Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: The Emergence of Third Space Professionals in UK Higher Education

two institutions was a state university with a balanced teaching and research profile
(‘Public 1’ in Table 1), and the other a world-class, research-intensive institution
(‘Public 2’ in Table 1). In the overseas institutions, an attempt was made, via the
‘gatekeepers’ in each institution, to target individuals with mixed backgrounds and
roles that crossed academic and professional boundaries, to see whether there were
any lessons to be learned for the UK about possible future trends in professional
identities.

A qualitative approach was adopted, using semi-structured questions, to explore ways
in which staff constructed their identities, and to understand the professional spaces
that they occupied, the types of knowledges and relationships that they built, and the
sources of their authority. Although consideration was given to whether the
relationships between, for instance, academic managers (such as pro-vice-chancellors
and deans) and professional staff could be explored more fully through additional
interviews with academic managers, it was decided that, since this was the first study
of its type, and there was no earlier empirical work on which to build, its scope would
be restricted to the understandings that professional staff had of their own identities.
The study was, therefore, based on a total of fifty-four interviews (Table 1).

Table 1: Summary of interviews of professional staff undertaken for the project

Re-defining professional identities

From the first set of interviews it became apparent that respondents could be
distinguished by their approach to the structures and boundaries that they
encountered. They were categorised into three broad groupings:

• Individuals who located themselves within the boundaries of a function or
organisational location that they had either constructed for themselves, or
which had been imposed upon them. These people were characterised by their
concern for continuity and the maintenance of processes and standards, and by
the performance of roles that were relatively prescribed. They were
categorised as bounded professionals.

• Individuals who recognised, and actively used boundaries to build strategic
advantage and institutional capacity, capitalising on their knowledge of
territories on either side of the boundaries that they encountered. They were

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