Mullti-functional teams
‘The Professional Higher
Education Manager’
It should be noted that, as with the categorisation of the four forms of professional,
this typology is offered as a heuristic device to illustrate a disposition towards one
spatial location or another, and comes with the ‘health warning’ that individual
positionings are not necessarily fixed or immutable, in that individuals may, for
instance, occupy different forms of space at different stages of their career, or move
between these according to circumstances.
Third space, therefore, is characterised by mixed teams of staff who work on short-
term projects such as bids for external funding and quality initiatives, as well as the
longer-term projects noted above. These teams are not necessarily co-located
geographically, and may even be virtual. A number of respondents used organic
imagery to describe this process of joint working, seeing the building of