The literature concerning work identities within universities is limited and focussed upon the ways academic staff construct their identities and the impacts these have upon their approaches to change. Similar studies for the range of differentiated roles that characterise the newly managerialised university are not available. The first stage of the research, therefore, was to develop a categorisation of the ways in which senior managers, line managers, support staff and academic staff construct their identities at work. This categorisation was created by bringing together the experiences of change of fifty three staff from five similar Australian universities, reported in interviews, with a review of the discourses widely available within the university sector (Deetz 1992; du Gay 1996a; Knights & Morgan 1991; Marginson 2000; Readings 1996) to produce thirteen different classifications associated with different roles. These categories described as case study one provide an initial framework for making sense of the different viewpoints expressed by staff in interviews and a language for understanding w hat particular actions might mean to the organisational members making them. As such it provides a starting point or tool for analysis and makes an original contribution to understanding change within universities. The second stage of this research examined the dynamics of a teaching change project and the interactions between differently constructed work identities it entailed. This was undertaken through an ethnographic study of a change project in process. The ethnography was supplemented by interviews with participants at the conclusion of the project. The analysis of the ethnography combined the first theoretical focus on constructed identity with concepts of power and their forms within organisations (Foucault 1998; Clegg 1989a; Callon 1986) to take account of the hierarchical organisation of the university and the differentiated organisational roles of participants in the change project.

How were work identities of female and male shop assistants in the clothing departments at NK constructed, and how did this change over time? The starting point of this thesis has been that identities are contextually constructed. Focus has been set on trying to understand how the process of ‘making’ identity has been done in a historical perspective for shop assistants in clothing departments at the department store NK, AB Nordiska Kompaniet, in Stockholm. Shared narratives are crucial in the process of making collective identities. This thesis analyses narratives on relations between shop assistants and the company, the trade union and the commodities that were sold. The results show that the constructions of work identities, besides from being an ongoing process, have been characterized by a constantly ongoing struggle about expectations on their nature. The perspective is both discursive and materialistic. NK had approximately 2000 employees. All these people could not have personal relations to each other. To create an imagined community and a sense of collective identity, common narratives were important. The employees were in the company’s internal narrative named the ‘NK-ists’. It was said to be important to work in the ‘NK- spirit’. Narratives outside the NK-collective did effect the imagined community within, sometimes causing the collective to join closer together and sometimes dividing it. Work identities and the gendered division of labour are connected. Notions of gender and of what kind of work that is considered to be suitable to men or women at different times and in different places colour the narratives that construct work identities. The narratives dealt with in this thesis originate in existing events and in myths about the department store NK, and the shop assistants working at NK had to relate to these. The employer had picked one group of employees for whom this was especially true: the shop assistants. They were told: “You are NK”.