Beyond administration and management: reconstructing the identities of professional staff in UK higher education

This paper describes an empirical study associated with earlier reviews of the changing roles and identities of contemporary professional staff in UK higher education (Whitchurch, 2004 Whitchurch, C. 2004. Administrative managers: A critical link.. Higher Education Quarterly, 58(4): 280–298. Crossref , Google Scholar; 2006a Whitchurch, C. 2006a. Who do they think they are? The changing identities of professional administrators and managers in UK higher education.. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 28(2): 159–171. Taylor 2006b Whitchurch, C. 2006b. Professional managers in UK higher education: Preparing for complex futures, London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. Retrieved September 11, 2008, from http://www.lfhe.ac.uk/publications/research.html/ [Google Scholar). The study draws on the narratives of 24 individuals to illustrate that identity movements cannot be captured solely in terms of a shift from ‘administration’ to ‘management’, or of a collective process of professionalisation. Contemporary ideas about the fluidity of identity (Delanty, 2008 Delanty, G. 2008. “Academic identities and institutional change.”. In Changing identities in higher education: Voicing perspectives, Edited by: Barnett, R and di Napoli, R. 124–133. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar; Taylor, 2008 Taylor, P. 2008. “Being an academic today.”. In Changing Identities in higher education: Voicing perspectives, Edited by: Barnett, R and di Napoli, R. 27–39. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar) are used to theorise the empirical data, and to develop a conceptual framework that describes emerging identities by means of three categories of bounded, cross‐boundary, and unbounded professionals. This framework demonstrates that professional staff are not only interpreting their given roles more actively, but that they are also moving laterally across functional and institutional boundaries to create new professional spaces, knowledges, relationships and legitimacies. It is suggested, therefore, that the roles and identities of professional staff are more complex and dynamic than organisation charts or job descriptions might suggest.