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... somebody who’s got a PhD in a relevant academic subject like
biotechnology, who may have sat on the board of a spin-out company at some
point. they look sexy in that way, because they’ve got an academic
background . but they also have some experience of harsh and brutal
business realities.
The appointment of such individuals is likely to swell the pool of blended
professionals, and there are issues about how they might be incorporated into the
institutional community. A number of respondents in this category expressed a sense
of having outsider status with respect to both professional and academic domains,
although they had been appointed to take forward a specific project area on the basis
of their mixed backgrounds and portfolios.
Furthermore, greater mobility among professional staff can, on the one hand,
generate a view of them as a:
national (and international) cadre of mobile and unattached senior managers
without loyalty but with their own (not an institutional) portfolio—the new
portfolio successional career managers. (Duke, 2002, p. 146)
On the other hand, the study suggests that it may be helpful for institutions to modify
a belief that such mobility represents ‘disloyalty’, in that such individuals may make
a more significant contribution to an institution in the period that they are there than
longer-serving staff. There may need to be, therefore, a revision of the value accorded
to professional staff who bring expertise from elsewhere, but also have the potential
to move on when they have completed a specific project.
The introduction of a common National Framework Agreement for staff in UK higher
education in 2006, permitting institutions to design and customise their employment
structures around a single pay spine, could give greater latitude for rewarding
individuals who extend their roles outwith the precise parameters of a job description
(Strike, 2005). However, the emphasis of the Framework on a job evaluation process
may, at the same time, restrict the ability of individuals to interpret and develop their
roles. Institutions will be obliged to address such issues if they wish to encourage
more extended ways of working.
An international dimension
In the interviews outside the UK, respondents were sought who had mixed
backgrounds and roles that crossed professional and academic boundaries. They
were, therefore, skewed towards the less bounded categories, although it was
significant that of the fifteen respondents in the US, nine (60%) were categorised as
blended, whereas only three of the ten respondents in Australia (30%) fell into this
category. In both cases, and in contrast to the UK, these were clustered in research-
intensive institutions that were high in the international rankings. It would appear,
therefore, that institutions in both the UK and Australia might wish to understand in
more detail how blended professionals in the US contribute to the development of
activity in third space.