the workplace [14]. This paper describes a research study that examined these challenges in Physiotherapy.…”

Liminality in the occupational identity of mental health peer support workers: A qualitative study

“…In fact, external validation of identity through relationships in the work/practice environment is reported to be more important for those less experienced in their work, such as the PSW participants in the present study, than those with greater experience (Kram et al . ; Moss et al . ).…”

Conceptual Metaphors and Apprenticeship Paths as Levers for Professional Development and Learning

“…The metaphors created by the involved students represented symptomatic elements of specific ways of considering their own apprenticeship paths in reference to other things and allowed to participants to transfer their own frames of reference from a field of experience to another. Metaphors analysis is a "method particularly suited to study the meanings people invest in their actions and the interpretations they make out of them" [27] (p. 307). As such, the metaphor has been seen as an appropriate heuristic for investigating issues of belief.…”