You finally made it to full professor, now what?

Crafting your academic identity and sustaining it in retirement

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Fri 5 Dec 2025 12:42)

© Copyright 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. First version, 24 November 2025

[Note: Parts of this white paper and the analytical framework of necessity, meaning, and joy were inspired by my chairing of the first session of our senior CYG meetings on how to craft your identity as a senior academic. A big thank-you to all of the attendees and in particular to Ciara O’Higgins for facilitating the senior CYG.]

Many academics are facing a bit of an identity crisis after being promoted to full professor. You have worked soooo hard to get there. The longer it took, the more important reaching this position may have become to you. You may have failed a few times in the process of getting there; I certainly did. You may have seen others – whom you thought did not even get close to matching your own record – achieve this coveted position before you did; I still remember the deep sense of unfairness when that happened to me. And then suddenly…, you are a full professor yourself and you are asking yourself:

  • “Why was reaching this level so important to me and what do I do now?”
  • “How do I craft my career/identity as a senior academic?”
  • “How do I align this identity with my goals, strengths, and interests?”

To inspire you to start thinking about your own academic identity, this white paper first presents an illustration of my own academic identities since becoming a full professor. I then introduce the “necessity, meaning & joy” framework and analyze my academic identities based on this. Finally, I reflect on the relationship between these three criteria – are they conflicting or synergistic? – and the usefulness of this framework across career stages.

Table of contents

Below you can find a Table of contents for this white paper. So, if you are not interested in my own illustrative career reflections, feel free to just skip straight to the general bits. I promise you I won’t be offended in the least :-). We all learn in different ways, some by concrete examples, others by general conceptualizations and frameworks.

Changing academic identities: an empirical illustration

Academic identity as balancing act: necessity, meaning & joy

Illustrating the framework: The three criteria in my own career

Necessity, meaning &  joy: conflicting, synergistic, fragmented?

How do the three criteria play out across career stages?

Changing academic identities: an empirical illustration

Since becoming a full professor, my career included nearly a decade of formal research (higher degrees) leadership at a research-intensive university in Australia. This was followed by a move to a post-92 university in the UK for the next decade, taking up an informal leadership position in research mentorship and development. I combined this with knowledge transfer to the wider academic community through online resources (see: When and why did you create your website?, and Why I love blogging and creating videos). In 2024, I took early retirement, enabling me to devote more time on academic volunteering activities to Transform Academia. Whether that will stretch to a third decade remains to be seen, but for now it very much feels like a substantive new identity, albeit one characterized by a slightly more leisurely pace :-). 

My first identity – the capable research administrator

After failing at my first promotion application to full professor – leading to the Publish or Perish software (Why did you create the JQL and the PoP software?) and later extensive resources on Writing effective promotion applications – I was promoted internally to full late 2006. At the time, I was very busy as Director of a large PhD program in Management & Marketing with some 70 students, a role I had taken on three years earlier when becoming Associate Professor. I had always been involved in service activities, such as committee memberships and my job-crafted role as Coordinator international students. But the PhD directorship had been my first real leadership position.

However, after becoming full professor, I was immediately asked to become Associate Dean Research Higher Degrees for the entire Faculty. A few years later I was also asked to take over as Associate Dean Research; the incumbent had run out screaming after little more than a year. I never applied for any of these jobs. In the institution in question, you were just tapped on the shoulder. Having acquired a reputation for “Germanic efficiency” and – after introducing the Publish or Perish software – known to do research on rankings and research metrics, I must have felt like a safe bet for the Dean.

So, for years I was just “busy, busy, busy”, and I didn’t have much time to think about my academic identity. Effectively though, my identity was that of “the capable research [higher degrees] administrator”. At the same time I extended my research portfolio with a sixth research program on the Quality and Impact of Academic Research and became known for my advocacy for inclusion in research evaluation through the Publish or Perish software (see Proof over promise: a more inclusive ranking of academics).

