Grundy, Pepa (2026) ‘It’s about giving, not giving up’: Emeritus professors’ narratives of professorial professionalism and retirement. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.
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Abstract
The UK-based emeritus professors are retired professors who retain their professorial title as an honour, with often continued academic, research and mentoring involvement, but no formal employment role after retiring from their university. This Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) study examines the retirement reality of the emeriti as both a personal experience and a social construct shaped by neoliberal influences in higher education and the wider UK society. It focuses on how the emeriti perceive their identity, professionalism, and intellectual ‘self’ after leaving academic roles and gaining an emeritus professor status. The research addresses the shifting definitions of professionalism and explores how retired professors reconcile their past professional and intellectual identities with their new retired professional ‘selves’. Special attention is given to generativity, legacy, and the motivations and aspirations that shape life post-retirement, including how emeriti navigate new roles and adapt to evolving rights and responsibilities. Developed within an overarching interpretative framework and grounded in Bakhtinian dialogic theory, the study employs a qualitative methodology to analyse the narrative accounts of fifteen retired senior academics, focusing on the transformative, affective, and socially situated aspects of retirement. The findings highlight the complexities of professional identity negotiation, the challenges posed by engaging in professional activity in retirement, and the emotional dynamics of transition, culminating in a proposed model of professorial professionalism in retirement which extends existing theoretical frameworks of professionalism in education. The study concludes that being an emeritus professor is a dynamic and affective professional identity construct, and the emeriti continue to offer fresh personal and professional insights and perspectives to encourage positive collaborative discussions in academia, despite ongoing market-driven pressures in UK higher education and society.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | Copyright © The Author 2026. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education |
| Depositing User: | Matthew Adams |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2026 13:36 |
| Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2026 13:36 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4946 |
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