Lecturer professional identities in gamification: a socio-material perspective

ABSTRACT Online gamification is an innovative educational practice, yet little is known about how the socio-material imbrications entailed in this pedagogical approach influence educator professional identities. Adopting a social-material sensibility to examine lecturer professional identities, this qualitative study mobilises visual-elicitation interviews and observations to understand the nuanced lecturer identity positions emanating from Kahoot! gamified practice in a Middle East college. Following a socio-material narrative analysis, the imbrication of people and Kahoot! reveals four distinct identity positionings underpinned by the material affordances and constraints of gamification. This study contributes to the growing body of research into how subject positions are manifested through the imbrications of human actors and materiality, revealing that the enactment of Kahoot! is not a neutral process, but one which may have transformative effects for lecturer professional identities in the higher education gamification context.


Introduction
Whilst gamification has emerged as an innovative educational approach, research has yet to probe the relationship between this pedagogical model and the socio-material enactment of lecturers' professional identities. 1 Seeking to bridge this gap, this paper presents research conducted in a Middle East college where gamification is particularly pervasive, explicitly encouraged through the institution's procurement of commercial licenses and embedded in several professional development (PD) interventions. The institution particularly favours the use of Kahoot!a popular gamification platform that features live, interactive quizzes (Wang and Tahir 2020).
The article begins by introducing the socio-material lens, then contextualises Kahoot! gamification and its implications for lecturers' practice and identities. Following this, lecturer professional identities in gamification (LPIG) are conceptualised as arising both narratively and resultant to digital-material influences. Next, the qualitative methodology mobilising visual-elicitation interviews and observations is described. This leads into the exposition of findings, revealing how the digital-material affordances of gamification evoke two positions characteristic of reinforced professional identities. Two further positions arise from the socio-material constraints that may accompany sedimented Kahoot! practice, revealing the fragility of professional identities in the gamification milieu.

Socio-material imbrications in higher education
In recent times, there has been increasing attention to sociomateriality to examine 'how materiality acts as a constitutive element of the social world and vice versa' (Leonardi 2012, 34). The complex, dense field of sociomateriality recognises that everyday material objects are fundamental facilitators of social action (Leonardi 2012) and warrant foregrounding in empirical research (Fenwick 2015). The relationship between the socio and the material is broadly categorised into two fields: the 'stronger' 2 sociomaterial theorisations, and the 'weaker' socio-material lenses. Under the first umbrella, stronger stances, including Actor Network Theory (ANT), adopt a relational ontology to view social and material dimensions as mutually constituted (e.g., Orlikowski 2007). For example, ANT theorists may uphold the provocative notion that human and non-human agency are symmetrical, eschewing the notion of human intentionality (Hawley 2021). This frequently entails the application of 'symmetric metalanguage' (Callon and Bruno 1992, 354) to attend to both human and material actants to avoid privileging the social (Schraube 2013). However, scholars have argued that when attempting to 'unpack' the social and the material in empirical data, this approach is problematic (e.g., Mutch 2013).
Meanwhile, the hyphenated socio-material lens, underscored by a substantialist ontology and grounded in the socio-technical paradigm, preserves the notion of human intentionality (Hultin 2019). It considers the human and material as distinct entities that enmesh to form the sociomaterial (e.g., Leonardi 2013). Leonardi's (2013) framework allows for the study of how different types of materiality and discourse intertwine and conjoin over time through repetitive interactions to effectuate socio-material outcomestermed imbrication (e.g., Leonardi 2011). The imbrication metaphor is derived from ancient tiling architecture using 'tegula' and 'imbrex' interlocking pieces to create rooves, to denote the interweaving of human and material agency (Leonardi 2011). Material agency arises from the innate physical properties of material artefacts that can effectuate or constrain their utilisation, with imbrication occurring in a layering effect as human actors deploy artefacts to realise goals and produce socio-material outcomes (Leonardi 2013). As human and material agencies come together, they create 'an organisational residue' (Leonardi 2011, 151), which for example, may be characterised as emergent practices that become taken for granted over time. Furthermore, new routines and practices may be cultivated as actors refashion and adapt material agency to overcome perceived constraints, creating a renewed socio-material agency which can yield new affordances or opportunities (Leonardi 2011;Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017). However, material agency is also manifested in what an artefact may do that is not completely within a user's control and may serve to hinder one's objectives (Leonardi 2013).
Recent attention to materiality in educational studies has extended beyond physical material entities such as lecture halls, desks and pens, to encompass instantiated, intangible digital tools or artefacts (Morizio 2014). This is especially salient as contemporary practices are reassembled through virtual learning programmes in response to expeditious technological developments and the pandemic (Pischetola, Thédiga de Miranda, and Albuquerque 2021). Thus, extending the traditional conceptualisation of materiality solely residing in tangible objects to digital artefacts, such as software programs, online games, applications and websites (Morizio 2014) recognises their capacity to reinforce concepts and ways of thinking (Leonardi 2013), and manifest abstract ideas materially to realise certain human behaviours and practices (Campbell, Lacković, and Olteanu 2021).
Whilst both digital and physical material artefacts can be considered in terms of their instrumentality (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017), the generative nature of digital artefacts means that users, such as lecturers, may realise affordances, or encounter constraints, that the creators did not foresee (Kallinikos 2013). Affordances, understanding, educational practices and discourses may enmesh (Symon and Pritchard 2015) or imbricate, and may include 'equipment, techniques, applications, and people' (Orlikowski 2010, 455). These imbrications give rise to 'digital significance' whereby actors exploit specific digital-material artefacts in the most fitting and efficacious means for their orientation to a task (Campbell, Lacković, and Olteanu 2021). This significance is markedly highlighted in online education as the physical proximity of traditional lectures is supplanted by entertaining, engaging and context-dependent digital software to facilitate teaching and learning (Campbell, Lacković, and Olteanu 2021). In summary, as 'artefacts and technologies set up a social field' this calls for consideration not only of human-to-human interaction but highlights the salience of human-material-digital practice and enactments (Ajjawi and Boud 2017, 252).
Accordingly, adopting a socio-material sensibility to both tangible and digital materiality recognises how integral, rather than incidental, these artefacts are to the nature and outcomes of educational contexts (Orlikowski 2007). Referred to henceforth as socio-material imbrications, this term represents how digital-material educational resources are dynamically enacted and entwined with actors' social interactions and their resultant identities (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017). This highlights the importance of attending not only to narrative and discursive acts in the study of identity, but also the power of artefacts (McVee et al. 2021). Identities are not produced in isolation, rather they are complex sociomaterial effects of broader digital-material conditions, suggesting the relevant unit of analysis extends beyond social and narrative positioning (Mulcahy 2011). In consonance with this, scholars including Martin (2019) revise the emphasis on purely anthropocentric accounts of educator identity and call for a consideration of occupational, material elements implicated in human positioning.
Socio-material approaches to identity work in organisational studies have revealed how the imbrication of the material agency of seemingly innocuous workplace technologies, such as whiteboards and mobile phones, may serve to regulate and perform identities beyond local discourse, through a socio-material process (e.g., Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017;Symon and Pritchard 2015). Educational research adopting a socio-material sensibility towards identity has examined how anti-plagiarism programmes exert agency to inscribe identity positions of imposters to their users (Introna and Hayes 2011) and how the affordances and constraints of socio-spatial arrangements influence teacher identity (Lai, Huang, and Lam 2020). What does appear to be missing from the literature is an account of how the imbrication of humans and gamification software enacts lecturer professional identities in situated practice.