But after a while – and getting close to 50 – I realized that I was “done” with my current trajectory. Although I was good at managing systems and loved the analytical aspects of the job (see the collage of some of my analyses above), I started to hate the political nature of university leadership and its rather mechanical measurement of research outputs and impact. That, combined with an increasing dislike of the quite individualistic and competitive culture at what was one of the top-30 research universities in Economics & Business world-wide, made me start thinking – pretty much for the first time in my academic career – about what I really wanted my academic identity to be. So, I started looking for a different kind of job at a different kind of university in the London area (after 13 years, my husband and I were no longer as charmed with Australia as we were initially and wanted to move back to the UK).

Intermezzo: thinking about your academic identity as an ECR

There is no need to wait – as I did – until you hit 50 or become a full professor to start reflecting on your academic identity! It all worked out fine in my case, but that was more by luck than by design. Ideally, I would encourage you to do this much earlier in your career. In this context, I recommend Christa Sathish's post Get to know yourself – shifting from production to construction who – as an ECR – is already consciously reflecting on her own academic identity.

My second identity – the inclusive research mentor

After carefully researching the UK HE landscape I found the different kind of job I was looking for at Middlesex University, a post-92 university, where the broad-minded Dean of the Business School – Anna Kyprianou – allowed me to job-craft a role in developing an inclusive and supportive research culture. I mentored dozens of academics and created an extensive researcher development program (see Reflections on staff development), which was at least partially responsible for the Business School’s stellar performance at the 2021 REF, where we became the top ranked modern university (see also: REF, rankings & reputation).

The role also left me time to transfer this knowledge to the wider academic community by engaging externally with the CYGNA women’s network that I co-founded in 2014, starting a weekly blog in 2016, a YouTube channel in 2020, writing five career guides, and engaging with social media, sharing all the materials I had developed. I also ran sessions for the European Foundation of Management Development on Supporting ECRs and the British Academy of Management on Supportive, inclusive & collaborative research cultures. Finally, I continued to maintain and expand the Journal Quality List and the Publish or Perish software. In the process, I crafted a new academic identity in mentorship and researcher development. Here is a partial list of resources I developed in this area that may be useful for researchers and those working in researcher development:

Resources for writing & publishing

Resources for research diffusion & impact

Resources for developing supportive and inclusive research cultures

My third identity – the transformative emerita professor

After ten fulfilling years in my role as research mentor and Staff Development Lead, the institutional circumstances and the wider HE sector in the UK changed considerably in 2023-2024. This led to a second key reflection point. I asked myself: “do I really want to spend my sixties tied down by institutional constraints in a volatile HE system?”

The answer was no. So, in October 2024, I took early retirement. I had always intended to reduce my fraction and work in part-time employment after turning 60. But beyond the changed external circumstances, there were three reasons for giving up on this idea:

  1. For a decade my focus had been on supporting others. I longed to get back to my own research and writing projects, but in my paid employment I had always struggled to put my own needs first and I didn’t see this changing with a part-time position. I would probably have worked full-time for part-time pay :-).
  2. I had built up many volunteering initiatives that demanded more time than my “day job” allowed. This included CYGNA, Positive Academia, my blog & YouTube channel, the Journal Quality List, the Publish or Perish software, and my five guides on Crafting your career in academia.
  3. I felt the drive to transfer my knowledge and experience to younger generations of academics before my energy ran out and I became too cynical. This also required dedicated time.

Thus, I decided to take voluntary redundancy, and retire from paid employment early. But for me leaving paid employment didn’t mean that I was leaving the world of academia. My decision meant I could end my academic employment on a positive note and continue my academic life focusing on what I am truly passionate about: creating supportive and inclusive academic cultures. My third identity as emerita professor thus focuses on transforming our academic cultures. I even created a new research programme – Transforming Academia – to capture my changing emphasis.

In the first year of my retirement I focused on two key initiatives to transform academia that I had co-founded, the CYGNA women's network in 2014 and Positive Academia in 2022. Both resulted in a flurry of activities in the 2024-2025 academic year. You can read more about them here. Working with lead authorChrista Sathish, I co-authored a range of articles that built up the conceptual foundation for the Positive Academia Movement. Most of these are still under review, but our published manifesto can be found here. We also published a booklet Every little action counts with weekly hands-on tips to make a real difference in academia. You can buy it for £3.99 at Amazon.uk or the local equivalent in your local Amazon store.

