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The Open Scholar and Identity

Open scholarship creates new opportunities and tensions for individuals, and one means of examining these is to consider the concept of academic identity. In this section, general theories of identity will briefly be considered, academic identity in particular. We will then consider how open scholarship impacts on these notions of identity and the relationship with traditional forms of academic identity.

The pioneering work on identity is that of Mead (1934), who argued that one’s concept of self is most fully developed when community attitudes and values are integrated. A strong component in the construction of identity is the degree to which either we absorb the values of the community we are in or find a community whose values we can absorb comfortably, summarised in the dictum ‘self reflects society’. The strength of these identities has tangible ­behaviours – ­the salience of religious identity ­correlates with time spent on religious activities (Stryker and Serpe 1982), for example. This social view is echoed by Snow (2001), who stated that identity is largely socially constructed and, as well as belonging, includes a sense of difference from other communities. In this framing, identity is seen as ‘a shared sense of “­one-​­ness” or “­we-​­ness” anchored in shared attributes and experiences & in contrast to one or more sets of “others”.’ Looking at national identity, Canetti (1962) determined that ‘crowd symbols’ are significant in constructing these shared ­values. He argued that for England, the sea is a crowd symbol, while for the French it was the Revolution. These crowd symbols, he contested, were more significant than history or territory and represented common, well-​­understood symbols, which could sustain a popular feeling of nationhood.