Kahoot! gamification
Overview Whilst traditional games have complemented lectures for many decades, recently the use of digital, online gamified quizzes 3 has increased (Wang and Tahir 2020). Kahoot! is an exemplar of a gamification 4 application commonly utilised in bring-your-own-device contexts for pedagogical purposes including informal assessment, review and respite from other activities (Wang and Tahir 2020). Educators may select existing quizzes or create their own, including multiple choice, fill in the blank and true or false question formats. After launching a quiz, learners submit responses on their devices and subsequently monitor their progress on the leader board projected from the teacher's interface.
Online Kahoot! gamification is socio-materially enacted and performs a multifaceted nature of reality (Postma 2012) arising through both social (human) and material (non-human) forces. The socio-material imbrications of Kahoot! encompass resources including the human (social): the institutional stakeholders, lecturers and learners, the tangible material: texts, devices, screens, PD texts and certificates, and the digital-material: the online space, quiz artefacts, attractive graphics, virtual points as rewards, music and digital leader boards. Whilst socio-material studies in bringyour-own-device contexts are increasing, there remains a silent aspect to what digital devices and artefacts such as Kahoot! do, or how they manifest agency, to specifically facilitate or constrain educational practice (Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, and Decuypere 2020). Moreover, whilst research suggests that digital and physical materiality are integral to the shaping of student identities (Godec et al. 2020), little is known about how the socio-material imbrications of gamification practice instantiate lecturer identity positioning. To contextualise what is known about educators' experiences of Kahoot! and the implications this has for their professional identities, a brief review of the broader literature is pertinent.
Kahoot! and Educators. Studies have recounted educator perceptions of the affordances provided by Kahoot!, including enhanced classroom dynamics, convenient premade quizzes, the platform's flexible functionality (Wang and Tahir 2020) and the deployment of kahoots 5 as meaningful time fillers (Zucker and Fisch 2019). The imbrication of Kahoot! in practice also appears to endow lecturers with the capacity to become effective designers of digitally enhanced activities (Engeness 2021). Kahoot! may also increase teacher motivation, permit the real-time evaluation of learner knowledge and for some, reduce workload (Wang and Tahir 2020).
Research suggests that educators' intentions to utilise Kahoot! may be vitiated during the imbrication of their skills with the digital materiality embedded within. The Kahoot! learning curve may be conceptually and pragmatically challenging and preparing original quizzes can be inconvenient and laborious (Hung et al. 2017). Alongside instantaneous technical issues that can sabotage the utilisation of quiz artefacts, success is dependent on content accuracy, appropriate timing and effective feedback delivery (Wang and Tahir 2020). Thus, in the absence of the requisite skills to successfully integrate Kahoot! and form a stabilised imbrication, constraints to pedagogical practice may arise. This can result in meaningless or ineffective deployment which pervades precious instructional time and hinders learning (Wang 2015).
A further constraint may arise from learners citing Kahoot! as a distraction from substantive learning and questioning its legitimacy as a pedagogical tool introduced by educators (Licorish et al. 2018). Moreover, with the excessive use of gamification artefacts the novel productive effects may dissipate, resulting in symptoms of tech-fatigue, ostensibly for both student and lecturer (Wang 2015). In these instances, the gamification imbrication may be subject to resistance and potentially subverted by lecturers to preserve social relations (Symon and Pritchard 2015). Further resistance may occur as the imbrication of lecturers and Kahoot! triggers multidimensional role shifts which may be contrary to existing beliefs and values (Convery 2009). Whilst the literature documents gamification role adaptations spanning 'presenter' (Wang 2015, 221), 'game show host' (Wang and Tahir 2020, 2), 'planner' (Nousiainen et al. 2018, 86) and 'playmaker' (Kangas, Koskinen, and Krokfors 2016, 453), it is argued that with extended sedimentation, the gamification imbrication may exert pressure beyond role modifications to manifest the shaping of lecturer identities (Convery 2009).

