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Revealing university identity: a methodological reflection

by Michelangela Verardi

The blog is based on the outputs from my DBA in Higher Education Management (University of Bath) thesis entitled: ‘University identity: Statutes and Architectures”

Understanding what a university is – not only what it claims to be – requires a methodological approach capable of grasping identity in motion. Identity in higher education is rarely singular, it shifts across texts, spaces, and lived experience. To capture this complexity, I developed what I call the three‑card trick method: a triangulated approach designed to reveal organisational identity by examining how it is declared, embodied, and interpreted.

This method was tested through work with two Italian private universities that offered naturally contrasting contexts for methodological refinement. Their differences mattered only insofar as they enabled the method to be stretched, challenged, and sharpened.

The three‑card trick draws inspiration from the dynamic model of identity proposed by Hatch and Schultz (2001), who describes identity as a continuous movement between internal culture, expressed identity claims, and the images reflected back from external audiences. Identity, in this view, is not a fixed essence but a circulation. Their caution, following Baudrillard (1997), that identity signs can become detached from underlying reality – drifting into simulacra – reinforces the need for a method that can test alignment between what institutions say, what they materialise, and what people experience.

The three cards I propose are the statutes, the architectures, and the community narratives. Each represents a different mode of institutional expression. The method aims not simply to analyse each card but to understand the dynamics of identity produced by their interaction.

The first card, the normative corpus, includes statutes, codes of ethics, internal regulations, and other formal documents through which universities define their mission, values, and governance arrangements. These texts constitute the institution’s official voice. They are stable, durable, and often crafted with significant care, especially in systems where they must meet regulatory scrutiny. Analysing them involves reading not only what is said but how it is said, what is emphasised, and what is left unsaid. Rather than focusing on legal technicalities, the method treats these documents as identity artefacts: expressions of the university’s formal self‑understanding. To analyse this first card, I carried out a close textual reading guided by legal hermeneutics criteria, paying attention to wording, silences, and framing to uncover the identity logic embedded in formalised norms. The normative corpus provides the frame through which a university declares who it is, what it stands for, and how it intends to act. Yet these documents also reveal strategic adjustments, selective formulations, and silences that may reflect external pressures of bureaucratic control or evolving internal orientations.

The second card, architecture, concerns what the university expresses without words. Buildings, spaces, and material artefacts convey identity continuously, whether intentionally or not. Architecture shapes how people move, gather, celebrate, and learn; it anchors institutional memory; and it projects messages to newcomers, visitors, and the wider public. In this method, campuses are examined as symbolic landscapes. The analysis draws on a researcher‑generated visual archive – photographs, observations, and campus maps – to interpret space in terms of its semiotic and functional qualities. Three types of spaces are considered. Lived spaces are the places in which daily academic life unfolds: classrooms, courtyards, cantinas, shared areas. Representational spaces are used for ceremonies, governance, or ritual moments and often communicate concentrated symbolic meaning. Symbolic artefacts include statues, inscriptions, paintings, or any object that repeatedly signals aspects of identity. For this second card, I applied a visual‑interpretive method, using systematic photo‑analysis to understand how spatial arrangements and artefacts embody identity messages. Architecture is often where identity is most enduring – and where discrepancies become visible.

The third card, community narratives, focuses on identity as lived and interpreted. Through semi‑structured interviews, enriched by tools such as photo‑elicitation, participants are invited to interpret their own spaces and articulate what the university represents to them. This method avoids direct questions about identity, instead creating space for the emergence of themes related to belonging, values, distinctiveness, and institutional meaning. Narratives play a crucial role in understanding how identity circulates. They capture how members internalise or resist official claims, how they interpret symbolic spaces, and how they perceive the institution’s evolution. For this card, I used thematic analysis to draw out recurring patterns across interviews, tracing how individuals make sense of the university’s character and development. Community narratives sit at the intersection of expressing, impressing, reflecting, and mirroring, showing how identity is reproduced or transformed through lived experience.

The power of the three‑card trick lies in combining these forms of evidence rather than treating them separately. Analysing only the normative corpus risks confusing idealised statements with actual practice. Relying solely on architecture risks attributing static identity to institutions that are evolving internally. Listening only to narratives risks privileging individual interpretations without recognising structural or symbolic constraints. Triangulation allows identity to be seen not as a fixed point but as a set of movements. It highlights coherence when the three cards reinforce one another, and it exposes misalignment when one card diverges significantly from the others. Importantly, the method is not designed to declare whether an institution’s identity is true or authentic. Instead, it reveals how identity is declared, embodied, and experienced; how it evolves; and how it becomes contested or stretched under external pressures. When the three cards move in harmony, identity appears legible. When they move apart, the institution may face identity friction – an early signal that adjustment or reflection is needed.