Finally, I started to write up a range of white papers relating to this new research program. They vary from short musings on GenAI or social identity to substantive reflections on tools to assess teaching and policy impact, sustaining your motivation in change processes, research across career stages, and the why, when and where of academic leadership and service roles.

However, they also include article-length write-ups of small curiosity-driven research projects on the value of Business Schools and the myth of uncitedness of academic articles. Publishing these projects as white papers rather than as traditional journal articles allows me more flexibility in terms of format. It also means I do not waste precious time having to battle the review process ;-).

Academic identity as balancing act: necessity, meaning & joy

Hopefully the empirical illustration of my own academic identities has already triggered lots of ideas with you, regardless of whether your journey was similar to mine or entirely different. But you might wonder: isn’t there a way to reflect on academic identities a bit more systematically? Absolutely! In our first monthly Senior CYG (CYG = CYGNA SIG = Special Interest Group) meeting, we co-created three criteria that we see as relevant in crafting your academic identity: necessity, meaning and joy.

Necessity

Necessity reflects the need to “check the boxes” when meeting the demands of our employing institutions. Although an academic career usually provides more scope for job crafting than a career in industry, there are still many roles and activities that simply need to be done. We may well need to take on leadership or service roles as a “rite of passage” to get a permanent job or climb the career ladder, even if we do not particularly enjoy them or find them meaningful. As conditions for tenure or promotion, we may be required to publish a certain number of papers in specific journals or bring in a minimum amount of research funding. Nearly all of us are also required to teach, regardless of whether the course in question – or even teaching in general – makes our heart sign. However, fulfilling the necessity criterion may “buy” you a wider range of choices in terms of employers, as well as more flexibility later in your career.

Meaning

Meaning is typically derived from doing work that is important for you and/or others. It may include activities where we are able to draw on our unique skills, allowing us to be “in the flow”. Work becomes effortless, because it draws on our strengths and suits our personalities. However, it may also include roles and activities where we make a difference for others through transformative teaching, societally meaningful research, or service/leadership that changes things for the better, rather than simply going through technocratic routines. Finally, it may involve doing things that don’t necessarily “count” in your university system, but that matter to you personally, such as academic volunteering work for journals and professional associations, or networks such as CYGNA, or using your research to support NGOs as a consultant, being on their advisory boards.

Joy

Finally, we define joy as doing things that make us smile, bringing rays of sunshine to dark days, and that give us a sense of fun. These activities might sometimes feel more like hobbies than “real work”. Oftentimes, we don’t even know why we enjoy these things, just that we do. It includes doing things that might not “lead anywhere”, things that you do for the pure enjoyment of engaging in the activity itself. One CYGNA member called it gallivanting, i.e. roaming around without a plan, flitting from one interesting activity to another. Joy often occurs more in the moment and at the level of individual tasks, whereas necessity and meaning are typically longer-term criteria that are linked to specific roles.

Illustrating the framework: The three criteria in my own career

Although these criteria can be applied universally, the outcome will be different for every academic, depending on their institutional context, their skill-set, and their personality. One academic’s sense of meaning might be a necessity for another; one academic’s joy might be another academic’s worst nightmare. So, to illustrate how you could apply these criteria at the individual level, I have indicated what necessity, meaning, and joy have meant for me in my own career.

Necessity: teaching, admin, and top journals

The way the necessity criterion materialised in my academic identity is probably not unusual. Like many academics I was drawn to academia because I loved curiosity-driven research. This meant that the teaching and administrative elements of my academic job were often conducted out of a sense of duty, rather than giving me a real sense of meaning or joy. The same was true for me for publishing in top journals.