Conceptualising professional identities
In today's digital world, it seems legitimate to ask who educational actors are becoming vis-à-vis the technology they employ (Carter and Grover 2015), and more specifically, how the socio-material imbrications of Kahoot! influence Lecturer Professional Identities in Gamification (LPIG). Defining educator identity is a formidable undertaking due to the lack of academic consensus towards its conceptual definition (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009). Nevertheless, I suggest that professional identities, existing in plurality, and extending beyond the relative stabilisation of roles (Howard 2021c), are organising aspects of educators' occupational experiences which sanction the justification and legitimisation of their selves in situated practice (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009). Identities encompass the dynamic and continuous nature of 'how an individual mediates teachingdrawing upon different arrays of social positioning, experiences, and resources to enact their professional selves' (Sexton 2008, 75).

Identities: narratives and materiality
There are diverse theories of educator identity, including experiential (e.g., Wenger 1998) and emotional accounts (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009). However, relevant to this inquiry is a poststructuralist, socio-material approach that recognises how identities are formed in multiplicity through social interactions and material practices (Mulcahy 2011).
Identity work is partially manifested through narrative speech acts galvanised by beliefs, attitudes, and values (Symon and Pritchard 2015). Narratives endow lecturers with subject positions from which they purposefully interpret the social world, which in turn, may regulate their actions (Weedon 1997). Thus, identity positions are embedded in lived experiences and emerge through external and internal narratives, which are shaped by the normative presumptions that actors perceive they should comply with (Howard 2021c). Two distinct types of positioning arise in narratives. In ideational positioning, lecturers position themselves vis-à-vis the idealised notions of the self they aspire to and conceptualisations of who they should be, resulting in claims to identities (McInnes and Corlett 2012). In terms of relational positioning, lecturers may also cite their identities in relation to other actors, demonstrating similarity or difference to others in self-other talk (Symon and Pritchard 2015). For example, in distancing themselves from unfavourable other self-representations, such as a colleague who is the 'boring teacher', lecturers may affirm their professionalism and legitimacy as an 'effective facilitator' (Howard 2021b). As Ybema et al. (2009, 299) explain, 'it is the varieties of self-other talk that emerge as the critical ingredient in processes of identity formation.' Professional identities are seldom fully within one's control, and their inherent complexity is 'relational, negotiated, constructed, enacted, transforming, and transitional' (Miller 2009, 174), as certain subject positions may be both contingent and temporal (Mulcahy 2011). Lecturers must negotiate competing and constraining narratives from other actors as they navigate societal and institutional expectations (Rhodes and Brown 2005) and the tangible and digital-materially influenced aspects of subjectivity (Mulcahy 2011).
The entanglement of human and non-human artefacts may invoke pedagogical affordances, constrain educational practice (Gourlay 2017) and shape the presentation of identities through repetitive enactments (Symon and Pritchard 2015). This perspective permits professional identity to be studied as a progressive rendering which is performed (Butler 1997) in 'an ongoing process rather than an internalized and stable state' (Symon and Pritchard 2015, 244). Moreover, as technologies are utilised in practice, this may 'result in fundamental modifications in workflows, relationships, balance of power, control dynamics and current modes of cognition' which either threaten or reinforce professional identities (Mishra et al. 2012, 743). When the material agency of a technology is regarded as a regression or a disturbance which impugns one's status, for example, this may cause a threat to, or a deterioration in, professional identity (Bartel 2001). Conversely, when material agency is perceived as increasing one's self-efficacy 6 and status, this serves to reinforce one's professional identity (Mishra et al. 2012).
Whilst 'strong' relational theorisations of sociomateriality, such as ANT, perceive technology and human actors' agentic capacity symmetrically, this does not align with the humanistic priority of identity research (Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus (2013). In disputing the resolute de-centring of the human, Hawley (2021, 13) posits that 'if we foreground non-human material agency without paying sufficient attention to the asymmetry and range of human agentic capacities, are we in danger of weaving the Emperor's New Clothes?' Thus, I argue that whilst we should attend to non-human entities to steer research away from solely anthropocentric accounts of agency and identity, viewing 'agency as a circuit of human tendencies or potentials in constant intra-action with material agency' (Hawley 2021, 13) foregrounds a socio-material lens.
In acknowledging the salience of non-human agentic capacity resting in the material artefacts, surroundings and curricula of HE (Gourlay 2017), it is suggested that lecturers' agency is not absolute. For example, whilst lecturers exert agency to make gamification choices, such intentions are subject to transformation through their encounters with the digital-material artefacts implicated in Kahoot! practice (Symon and Pritchard 2015). Individuals may position themselves and express preferred identities (e.g., an ideational identity as a 'great lecturer'), yet in converging with digitalmaterial constraints, these identity positions may be vitiated or modified, manifesting a renewed socio-material agency (Symon and Pritchard 2015) and consequential subject positioning. This treatment of agency aligns with Leonardi's (2011) metaphor of imbrication which conceptualises the human and non-human 'as separate and self-contained entities that interact and affect each other' (Cecez-Kecmanovic, Boell, and Campbell 2014a, 809).
Despite the increasing empirical attention to materiality, socio-material perspectives have ostensibly rendered the educator somewhat imperceptible (Williamson, Potter, and Eynon 2019), while HE studies have largely neglected the socio-material conditions which engender professional identities (Brown 2019) or have done so quite implicitly (Mulcahy 2011). However, there is noteworthy research in the IT (e.g., Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus 2013) and organizational literature (e.g., Symon and Pritchard 2015;Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017). For example, Symon and Pritchard (2015) demonstrate how rail employees' identities as authoritative, committed and responsive are narratively and socio-materially constructed, performed, and threatened through their entwinement with mobile technologies. Meanwhile, Paring, Pezé, and Huault (2017) reveal how consultants' professional identities may be regulated not only through discourse, but also resultant to the socio-material imbrication of whiteboards in work routines. Extending on these illuminative studies, it was anticipated that attending to both narrative and material manifestations of professional identities would serve to unveil the complexity of an innovative educational practice by opening the metaphorical 'black-box' of lecturers' gamification work (Zukas and Malcolm 2019). Accordingly, the research question framing this study is: How do LPIG manifest in the sociomaterial imbrications of gamification practice?