In an era of increasing regulation, marketisation, and pressure to differentiate, universities often feel compelled to communicate distinctive identities while simultaneously conforming to external norms  and pressures. The three‑card trick provides a practical, conceptually grounded method for observing identity in this tension. By keeping all three cards in sight, the method helps institutions recognise what they are truly communicating, intentionally or otherwise, and how they might align their identity more coherently as they evolve.

Dr Michelangela Verardi is a senior technologist and grants manager at the University of Milan, where she oversees the legal and organisational frameworks for artificial intelligence research projects in health science. A qualified lawyer, she brings extensive expertise in university governance and institutional legal affairs, following a long tenure as Legal Office Director at Bocconi University. Dr Verardi holds a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) in Higher Education Management from the University of Bath and serves as an adjunct professor at Accademia del Lusso. Her research interests include university identity, branding and IP protection, the internationalisation of academic systems, and the judicialisation of university policies.


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Psychological Safety in the Doctoral Context

by Jayne Carruthers

The doctorate is a subjective experience demanding the re-evaluation of ways of thinking, the navigation of intense emotions, and the adaptation of behaviours by the candidate to achieve new learning goals, transforming the candidate from a consumer to a creator of knowledge. Candidates often face uncertainty and enter a state of liminality during this process, feeling caught between old beliefs and new insights, which can lead to discomfort and feeling ‘stuck’. To navigate this liminal space, candidates benefit from a change in perspective supported by transformative learning. While much of the focus in doctoral support is on the candidate avoiding negative experiences during this process, there is limited attention given to the candidate’s role of self-awareness and self-management. Reflexivity provides one such option to consider.

Reflexivity is a cognitive, or thinking, process that enables individuals to move beyond simple reflection, fostering self-awareness and exploring different options for progress. While candidates have demonstrated its usefulness in understanding their doctoral journeys, further research is needed on initiating and sustaining this process independently. This ability to learn and develop autonomously is essential, as doctoral programs require candidates to show evidence of becoming independent researchers. In organisational literature, reflexivity has been demonstrated to enhance information processing, helping employees understand what, why, and how of learning and change. It enables adjustments in both task execution and personal approach. Moreover, team psychological safety has been demonstrated to be crucial for effective team reflexivity. However, variations in terminology and definitions related to psychological safety limit the extension of this construct beyond the organisational context.

A body of conceptual research adopting a Theoretical Integrated Review (TIR) approach was conducted, with findings highlighting historical use, providing theoretical insights, and clarifying a generalised definition of psychological safety with relevance beyond the organisational setting. Psychological safety is an internal process that helps individuals manage distress, influencing their thoughts, feelings, and actions. It plays a crucial role in growth and development by connecting motivation and goal-directed behaviour, providing the opportunity for a generalised definition:

Psychological safety is a dynamic intrapsychic construct drawn on by individuals to mitigate actual or foreseen distress. The presence or absence of psychological safety is influenced by context, the individual’s existing psychological frames of reference, and current and future motives relating to an endeavour.

This understanding allows the absence or presence of psychological safety to be considered in broader contexts, including independent learning settings like doctoral programs. To explore this potential, a body of qualitative research was conducted with six volunteer PhD candidates enrolled at a regional Australian university awaiting feedback on their theses.

Using the vignette methodology technique to present short fictional scenarios regarding experiences of doctoral knowledge uncertainty, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews to understand how doctoral candidates deal with knowledge uncertainty. This approach encouraged interviewees to discuss their experiences without the pressure of direct questions, facilitating open discussions about managing uncertainty. At the end of the interviews, findings from the conceptual research were shared, and feedback was gathered on their benefit as a basis for candidate support. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analysed.

All six interviewees described experiences with knowledge uncertainty and agreed that the conceptual research findings on psychological safety could improve opportunities for candidate support and warranted further investigation. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the interviewees’ experiences of uncertainty stemmed from intrapersonal, interpersonal, and university governance-level interactions. While similarities existed based on stages in the doctoral program, no strong recurring theme of uncertainty emerged. Notably, the differences lay in how the interviewees discussed their experiences of uncertainty.

