Changing logics in healthcare and their effects on the identity motives and identity work of doctors

Recent literature on hybridity has provided useful insights into how professionals have responded to changing institutional logics. Our focus in on how shifting logics have shaped senior medical professionals’ identity motives and identity work in a qualitative study of hospital consultants in the UK NHS. We found a binary divide between a large category of traditionalist doctors who reject shifting logics, and a much smaller category of incorporated consultants who broadly accept shifting logics and advocate change, with little evidence of significant ambivalence or temporary identity ‘fixes’ associated with liminality. By developing a new inductively-generated framework, we show how the identity motives and identity work of these two categories of doctors differ significantly. We explore the underlying causes of these differences, and the implications they hold for theory and practice in medical professionalism, medical professional leadership and healthcare reform.