Overview
This small-scale exploratory study is grounded in a social constructionist ontological perspective with a corresponding broad interpretivist epistemology. Consistent with Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus (2013) approach, this worldview permits the consideration of both human and digital-material interactions in the enactment of the professional self. It was deemed important to use a socio-material lens in the analysis, for eschewing any distinction between the social and the material neglects the uniquely human capacities for intentionality and discursive, purposeful self-positioning (Symon and Pritchard 2015).
In accordance with this socio-material approach, in-depth interviews were the primary means of data collection, since 'when we tell a narrative about our personal experiences, we also weave, mould and fashion our sense of self in the process' (Kenny, Whittle, and Willmott 2011, 27). Additionally, observations of the lecturers enacting Kahoot! during their online sessions were conducted to render visible the imbrication of the social (e.g., lecturers, students) with digital-material artefacts (e.g., Kahoot! software, screens and devices).

Research context and participants
The research was focused on the deep understanding of Kahoot! gamification and LPIG at a single institution, a Middle East college with a predominantly expatriate faculty. As an insider researcher, I was aware that faculty members instructing first-year students were more engaged in gamification than colleagues in core departments such as Engineering and Business. Therefore, purposive sampling concentrated on lecturers teaching English Communication, Academic Writing, Research Methods, Mathematics and Life Skills. Email invitations were sent to twenty-five prospective participants who were potentially accessible according to the research timeline (Bolldén 2016). This resulted in the recruitment of ten participants who were actively deploying Kahoot! quizzes in online lectures several times per week.

Semi-structured visual elicitation interviews
The data collection began with a pilot interview with one participant, enabling me to experiment with and refine the draft interview schedule (Howard 2021c). Due to the pandemic, remote interviews were conducted and recorded on Zoom. Despite interviewing just ten lecturers, the highly focused data were rich enough to provide salient insights into lecturer professional identities (Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus 2013). The flexible semi-structured interview protocol, using the Kahoot! website as a visual elicitation device (Pauwels 2020), shown in Figure 1, enabled the participants to deeply expand on their subjective beliefs and experiences, with each interview lasting at least sixty minutes. Furthermore, this leveraged the socio-material technique of 'inviting materiality into interviews' (Hultin 2019, 92) to encourage the lecturers to engage with Kahoot! as they recounted rich narratives of their socio-material praxis. The interview topics spanned the ways participants exploit Kahoot! features, their views of gamification and the relationship between Kahoot! and learner engagement. Otter Ai online software was used for transcription, and the generated files were edited against the audio for any inconsistencies, permitting my timely immersion in the data (Howard 2019). Whilst concerns may be expressed over the situated nature of the interview when conducting socio-material research into identity, adopting the visual elicitation technique and observing Kahoot! in practice conceivably mediate this ambiguity (Symon and Pritchard 2015).

Observations
By including the observational element to witness the socio-material performance of Kahoot! firsthand (Symon and Pritchard 2015), the dual data sources augment the depth and internal validity of this single-case approach (Daniel, Hartnett, and Meadows 2017). There were three options regarding how to conduct the observations: to join the online class remotely, review recorded lessons, or observe the lecturers host the online Kahoot! in person (e.g., in the same room). The final option was anticipated to be the most fruitful since this would at least enable the direct, real-time observation of the lecturers engaging with material/intangible digital artefacts (e.g., their computer/ Kahoot artefacts). During this phase, I took detailed field notes, which, combined with the interview data, provide a degree of triangulation to enrich the analysis (Howard 2021c). To ensure trustworthiness, the participants reviewed their transcripts and corresponding field notes to confirm legitimacy and accuracy (Howard 2021b).