Some interviewees emphasised the importance of interpersonal support to help them progress:

… the Confirmation panel Chairperson insisted that I rework my research question … I found it confusing. I felt that I must have grossly mistaken something …. my supervisor just said, okay, well, rebuild methodology … I felt uncertain. But she was very encouraging and supportive … I got through the second time, no questions asked …                                                                                                                                                                                                 Interviewee Steve

… my methodology was underdeveloped … I was asked to resubmit this section to the confirmation panel … I was stressed about it having to be perfect because I thought failing would be the worst thing in the world.  … I remember that being a big thing … I was embarrassed, … an extra hurdle because no one else I knew needed to resubmit … my supervisors were empowering … they both said, redo what you need to … You’ll get through. You’re going to be okay.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Interviewee Amy

Other interviewees’ narratives shifted from reflection to reflexivity, demonstrating self-awareness and developing metacognitive strategies to navigate their uncertainties.

So yeah, it was an unhappy period. It was a couple of months of really hating what I was, what I’d done to myself in choosing this particular topic…I just had to ride that wave, you know, think it through, think, really think about what I was doing and why I was doing it, what the product was, what the process was and what the result needed to be in the end. 

                                                                                                                                 Interviewee Julie

… a big part of my uncertainty was about paradigms … I couldn’t write my methodology. … I was just not convinced … if I can’t believe in these views about knowledge and reality, I can’t write about this stuff. So that was a hurdle …  I was sometimes reading without knowing what would come of it. … then it felt like, oh, this is it … what had been a major period of uncertainty had also been a cognitively shifting one that changed my perception of the world.                                                                                                                Interviewee Jack

The extracts illustrate how interviewees navigated uncertainties and liminal spaces, utilising various strategies to move forward. Some narratives show less use of self-awareness, relying on interpersonal support, while others reflect and use reflexivity as a proactive, independent approach to managing uncertainty.

Understanding psychological safety as a multi-dimensional construct and appreciating its demonstrated moderating effect on reflexivity in the workplace provides an opportunity for further investigation. The differences in interviewees’ narratives offer valuable insights regarding reflexivity and the doctoral experience of uncertainty, collectively establishing a basis for exploring psychological safety in the doctoral context.

Jayne Carruthers is a PhD candidate in SORTI, a research centre based in the School of Education at The University of Newcastle, Australia, where she works as a Research Assistant. With a background in Adult Education and Positive Psychology, she has a well-developed interest in fostering autonomous learners. Her PhD research explores psychological safety within doctoral learning and development. Her recent publications include “Conveying the learning self to others: doctoral candidates conceptualising and communicating the complexion of development”


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The (future) state of higher education research?

by Stijn Daenekindt and Jeroen Huisman

  • Stijn Daenekindt
  • Jeroen Huisman
    Jeroen Huisman

Parallel to the exponential growth of research on higher education, we see an increasing number of scientific contributions aiming to take stock of our field of research. Such stock-taking activities range from reflective and possibly somewhat impressionistic thoughts of seasoned scholars to in-depth reviews of salient higher education themes. Technological advancements (such as easy electronic access to research output and an increasingly broader set of analytical tools) obviously have made life easier for analysts. We recently embarked upon a project to explore the thematic diversity in the field of research in higher education. The results have recently been published in Higher Education. Our aim was to thematically map the field of research on higher education and to analyse how our field has evolved over time.

For this endeavour, we wanted our analysis to be large-scale. We aimed at including a number of articles that would do justice to the presumed variety in research into higher education. We did not, however, want the scale of our analysis to jeopardize the depth of our analysis. Therefore, we decided not to limit our analyses to, for example, an analysis of citation patterns or of keywords. Finally, to forestall bias (stemming from our personal knowledge about and experience in the field), we applied an inductive approach. These criteria led us to collect 16,928 journal articles on higher education published between 1991 and 2018 and to analyse each article’s abstract by applying topic modelling. Topic modelling is a method of automated text analysis and a follow-up blogpost (also on srheblog.com) will address the method. For now, it suffices to know that topic modelling is a machine learning technique that automatically analyses the co-occurrence of words to detect themes/topics and to find structure in a large collection of text.

In this blogpost, we present a glimpse of our findings and some additional thoughts for further discussion. In our analysis, we differentiate 31 research topics which inductively emerged from the data. For example, we found topics dealing with university ranking and performance, sustainability, substance use of college students, research ethics, etc. The bulk of these research topics were studied at the individual level (16 topics), with far fewer at the organisational (5) and system level (3). A final set of topics related either clearly to disciplines (eg teaching psychology) or to more generic themes (methods, academic writing, ethics). This evidences the richness of research into higher education. Indeed, our field of research certainly is not limited in terms of perspectives and unleashes “the whole shebang” of possible perspectives to gain new insights into higher education.

