The Impact of Professional Identity on Strategic Renewal in a Multistakeholder Environment

Abstract

This thesis examines how professional identity influences strategic renewal, understood here as the processes through which organisations and systems adapt, reconfigure and sustain their strategic direction over time, balancing continuity with change. It addresses broader debates concerning how professionalised public systems renew themselves under reform pressures. The study is set in the multistakeholder environment of postgraduate medical education in Ireland, a context where authority is dispersed, reforms are contested, and legitimacy must be continually negotiated.Existing literature on strategic renewal highlights learning, dynamic capabilities and resource reconfiguration as central to renewal, but this work is rooted mainly in corporate contexts that assume unified goals and centralised authority. Such perspectives underplay the identity-laden and negotiated character of renewal in healthcare systems, where multiple professions and institutions must collaborate under conditions of constraint and reform.To address this gap, the study asks three questions: how professional identity shapes decision-making during renewal; how identity commitments influence prioritisation and resource allocation; and how identity conflicts underpin or inhibit consensus across stakeholders.An interpretivist, abductive research design was employed. Data were generated from 35 semi-structured interviews with senior stakeholders, supplemented by document analysis and cognitive mapping, a method that visualises how actors link causes and outcomes in reasoning about strategy. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify patterns of meaning around identity, legitimacy, and reform, while causal mapping provided a mental representation of the underlying logics of stakeholder reasoning and consensus.The analysis identified four distinct causal logics—relational, operational, legitimacy-oriented and integrative—through which stakeholders constructed their reasoning about renewal. Building on these findings, the study develops an identity-structured process model of strategic renewal, specifying how professional identity shapes interpretation, legitimacy evaluation, and coordinated strategic action in multistakeholder systems. These logics demonstrate that renewal in professionalised public systems is not primarily constrained by technical planning deficits, but by failures of shared meaning and legitimacy across identity groups. Professional identity emerges as a structuring mechanism shaping how strategies are interpreted, which actions are prioritised, and whether consensus stabilises over time.This thesis makes two central contributions. Theoretically, it advances strategic renewal research by demonstrating that professional identity operates as a practical causal mechanism through which power, legitimacy, and sensemaking shape renewal outcomes in professionalised public systems. Rather than treating identity as background context, the study demonstrates how identity dynamics actively structure decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and the pace of reform, thereby extending strategic renewal theory into settings characterised by distributed authority and regulatory constraint. Practically, the findings provide system leaders and policymakers with an identity-sensitive framework for diagnosing stalled reform, sequencing change in contested environments, and building durable strategic consensus—shifting attention from formal strategy design to the conditions under which renewal becomes legitimate, actionable, and sustainable in practice.

Date of Award	Mar 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aston University
Supervisor	David Carrington (Supervisor), Roberta Fida (Supervisor), Aoife M. McDermott (Supervisor) & Sudeshna Bhattacharya (Supervisor)