Data analysis
Whilst the observational data traced the imbrication of Kahoot and the lecturers' situated enactment of it to foreground the analysis (Aagaard and Matthieson 2016) particular attention was paid to the lecturers' first-person accounts. I adopted a socio-material narrative analytical approach to the transcripts (Symon and Pritchard 2015), with the close reading of the interview data focused on what was said, rather than how (Riessman 2008). This proceeded on the assumption that 'when we tell stories about our lives, we perform our preferred identities' (Riessman 2003, 337).
In the first stage, I particularly focused on locating and coding 'narrative fragments' (Symon and Pritchard 2015) where participants' words revealed their subject positioning, either explicitly (for example: I don't want to represent myself as a teacher in that way) or implicitly (for example: It's incumbent upon us educators to keep up the pace). As they recounted stories of their experiences, participants would 'relive their experiences of discursive-material engagements' in gamification practice (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014b, Methodology section). The 'level of granularity' (Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus 2013, 170) correlated with the lecturers' social beliefs, attitudes, and values regarding their utilisation of Kahoot!. The second stage scrutinised the relationship between the digital-material artefacts of gamification practice and the identity positions. This entailed coding how the lecturers' imbrication with digital-material agency facilitated or constrained their pedagogical practice (Stanko et al. 2022) and reinforced or threatened their sense of professional selves (Mishra et al. 2012). This iterative procedure involved searching for 'consistent motifs' (Fenwick 2007, 516), ultimately leading to four distinct positioning themes: two which appear to reinforce professional identity and two positions which present as threats. Accepting that this is a nonexhaustive categorisation of the multiple identity manifestations that may arise through gamification practice, the positions interpreted from this specific cohort and context are derived from their dominance and salience.

Ethical considerations
Lancaster University and the research site granted ethical approval. The lecturers received an information sheet in advance and provided written consent, with four participants also agreeing to observations. Additionally, the students from the observed online classes received an information sheet in Arabic and consented. The Zoom platform was chosen since it permits locally stored data (reducing the vulnerability posed by cloud-storage) and offers secure user-specific authentication and data encryption (Archibald et al. 2019). A further deontological consideration arose in respecting confidentiality and remaining sensitive to respondent vulnerability owing to the protective Middle East cultural context (Howard 2021c). Therefore, to adequately anonymise the lecturers, all identifying information is excluded from the exposition of findings.

