As most social organizations higher education institutions are undergoing fundamental structural changes which are deeply affecting scholars’ identity and working life and working conditions. These transformations are related, among others, with the increasing change in the knowledge producing, accessing, disseminating and legitimating systems of post-modern societies and de emergence of new fields of knowledge (Lyotard, 1984; Gibbons et al, 1994); the digitalization of information which displaces the attention from values and ideas to the means and techniques to obtain effective results; and the mixing of new economic perspectives with ICT which is fostering new organisational formats for higher education (Hanna and Associates, 2000) putting a lot of pressure over higher education institutions (Garrison & Anderson, 2003; Metcalfe, 2006) and people working in them –specially on scholars. This situation has brought about a good number of studies. However most studies have been carried out from a structural perspective in which scholars’ views about their working conditions, expectations, and worries are collected through statistic-based questionnaires or not taken into account at all. This is the reason underpinning the research project this paper builds on: The Impact of Social Change in Higher Education Staff Professional Life and Work. (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. SEJ2006-01876. 2006-2009), which main aim is to explore and understand how scholars establish a dialog, resist, adapt themselves or adopt changes and construct their professional identities. This paper deals with one of the first studies developed within the scope of the project. As all the members of the research team are scholars ourselves, teaching and carrying out research in Spanish universities, we started the project by writing our own autobiography related to the main changes we have gone through our professional lives. We have written nine professional autobiographies and have triangulated its content in pairs by means of “resonance” (Conle, 1996).

The main methods used in this piece of research have been autobiographical accounts and “resonances”. Autobiography accounts and “resonance” have been the methods used in this piece of research. According to Smith (1994:288) “Autobiography is a special case of life writing. Writing autobiographies and critics of autobiography is one of the most rapidly developing […] Autobiography suggests the power of agency in social and literary affairs. It gives voice to people long denied access”. For Conle (2000:53) “resonance is the process that carries the inquiry along, producing more and more stories, through metaphorical connections rather than through strictly logical ones (Conle, 1996). This process became especially useful in culturally heterogeneous settings where it could render encounters of difference particularly productive (Conle et al., 2000)".

The main results of this research process are nine rich autobiographical accounts which give a complex and deep account of senior and junior scholars in their process of constructing their identity and working lives in a rapidly changing world.