With ongoing restructuring of the economy at a global level and increasing dependence on knowledge resources, the character of work is inevitably being transformed in profound ways. (McFall 2004). Universities are just one arena where these changes are being experienced. With complexity and uncertainty a feature of contemporary universities, academic identities are being challenged and competing views exist about what it means to be an academic and specifically what it means to be a ‘good teacher’.

In this paper selected findings are presented from a narrative study conducted with award winning university teachers. The purpose of this study was to explore the way university teachers engage in their own developmental process, fashioning and refashioning their identities to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing workplace. I argue that in the knowledge economy, with the ‘enterprise’ university presenting new and varied demands on university teachers, conceptions of teaching expertise and teacher identity as stable and enduring are no longer sustainable.

In contemporary workplaces, to be an expert one must participate in a particular work activity, and transform it, and in the process be transformed by it (Laufer and Glick in Barnett 1999). Developing teaching expertise is not simply a matter of acquiring new skills and knowledge; it is about taking up new identities, new ways of understanding and conducting oneself.

Taking a narrative identity approach to studying university teaching practice and teacher identity, means that the boundaries between agency and structure become more fluid. Rather than viewing academics as victims of structural change, the possibilities that change in the higher education sector offers can be explored. Viewed in this way, academics become agents who actively make their own reality and create new ways to be at work in the knowledge economy.