Findings and discussion
The integration of gamification into the lecturers' classes was facilitated by the institution's commercial Kahoot! licensing and resources devoted to related professional development. This represented a salient human to material imbrication, whereby the human agency of the college leaders introduced a gamification technology (a material agency) aimed at altering the pedagogical (social) practices of the lecturers (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017).
As demonstrated in the following excerpts, this socio-material configuration in which the affordances of Kahoot! were channelled by the power of institutional discourse encouraged routinisation in the lecturers' identity enactment (Symon and Pritchard 2015). Kahoot! is highly encouraged by the college … we have the commercial account and the Bronze, Silver and Gold PD sessions that we should take (Lecturer G) and: One of our performance objectives is educational technology. It fits in well with that (Lecturer C).
Accordingly, an effect of the materiality of performance evaluation criteria and PD resources was to create institutional 'residue' (Leonardi 2011, 151) which had implications for LPIG. As the following quotation reveals, lecturers could mobilise their pedagogical gamification approach to perform an identity narrative which was legitimized by the organization (Symon and Pritchard 2015) and achieved alignment with institutional objectives: There is a real culture of using [Kahoot!] here. It's something we all seem to go to as a default, even though we use other platforms, we come back to this one. There's something to be said about that and how it's viewed as effective and useful by faculty and the college. (Lecturer G) Resultant to this imbrication of socially embedded understanding, people and technology, the repetitive use of the Kahoot! platform created an occupational routine, within which certain affordances and constraints arose and had direct implications for LPIG (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017). The analysis revealed the positioning of the lecturers was demonstrated most markedly in who they could be socially when leveraging the affordances or confronting the constraints of material agency (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017). Two positions manifest resultant to the affordances harnessed through Kahoot! practice: the creative, collaborative content developer, and the motivational performer, with the final two categories encompassing the socio-material constraints lecturers negotiate which may threaten their professional identities, characterised as the schoolteacher and disconnected educator.
The findings are summarised in Table 1, below, and then discussed in detail. Decluttered excerpts (Riessman 2008) of the prevailing narratives are meaningfully interlaced in an interpretive account grounded in the relevant gamification, socio-material and identity literature (Symon and Pritchard 2015).
Position 1: the creative, collaborative content developer Kahoot! offers material functionalities for developing and sharing bespoke quizzes which provided affordances for the lecturers in positioning themselves as creative, collaborative content developers. Whilst the option to utilise existing Kahoot! quizzes through shared institutional repositories existed, the lecturers enacted human agency to build their own activities, deriving a sense of professionalism and pride from these acts.
When I have a tight focus on a lesson or skill I want to work on, I know I can put together a great kahoot. The tool itself is very easy to master, and the software is simple to use (Lecturer E). This narrative demonstrates how the enmeshing of lecturers' skills, robust beliefs about learning and Kahoot! affordances convene to establish 'digital significance' (Leonardi 2010) and cultivate a creative lecturer identity. Thus, as demonstrated in the preceding excerpt, the merging of human action and intention with the affordances of the simple interface and navigational flexibility of the website offered an effective socio-material agency which allied with the lecturers in their design of activities. Through their engagement in the preparatory aspects of gamification by crafting their own quizzes, the lecturers could position themselves as successful creators of artefacts.
Previously, I was an assessment coordinator, and I've noticed that some colleagues might not possess the skills to make effective quizzes. The distractors should have a diagnostic or analytic element to them, so we would know what students don't understand. But what I've found is they just pull three other random choices out of a bag and put those there (Lecturer A).
This fragment reveals how Lecturer A relationally positioned themselves apart from the other, the ineffective, unqualified quiz maker. Moreover, it provides an example of ideational positioning, shaped by the idealised teacher/assessor role, and derived from their professional security in fashioning valid assessment artefacts to overcome perceived constraints. Thus, Lecturer A's social agency, pedagogical values and occupational experience convened with Kahoot! to create digital artefacts which agentically effectuated good practice.
I find it hard to use the premade [kahoots]. There are often so many little errors which makes me feel badly represented if I use those. I feel embarrassed and discredited. I don't want to represent myself as a teacher in that way (Lecturer B).
Similarly, for Lecturer B, recycling content which misaligned with their social beliefs about learning invoked resistance. The embedded material agency of pre-made educational artefacts could compromise their professional self-image (e.g., Howard 2021c). Whilst lecturers could have initiated a new layer of imbrication to adapt the existing material properties (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017) of the kahoots, they embraced ownership of quiz artefact creation, rather than saving time, to enact a robust and empowered preferred self (Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus 2013). The affordances of virtual shared folders and repositories convened to permit an important socio-material outcome: the distribution of lecturers' own content. This is described in the following excerpts: It's important to share the kahoots you create. We're helping each other; it's teamwork and cooperation in your faculty department (Lecturer F), and I believe in sharing the wealth. I am not sure what other people are doing or what their needs are, but if they can use what I make, I am helping them (Lecturer H). The created artefacts, as useful tools, (Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus 2013) could circulate digitally, shaping new thoughts, actions and practices in colleagues (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017), strengthening the creator's identity and perceived value as an educator. As Kahoot! artefacts' material properties became imbricated with human agency and purpose (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017), the lecturers activated material affordances which could support their innovative practice and socio-professional relations. In this regard, the socio-material imbrications of people, tacit pedagogical knowledge, Kahoot! and the digital space enmeshed (Mulcahy 2011). The lecturers harnessed the material agency provided by the Kahoot website to create specific artefacts, which were perceived by the lecturers as enhancing their social positioning, their self-efficacy and status, and in turn, reinforced their professional identities (Mishra et al. 2012).
Position 2: the motivational performer Some participants enacted various entertainment roles whilst using Kahoot! live, extending on the aforementioned studies (e.g., Nousiainen et al. 2018). These narratives also highlighted the salience of the digital-material resources mobilised during live quizzes for maintaining student engagement. Whilst 'role speaks to function whereas identity voices investments and commitments' (Britzman 1991, 29), when lecturers repeatedly verbally and performatively adopted these positions, their professional identities were inevitably reinforced (Symon and Pritchard 2015). The analysis revealed these performances were chiefly undergirded by the social desire to motivate learners; the subject positions referenced included 'hype man', 'game show host' and 'quiz master.' Performing the self as a director, motivator and encourager are ideational identity renderings enacted amid a game: I'm an encourager during the kahoot. I don't want to lose their attention or motivation … then, on one hand, I'm a director in control of the pace, and on the other, I'm a cheerleader to motivate them. (Lecturer F) In this excerpt, Lecturer F described a variety of identity performances modulated in a single enactment of Kahoot! which were also evident in the observation session. Furthermore, individual teaching styles, levity and the material affordances of the digital interface were imbricated in gamification practice to reinforce such positions: I am not much of a strict disciplinarian. Kahoot! is a great method because it's fun and entertaining for students. It suits my style: light, engaging and friendly (Lecturer D). Meanwhile, whilst some utilized Kahoot to motivate their learners amiably there was also value derived from a more didactic, yet still motivational stance, as Lecturer B recounted: I use Kahoot! to show them where they're not good enough. It's helping them tomorrow. I encourage them to see the gaps in their knowledge. This was demonstrated during the live class as I witnessed Lecturer B performing an authoritative, disciplinary position, conceiving motivation more austerely. Lecturer B enacted an identity to mediate gaps in student knowledge, capturing the material affordance of Kahoot! to extend their human agency in formatively assessing students.
Furthermore, specific digital artefacts embedded in the Kahoot! platformthe multimodality of music, the leader board ( Figure 2) and the timerappeared pertinent in lecturer positioning during the observations. These functions and signs were imbricated with the educators' inspirational performances and revealed the salience of aural and visual material agency in gamification.
The music gets me and the students excited. It really adds to the experience (Lecturer C). This excerpt depicts the important socio-material imbrication in which the artefacts' sensory aesthetics (Rafaeli and Vilnai-Yavetz 2004) performed the social objective of energizing learners to reinforce the ideational identity position of the fun educator. Similarly, LPIG were reinforced through the imbrication of the lecturers' socio-vocalisations and the digital-visual affordance provided by the leader board: Lecturer G: If a student, who is never on the leader board suddenly appears, I make a funny comment, like a sports caster commentating on a football game. I also talk about the leader board after every question to keep it engaging.
Additionally, the lecturers cited the timer feature as instrumental in motivating their learners: The timer puts the students under pressure. It's good training to answer something in a certain timeit reminds them they've got to get this done. (Lecturer D).
Here, the marrying of the timer's agency in steering and reinforcing learner behaviour and Lecturer D's intent, reveal a socio-material capability in which the lecturer could perform and position themselves not only as a coach, but also a monitor. Thus, these narratives depict how during gamified practice, pedagogical beliefs and the visual and aural material Kahoot! artefacts enmesh to influence both classroom praxis and realise lecturers' enactment of their professional selves as motivators of student engagement.

