Digital self-marketing strategies of Australian-based academics

Academics in Australia, as a population, face many challenges in the higher education labour market. Although some of these challenges are also experienced by academics in other countries, the pressures for Australian-based academics are compounded by (1) the smaller size of the Australian higher education system, which consists of a total of 43 universities (Universities Australia 2020); its unique governance nature, which has led to extremely high competition for full-time equivalent positions (Welch 2022); and (2) the contraction of the Australian academic job market during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic due to the system’s significant dependence on international student enrolment, with the international education sector shrinking by AU$13.5 billion from the start of 2020 to the end of 2021 and thousands of academic jobs cut (Hurley 2021). These circumstances have created an extremely competitive, pressurised professional environment for Australian-based academics, making efforts to market and brand themselves critical to their professional success (D’Alessandro et al. 2020; Jayasuriya 2021; Welch 2022). Thus, the central aim of this thesis is to develop knowledge on the ways in which these academics use digital and social media to support their career development. The need to market oneself and establish a personal brand is increasingly central to professional success for academics, given the volatility of the higher education sector (Welch 2022), and doing so online has become even more imperative during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic because, initially, nearly all interactions occurred in a virtual environment and, currently, many universities have adopted a hybrid model of offline and online classes (Hurley, Hildebrandt & Brisbane 2021). Self-marketing is defined as ‘the process of creating professional projections of an ideal self’ (Shuker 2014, p. 228) and comprises a recognised set of processes, such as those for product development and promotion. Similarly to other concepts established prior to the advent of the internet, including impression management (Goffman 1959; Leary & Kowalski 1990) and self-presentation (Jones 1964), self-marketing in its original conception (Kotler & Levy 1969) did not account for digital practices around shaping one’s brand. Currently, researchers employ different terms across disciplines to represent similar phenomena around the acts of marketing oneself, and the resulting lack of consistency or universality and the significant overlap foster confusion. To clarify these issues, this thesis engages with current scholarship on the use of the internet and social networking sites (SNSs) for professional branding and marketing in order to develop a framework of digital self-marketing (DSM). This aim was achieved through integrating the self-marketing literature with the literature in the fields of sociology, psychology and communication to rethink and evolve the concept of self-marketing and advance existing theories in order to account for the social media era and the new, digital ways in which individuals create and curate their identity and promote their professional achievements. Using a review of the relevant literature, this thesis investigates how Australian-based academics, defined as individuals employed in an academic role by an Australian university, use digital avenues for self-marketing, and it documents their experiences around the benefits and challenges of using DSM for professional purposes. A grounded theory qualitative research design was adopted to address several research questions for providing a conceptual clarification of DSM among academics. Interviews were conducted with 21 Australian-based academics to determine their perceptions of DSM, wherein five main themes were derived from the systematic coding of their interviews: Authenticity, Connections, Impact, Public Engagement and Shifting Sands. Importantly, these themes and findings provide new and updated knowledge about academics’ perceptions of DSM in their work and generate relevant answers to the research questions of this thesis, which thus advances existing theories and contributes practical applications. The findings indicate that Australian-based academics acknowledge the benefits of DSM, such as how relationship-building with other academics provides potential for research collaboration. It was important to participants that they remained authentic with a somewhat casual persona. They also shared a number of concerns, hesitancies and opinions on how DSM should be practiced. A common view was that authenticity is undermined when people use it merely as a forum for self-promotion. In addition, DSM is time-consuming, which is not accounted for in university workload allocation. Difficulty in learning new technology, keeping the personal and professional selves separate and being subjected to online abuse were also concerns raised by participants. They also identified several exogenous factors beyond their individual control that affect their use of DSM. These factors include the COVID-19 pandemic and how it led to the increased use of SNSs to stay connected with others, and the avoidance of self-promotion to be sensitive in the current climate. In conclusion, these findings advance knowledge on the benefits and challenges of DSM in the academic career context and specifically related to the Australian academia and they are a valuable addition to the broader field of self-marketing. Last, the research presented in this thesis contributes to the literature by providing an in-depth DSM framework to enumerate new considerations and behaviours around self-marketing in the digital era as well as two practical DSM guides, one for Australian academics and the other for Australian universities, which provide a checklist of considerations for each audience around professional academic social media use, as practical resources that can be used in the higher education sector and in industry.