Open Access Publishing and University Researchers’ Agency Towards Reshaping the Publishing Habitus

Abstract

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, this qualitative study adopted a multiple-case design to investigate how university researchers exercised their agency as they engaged in actions of open access publishing, and how such actions influenced the researchers themselves and the university as an institution. Guided by a four-dimensional approach to agency as the conceptual framework, the study unveiled the complex processes by which university researchers played agentic roles in open access publishing and reshaped their own publishing habitus. They utilised various kinds of personal and social resources to mediate their agentic actions for the purpose of producing intended outcomes as institutionally recognised achievement. As their agentic actions influenced the university as institutional structure in terms of policy reformulation, they also reshaped university researchers’ habitus in an incremental manner as their habitus was augmented to include a new form of recognised action. The study also revealed the duality of discourse, which, conforming to institutionality, both enabled and constrained researchers’ agentic actions.