Position 3: the schoolteacher
Notwithstanding the rich opportunities for materials development and motivational positions, the sedimentation of Kahoot! gamification also threatened LPIG for some of the participants. This is perhaps an example of how the progressive layering effects of social-material imbrications produce taken for granted practices (Leonardi 2013) which, as a result, yield constraints in human-to-human interactions.
Excessive Kahoot! utilisation was perceived as potentially infantilising learners. Some lecturers grappled with this conflict; they wished to appeal to students' apparent preferences yet were concerned they could potentially patronise them. This caused several participants to dissociate themselves from the original human to material imbrication facilitated by the institutional discourse encouraging gamification (Trent 2012). The perceived behaviourist approach embedded materially in Kahoot! (simply clicking a coloured square to answer) and the lecturers' social awareness of both the students' conservative Arab upbringing (Harb and El-Shaarawi 2007) and emergent English language ability disrupted their enactment of, and identification as, professional lecturers. This resulted in the social-material manifestation of 'school' teacher positions. Thus, several participants reflexively acknowledged the need to recognise their learners as young adults and perhaps temper their use of Kahoot!: In international higher education, often we conflate English ability with maturity levels. They're still adults, even if they have a narrower worldview. Sometimes, I feel Kahoot! is a slightly juvenile activity we play too much. (Lecturer A).
It appeared that lecturers' intentions may have been subverted by the agentic performance of Kahoot! as it inadvertently inscribed identity positions to educators (and learners). This was perhaps an unanticipated, generative effect produced by digital gamification software (Kallinikos 2013). Thus, Lecturer A adopted a subject position which recognised this limitation of Kahoot! and intimated a future orientation to shifting values and practical refinements to Kahoot! gamification, whilst questioning the routinisation of this socio-material practice.
You know they appreciate that you put in extra work to make class more fun. On the other hand, sometimes I feel they think, 'Come on its college, why are we doing Kahoot! again!? It's kind of ridiculous!' (Lecturer I) Similarly, the above excerpt suggests that occasionally students implicitly questioned the validity of gamification, which competed with the lecturers' sense of self (Rhodes and Brown 2005). This particular finding bolsters Licorish et al.'s (2018) observation that university students may perceive Kahoot! as an irrelevant, ineffective use of instructional time. This social realisation that students may not actually learn through the materiality of gamification could threaten LPIG and lead to a loss of pedagogical prestige (Mishra et al. 2012). Thus, when Kahoot! is ostensibly misaligned with some student's perceptions of a valid educational approach, this may reveal the mutability of LPIG, as Lecturer I vacillated between appealing to learners through the material affordances of designing quiz artefacts, recognising heterogeneity in student cohorts and attending to the demographic realities of the educational context. Moreover, the cautious awareness of potential gamification fatigue (Wang 2015) as a material-digital constraint suggested a tacit re-positioning, perhaps through the new imbrication of an alternate technology's material agency to maintain an ideational identity.