Teaching is a crucial part of our academic careers. I fully support calls to improve its status vis-a-vis research and to create career pathways for academics focusing on pedagogical research and practice (see also: On the loneliness of teaching and Talk about Teaching with Pride). And yes, there have certainly been moments where I have found meaning in seeing my students develop critical thinking skills. But even though I was a capable teacher, it was never really my passion, and – being a strong introvert – the “performing” element of teaching exhausted me, especially in the weeks where I had to fill three 3-hour evening sessions. That said, I have huge admiration for those who make teaching the core of their profession. We probably have more impact as teachers than we will ever have as researchers, providing a strong foundation for meaning in our academic identity. It just wasn't for me.

Similar to many academics, university administration was not on my agenda when I started my academic career. Even so, I did find meaning in my role as PhD director and even in elements of my role as Associate Dean Research. However, a large chunk of both revolved around tedious meetings, tiresome reporting and compliance requirements, and difficult conversations with colleagues, supervisors and students. There was also a fair share of battling university constraints and politics, playing the game by writing reports that nobody would ever read, and finding a compromise between my own values (e.g. in terms of academic standards) and university realities. So, leadership did feel as more of a necessity for me. Hence, after a decade, I felt I had “taken my turn” but wasn’t tempted to repeat the experience in another university or move up the leadership ladder. It might be very different for you though, many academics discover they really love the sense of accomplishment in leadership positions, and they derive considerable meaning from being able to shape their organizations.

Although I have always loved research, I struggled with the need to publish in top journals. It is not that I was unable to do it. Although I have never published in the holy trinity (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly), I have been quite successful in publishing in top journals in International Business and Human Resource Management on mainstream topics such as entry modes, HQ-subsidiary relationships, and expatriation. But the kind of research that truly excited me – research that was practical and myth-busting – wasn’t as easy to publish in top journals. So, I have always seen publishing in top journals as a means to an end, i.e. to keep my job and give me flexibility to change jobs. But I have discovered that quite a few academics do derive meaning and sometimes even joy from it. They really like the “battle of wits” with reviewers at top journals. They enjoy honing their skills and arguments in the process and treasure the sense of achievement of publishing in these journals. You might be one of them and there is nothing wrong with that.

Meaning: practical & myth-busting research and helping others

Meaning in my academic identity primarily derived from doing the type of research that excited me and that suited my natural abilities as an empirically oriented pragmatist. Beyond mainstream research on international HRM, HQ-subsidiary relationships, and the transfer of HRM policies, much of my research over the past 30 years – and most of the research I loved doing – was either research solving practical problems or myth busting and/or forensic research.

Oftentimes, the problems that I tackled occurred in the academic profession, such as the severe lack of replication studies, the acceptance of classic conceptualizations without empirical verification, the dearth of guidance on doing international research, the lack of gender and international diversity in key academic positions, and the undervaluation of the Social Sciences. I empirically tested two classic typologies in international business and one in expatriation, provided guidance on international mail surveys, researched national differences in response rates and response styles, as well as the impact of ranking vs rating on questionnaire response, and investigated whether the language of the questionnaire or experiment (on competition vs cooperation) impacted on how participants responded. I exposed the lack of diversity in editorial boards, studied bibliometrics in the Social Sciences, created metrics more suitable for this discipline, and explored why different countries specialize in different research areas. However, my interests also extended to addressing practical problems in MNCs with an entire research programme focusing on a long-ignored topic in International Business: language differences in MNCs.

Another strand of my research that was personally meaningful to me was “myth busting” and/or forensic research. In the field of International Business I have exposed the myths of high expatriate failure rates, of presumed European homogeneity in HQ-subsidiary relationships, control mechanisms, expatriation, and of the role of cultural distance in entry modes. But again much of my research in this area focused on our own profession, looking at the lack of name disambiguation for non-Western names in publication/citation rankings of scholars, the problematic definition of university age in the THE Young ranking, the misclassification of conference papers and review articles in the Social Sciences in the Web of Science, the rise of predatory journals in Management, the existence of phantom references, the false dawn of an Australian academic productivity boom, and the feasibility of replacing the Research Excellence Framework with metrics.

