Socially negotiating privacy boundaries and academic identities

Research examining privacy in a higher education setting tends to focus on the student perspective whilst largely overlooking the academic perspective. Moreover, it fails to fully conceptualise the social, relational, and contextual complexities of privacy and the vital role it has on academics’ ability to form their identity. To address these knowledge gaps, this paper draws on the social theory of privacy to examine how academics socially negotiate privacy boundaries and the influence these negotiations have on their identity. Data were gathered through a qualitative case study analysis of a higher education institution in the United Kingdom (UK). The findings reveal how academic preferences and context-dependent social meanings influence the construction of dialectical privacy boundaries that allow academics to create and maintain various personal boundaries. These negotiated boundaries are influenced by the nature of the relationship between individuals, the levels of trust between colleagues, and the social norms governing workplace relationships. The findings also reveal how these negotiated privacy boundaries provide an intimate territory within which academics co-construct their identity through a complex series of social interactions occurring over time.