(Delanty, 2007; Taylor, 2007) to describe ways in which individuals are not only
interpreting their given roles more actively (Whitchurch, 2004) but are also moving
laterally across functional and organisational boundaries to create new professional
spaces, knowledges and relationships (Whitchurch, 2008, forthcoming).
Definitions and methodology
For the purposes of the project, ‘professional staff’ were defined as individuals
having management roles but not an academic contract, and included, for instance:
general managers in faculties, schools and departments, and functional areas such as
student services;
specialist professionals with accredited qualifications such as those in finance and
human resources offices;
‘niche’ specialists who have developed functions such as research management and
quality audit specifically in a higher education context.
Because no dedicated study existed of these groups of staff, and in order to give the
project a clear focus, it was restricted to the professionals described above and did
not, therefore, include academic managers such as deans and pro-vice-chancellors
(the subject of other Leadership Foundation projects described in this issue of Higher
Education Quarterly), staff in academic practice or professional development roles
(on which see Land, 2004; 2008), or staff in library and information management
roles (Corrall and Lester, 1996).
The study was conducted in two stages. First, interviews were conducted with
twenty-four respondents in three different types of UK university: a multi-faculty,
research-intensive Russell Group institution; a green field, campus university; and a
post-1992, inner city institution serving a mass higher education market. In Table 1
these are represented as ‘Multi-faculty’, ‘Green-field’ and ‘Post-1992’. The
institutions were selected on the basis that they occupied different positions in the
higher education system in relation to their missions, size, history, and teaching and
research orientation. These interviews involved senior and middle managers on
grades 3 to 6 of the former academic-related staff pay scale in the pre-1992 sector,
and on management or senior management grades in the post-1992 sector. They
worked in a range of functional areas including finance, human resources, student
support, external relations, planning and enterprise.
During the first set of interviews it emerged that not only were individuals
interpreting their roles more actively, but also that institutions were recruiting
individuals who could perform, on a dedicated basis, roles that crossed between
professional and academic domains. A second set of interviews, therefore, was
conducted in the UK with professional managers who were undertaking blended, or
quasi-academic roles, such as managing student transitions or research partnerships.
Interviews were also conducted overseas: in Australia with ten respondents from a
research-intensive, sandstone institution (‘Sandstone’ in Table 1), and a teaching-
oriented, post-merger institution, the latter created from a number of colleges of
technical and further education (TAFE), (‘Post-merger’ in Table 1); and in the United
States with fifteen respondents from two public, state universities. One of the latter