However, right from the start of my career an equally important element of meaning in my academic identity derived from supporting other academics (see: How my career trajectory led to a focus on inclusion). Being a first-in-the-family to complete university (after a professional degree), I became an “accidental academic”. Due to my personal background, degree in International Business through problem-based (rather than discipline-focused) learning, and my PhD completion outside formal structures, I always felt like an outsider in academia. This translated into non-mainstream research topics (as detailed above), but also led me to provide support for others for whom academia was not a natural path. Over the years, I implemented this through my website/blog (see below), one-on-one support for my many co-authors, mentees, and colleagues, and the creation of networks such as CYGNA.

Joy: website, blogging, and video creation

Many of the things that gave me meaning in my academic identity also gave me some level of joy. However, there were three additional activities that gave me pure joy in the activity of doing, although ultimately, they also constituted meaning as they allowed me to help others. All of these were things I could do on my own, and where I could combine creativity with the creation of an orderly world from the privacy of my home office. As a very strong introvert this gave me the energy to cope with the more extroverted and chaotic parts of my job. Surprisingly, none of these three activities were things that I expected to enjoy, which pleads for trying out things even if you are not drawn to them.

Chronologically first was the creation and maintenance of my own website: Harzing.com. It dates from 1999 and was set up by my husband (a computer science engineer). He maintained it at first, but after a few years I learned how to do this myself. Initially, I used it mainly to distribute my teaching materials (this was before learning management systems were common-place at universities), present an online version of my CV and post free pre-publication versions of my papers. But I also started adding academic resources quite early. I launched the Journal Quality List in 2000 and the Publish or Perish software in 2006. What I had not expected is how much I enjoyed doing this, even down to editing actual html code. Over the years, website maintenance became one of my “happy places”, where I could withdraw from frantic and often political world of academia and create my own little world.

After “paying my dues” through continuing to publish regularly in top journals in the first 10 years of my full professorship, I became increasingly frustrated and bored with this process. I was longing for a space where I could just write what I wanted but still be read by others. My blog – launched in 2016 – became this space. What I didn’t expect is that I would keep this going for a decade, simply because I enjoyed the combination of free writing and web design so much. Moreover, it also allowed me to help others (my third strand of meaning). A blog allows you to write something with real impact for a large audience within the space of a few hours. In 2018 I also started to write up multi-part blogpost series on for instance:

In addition to blogposts, I also started to write white papers. These allowed me to expand on some topics in a bit more detail than a short blogpost would do. Over the years they have varied from short (1,500-2,500 words) reflections to full-blown research articles. Most importantly though, they gave me all the joy of writing without any of the pain of the journal submission and R&R process. Here are some of my 40-odd white papers that I am particularly proud of:

In 2020, my latest and most-unexpected joy came from creating (research support) videos. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I discovered I just loved video recording and editing. So, I did a lot of that and even opened my own YouTube channel Harzing Academic Resources. It now includes more than 200 videos on topics such as:

Necessity, meaning &  joy: conflicting, synergistic or fragmented?

For some of us, the three criteria – necessity, meaning, and joy – might be seen as naturally conflicting, as is suggested by a superficial interpretation of the triangle image that Ciara O’Higgins created after our Senior CYG meeting. It implies you can only maximize one of the three criteria; if you focus on necessity, you can forget about meaning or joy. If you focus purely on short-term joy, you may struggle to meet necessity and might even lose your job; it may also complicate achieving more enduring meaning or impact. Even a focus on meaning – which may seem like the most rewarding and sensible thing to do – might lead to a conflict with necessity if what is meaningful to you isn’t meaningful to your institution. It may even conflict with joy; achieving true meaning in your academic work might well require sacrificing short-term joy.

Fortunately, you may also be able to find a sweet spot within these three forces, as is suggested by the CYGNA triangle linking with all three criteria. You may be able to find a happy medium if at least some of the roles and activities that give you meaning and joy are also the ones that are appreciated by your institution. This is what happened to me in my identity as Inclusive Research Mentor. But even in my earlier identity as Capable Research Administrator which had a heavy focus on necessity, I was able to find elements of meaning and joy.