The existence of different perspectives also comprises potential dangers, however. Studies applying a certain approach on higher education — say, a system-level approach — may suffer from tunnel vision and lose sight of individual- and organization-level aspects of higher education. This may be problematic as processes on the different levels are obviously related to one another. In our analysis we find that studies indeed tend to focus on one level. For example, system-level topics tend to be exclusively combined with other system-level topics. This should not come as a big surprise, but there is potential danger in this and it may hamper the development of a more integrated field of research on higher education.

In our analysis, we also find a certain restraint to combine topics which are located at the same level. For example, topics on teaching practices are very rarely combined with topics on racial and ethnic minorities — even though both topics are situated at the individual level. To us, this was surprising as the combination of ethnicity and educational experiences is a blossoming field in the sociology of education. The fact that topics at the same level are only rarely combined is less understandable then the fact that topics on different levels are rarely combined. We hope that our analysis aids others researchers to identify gaps in the literature and that it motivates them to address these gaps.

A second finding we wish to address here relates to specialisation. Our analysis suggests that there is a trend of specialisation in our field of research. We looked at the number of topics combined in articles and we see that topic diversity declines over time. This is, on the one hand, not that surprising. Back in 1962, Kuhn already argued that the system of modern science encourages researchers towards further specialisation. So, it makes sense that over time, and parallel to the growth of the field of research on higher education, researchers specialise more and demarcate their own topic of expertise. On the other hand, it may be considered a problematic evolution as it can hamper our field of research to develop towards further maturity.

But what should we think of the balance between healthy expansion and specialization, on the one hand, and inefficient fragmentation, on the other? We lean towards evaluating the current state of higher education research as moving towards fragmentation. Other researchers, such as Malcom Tight, Bruce Macfarlane and Sue Clegg have similarly lamented the fragmented nature of our field of research. Our analysis adds to this by showing the trends over time: we observe more specialisation (not necessarily bad), but there are also signs of disintegration over time (not good). Other analyses we are currently carrying out also indicate thematic disintegration and suggest clear methodological boundaries. It looks like many researchers focusing on the same topic remain in their “comfort zone” and use a limited set of methods. For sure, many methodological choices are functional (as in fit-for-purpose), but the lack of diversity is striking. Moreover, we see that many higher education researchers stick to rather traditional techniques (survey, interviews, case studies) and that new methods hardly get picked up in our field. A final observation is that we hardly see methodological debates in our field. In related disciplines we often see healthy methodological discussions that improve the available “toolkit” (for example here). In our field, it appears that scholars shy away from such discussions and it suggests methodological conservatism and/or methodological tunnel vision.

There are still many things to investigate to arrive at a full assessment of the state of the art. One important question is how our field compares to other fields or disciplines. But if we were to accept the idea of fragmentation, it is pertinent to start thinking how to combat this. Reversing this trend is obviously not straightforward. But here are a few ideas. Individual scholars could try to get out of their comfort zone by applying other perspectives to their favourite research object and/or by applying their favourite perspective to new research topics. Related, researchers should be encouraged to use techniques less commonly used in our field and see whether they yield different outcomes (vignettes, experimental designs, network analysis, QCA/fuzzy logic, [auto-]ethnography and – of course – topic models). In addition, journal editors could be more flexible and inclusive in terms of the format of the submissions they consider. For example, they could explicitly welcome submissions in the format of ‘commentaries/ a reply to’. This would stimulate debate and open up the floor for increased cross-fertilisation of research into higher education and, in general, signal the maturity of research into higher education. Finally, there is scope for alternative peer review processes. Currently, only editors (and sometimes peer reviewers seeing the outcome of a peer review process) gain full insight in feedback offered by peers. If we would make these processes more visible to a broader readership – e.g. through open peer review, which still can be double-blind – we would gain much more insight in methodological and theoretical debates, that would definitely support the healthy growth of our field.  

This post is based on the article: Daenekindt, S and Huisman, J (2020) ‘Mapping the scattered field of research on higher education. A correlated topic model of 17,000 articles, 1991–2018’ Higher Education, 1-17. Stijn Daenekindt is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University (Department of Sociology). SRHE Fellow Jeroen Huisman is a Full Professor at Ghent University (Department of Sociology).