Position 4: the disconnected educator
Further threats to LPIG arose due to the decreasing visibility of student engagement during online gamification, which perhaps could diminish Kahoot!'s 'digital significance' (Campbell, Lacković, and Olteanu 2021, 15). The fluid, online arena with its material affordances of screens, cameras and Kahoot!, is quite distinct from the physical lecture hall (Postma 2012). This was evident in the marked discontent reported by several participants and palpable during the observations of their live classes. These unsettling challenges to self-efficacy emerged from constrained visibility, whereby learners could exert human agency in obstructing the material imbrication of their cameras in the online space. The absence of digital accountability, due to students not activating cameras, served to occlude the authenticity of their engagement, and rendered a layer of invisibility to their gamification practice. This displaced the lecturers' explicit control (Postma 2012), and positioned the learners as disembodied agents, detached from the co-constructive gamified process (Howard 2021c). This ambiguity of digital-material performances appeared to subvert (Symon and Pritchard 2015) both engagement and learning, and it was challenging for some lecturers to reconcile this with their ideational, motivational identities: I know some students join and never play. Kahoot! can be a great way for them to minimally engage in the class. They can put their name up there and then do nothing (Lecturer F). Here Kahoot! was problematised, cited as a negative, constraining material agency when its virtual configuration disrupted desired pedagogical and assessment processes (Stein, Galliers, and Lynne Markus 2013). Additionally, this could invoke pedagogical and professional insecurity due to the potential for unproductive instructional time and the fear of ostracizing poor-performing students: The students at the bottom get a bit lost and forgotten about. They can easily hide in Kahoot! Maybe they are just shopping in the mall and pressing red for every question (Lecturer I).
Thus, beyond the lecturers' gaze, Kahoot! appeared to extend a materially derived learner refuge, occasionally revising the participants' intentions to assert their preferred identities (Symon and Pritchard 2015). A socio-material boundary was erected between lecturer and learner, as the mutable virtual space rendered the predictability of student behaviour impossible: Online, they just have to look and click. There's no real consequence for being wrong. They are still in class, but as minimally as possible. It's cynical, but sometimes it's the reality (Lecturer E). Guarded student engagement online serves to disconnect the educator and has previously been shown to limit self-efficacy beliefs and threaten professional identities (Howard 2021c). Moreover, the lecturers questioned their capacity to effectuate authentic formative assessment when students invited social media applications into the existing imbrication. This added digital-material agency appeared potentially detrimental to the lecturers' pedagogical action, constraining student engagement and investment in the quizzes.
Lecturer J's human agency was stifled, and any substantive learning which may have taken place was rendered invisible. Reflexively, Lecturer J questioned the extent of their situated knowledge of the learners' actions during gamification as their pedagogical objectives were obstructed (Bolldén 2016): It's hard to ensure everyone is actually thinking and not just messaging each other with the answer! They all have their own WhatsApp group, so to what extent is it really working? (Lecturer J).
The imbrication of phones and social media with the lecturers' human agency yielded digitalmaterial distractions which seemingly territorialised the learning arena and disrupted the enactment of gamification (Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, and Decuypere 2020).
In summary, the final thematic position reveals how the lecturers' perceptions of Kahoot! affordances can shift according to time, cohorts and specific pedagogical interactions, reinforcing the nonlinearity and multiplicity of LPIG enactment (Martin 2019). Moreover, these positionings raised implications for how the lecturers choose to utilise Kahoot! in the future, as they navigate the vagaries of digital materiality and constrained visibility to prevent ideational positions and reinforced LPIG (Mulcahy 2011) from going 'awry or adrift' (Butler 1997, iii) in the complex imbrication of gamification practice.

Conclusion
Adopting a narrative, socio-material sensibility has revealed important insights into the relative terra incognita of lecturer identities enacted in gamification. It has revealed not only what one may do, but also who one can be, when enacting Kahoot! online amid the socio-material affordances and constraints of this practice (Paring, Pezé, and Huault 2017). The findings yield nuanced identity positions arising through the socio-material imbrications of institution, people, software, phones and game-based artefacts to demonstrate how the digital enactment of Kahoot! gamification is not a neutral process, but one which may have transformative effects for LPIG. The findings support the notion that gamification technologies are anything but 'a sphere free of ambiguities, contradictions, and ambivalences' (Schraube 2009, 297). Moreover, the study demonstrates the 'complexity, fragility and multiplicity' of lecturer professional identities as they negotiate this ambiguity (Howard 2021b, 667). The reinforced representations of LPIG can be seen in the collaborative, creative developer of original artefacts and the motivational performer who bolsters learner engagement. However, whilst Kahoot! embedded practice invokes these positions, the entrenchment of gamification as a normative, inviolable approach in the lecturers' toolbox (Zukas and Malcolm 2019), may create ambivalence and uncertainty when negotiating digital-material agentic capacity and identities in the long term, especially with regards to utilising gamification platforms with young adults in the online arena where student visibility is a concern.
To extend on these findings, potential avenues of research include applying a socio-material lens to reveal manifestations of LPIG in other contexts or to explore other gamification platforms (e.g., Quizizz). Additionally, a noteworthy limitation (beyond the scale) of this project is that due to the pandemic, the study centred solely on online gamification. As such, future research could investigate gamification imbrications further by adopting a more robust performative ontology (Schultze 2014) to observe the full embodiment of LPIG enactment in face-to-face sessions. Moreover, a longitudinal ethnographic approach, perhaps from the inception of gamification implementation, could unveil how socio-material imbrications emerge over time to influence LPIG.
It is suggested that educators endeavour to harness the affordances of Kahoot! by creatively designing and implementing bespoke quizzes, whilst remaining cognizant of key constraints, including the potential for gamification fatigue and the cloud of digital invisibility which may hinder pedagogical objectives. Pursuing training opportunities for platforms such as Kahoot! is highly recommended to suitably align educators' situated knowledge with their personalised gamification strategies. Institutions are encouraged to embed these opportunities in their PD frameworks and acknowledge the shifts in culture that innovative gamified approaches precipitate. Furthermore, regularly surveying faculty members (and learners) to create a transparent feedback loop as to the affordances and constraints of gamification is advocated. It is hoped that these recommendations will contribute towards the ongoing reinforcement of LPIG. Notes 1. Professional (rather than academic) identity as lecturers not obliged to conduct research in this institution (Howard 2021a). 2. The use of 'stronger' and 'weaker' does not pertain to stronger and weaker theoretical value. Rather, the usage correlates with strength of agency endowed to material artefacts. 3. Kahoot! also offers interactive lessons, outside the scope of this study. 4. Distinct from authentic game-based learning, such as World of Warcraft or SimCity, in which there is an ongoing narrative, scenes and characters. 5. Kahoot! = the platform and kahoot = an individual quiz. 6. Robust self-efficacy beliefs are considered prominent markers of professional identity (e.g. Howard 2021b).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).