Alternatively, you could also find these three criteria to be synergistic and interconnected (see middle image) if you are able to job-craft an academic role that draws on your unique strengths, makes a positive difference to others, and allows you to engage in activities that give you joy. At its best, this is what my role as Inclusive Mentor gave me. Finally, some of us simply have a mosaic of unconnected activities, some of which provide you with joy and meaning and others that are a pure necessity. This is common at specific junctures in your career when you have less discretion in your task portfolio, such as early on in your career or at times when universities are under siege, as they are now in many countries.

Finding a coherent career narrative (see: Academic promotion tips (6) - Craft your career narrative) where teaching, research, and service/leadership draw on a common logic can really help you to move from a fragmented mosaic or conflicting triangle to a synergistic academic identity where necessity, meaning and joy are interconnected. Job crafting  can also help you to realise more meaning in your job through cognitive crafting, task crafting and relational crafting (see Wellman and Spreitzer, 2011).

How do the three criteria play out across career stages?

The relative emphasis of the three criteria typically changes over the course of your career. Early on in your academic life, necessity might rule, whereas later in your career you may be able to prioritize meaning and pure joy a bit more. Getting to the full professor stage often means that the necessity criterion becomes a little less dominant, you are no longer evaluating every single activity with one eye on the promotion criteria. At the same time, though, more is expected of you in terms of leadership and service roles. So chose carefully and take on roles that fit your skills, personality, and passion. That way the inevitable necessity elements of these roles are matched by meaning and a bit of joy.

My own early career consisted of part-time and sessional jobs, followed by permanent jobs with heavy teaching loads and/or lots of teaching outside my area. At the same time, I had to figure out how to publish in top journals. Without mentors, this was pretty tough and took a lot of trial and error. So, early in my career the emphasis was squarely on necessity. After about a decade the tide turned, and the criteria reconfigured. A large research grant and publication success fulfilled the necessity criteria without having to carry onerous teaching loads. Meaning was derived from the freedom to do more of the research that excited me and my function as PhD Director, a role I really enjoyed for most of the five years I fulfilled it, and one that allowed me to support others.

If you are an ECR, a decade may feel like a long time to wait, it certainly felt like that to me! But remember that most jobs require a period of “hard slog” or “simply knuckling down”. Just keep reflecting consciously on what makes working in academia meaningful to you, gradually iterating towards a more interconnected and synergistic academic identity that combines necessity with meaning and joy, or find a sweet spot within the triangle that presents a happy medium. If – despite all your efforts – your career continues to be more of a mosaic, ensure that at least some of the tiles represent joy, even if they are small.

Table 1: Necessity, meaning, and joy for different academic identities

 

Necessity

Meaning

Joy

Capable administrator

High

Medium

Low-Medium

Inclusive mentor

Medium-High

Medium-High

Medium-High

Transformative emerita

Low-Medium

High

High

My three career identities since becoming full professor (see Table 1) differed in terms of meeting the necessity, meaning, and joy criteria. My first identity after becoming a full professor – the capable administrator – was highest on necessity, although there were elements of meaning and – less frequently – of joy. There was also a movement towards synergy as I started to do research in the practice of research evaluation. In my role as inclusive mentor, I was able to strike a happy balance, and my activities gradually became more and more synergistic. My work gave me meaning – because it squarely drew on my unique strengths and allowed me to help lots of others – but was also valued by the School’s leadership. It even allowed me to develop activities that gave me joy. Not surprisingly, both meaning and joy further increased as transformative emerita as my identity is now fully interconnected and synergistic, and I can pick and choose my activities. However, I can’t fully ignore institutional constraints as I am still working with others who need to work within them. 

In sum

Reflecting on your academic identity might seem like a luxury you can’t afford in today’s hectic academic world. There never seem to be enough hours in the day. There is always more to do. So, it is tempting to stay in “reactive mode”, simply doing what you think is expected of you or what will please others. However, stepping back and reflecting on how you can proactively shape your unique academic identity might bring both meaning and joy (back) in your academic life.

Related white papers and blogposts

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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Fri 5 Dec 2025 12:42

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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