Professional support staff at higher education institutions in Sweden: roles and success factors for the job

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse and discuss the professional support staff at higher education institutions in Sweden in terms of how they view their roles and what the success factors for them are. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with support staff from the fields of business liaison, internationalisation and strategic research support. The results show that the participants have shaped their own roles and see themselves as back-office staff. This can make it challenging for them to prove their contribution to the academic activities of education and research. Because they neither identify themselves as administrators nor hold academic positions, their ability to build credibility on a personal basis is a central success factor. Aware of being actors in a culture dominated by academic values and norms, they see a more transparent discussion of their roles as a desirable development in the sector.

Keywords:

• professional support staff
• third space
• academic culture
• administration

Introduction

It is hard to imagine a well-functioning higher education institution without a well-functioning administration (Olsen, 2007, p. 163). Higher education institutions have to be proactive and take measures to handle increased competition, both when it comes to attracting the best students and to securing and obtaining research funding A more globalised world also means encountering new categories of students. Furthermore, society expects higher education institutions to show the societal impact they make. In a Swedish context, governmental reforms have meant greater autonomy for higher education institutions, but also expectations that the organisation sets its own objectives and organisational structures to support these objectives.

Development has led to some specific support and service staff at higher education institutions taking on an increasingly important role within higher education institutions, and at the border between them and the surrounding society. How the border is approached will vary with situation and context. Interaction with international higher education institutions might demand cross-cultural competence, while interaction with, for example, industry is favoured by knowledge about values and norms in business life. These are examples of new roles within the administration which differ from classic roles such as salary administrators, accountants and secretaries. Administrative support, which has previously been seen as a peripheral function, has now become more central when fulfilling these new demands and, thereby, has also become essential for the success of teaching and research (Rhoades & Sporn, 2002; Schneijderberg & Merkator, 2013). According to Whitchurch (2010) and Becher and Trowler (2001), the diversity and range of staff in contemporary higher education institutions, together with the complexity of the activities they undertake, may have been understated in the discourse so far. Moreover, in parallel with the increased functional specialisation required to meet changes in the surrounding society, such as legislative and market requirements, other role dynamics appear to have surfaced for professional staff (Whitchurch, 2009). Previous studies undertaken in the UK, US, Australia, Norway and Germany (Collinson, 2006; Gornitzka & Larsen, 2004; Schneijderberg & Merkator, 2013; Whitchurch, 2009) have portrayed this group and analysed their competences, attitudes and relations. These studies might be seen as coming from an outsider’s perspective.

Although, in response to a more complex surrounding society, higher education institutions are employing this new category of professional support staff, which uses greater resources both in terms of salary and the discretion allowed by their organisations (Drazin & Van de Ven, 1985), there is a lack of scholarly attention to the group. They are, according to Rhoades (2009) not [yet] acknowledged as intellectual capital that contributes to the success of higher education institutions. They are seen by managers as providers of valuable services, but not as supporting the outcome of organisational performance. The present study aims to contribute to the research on this underexamined subject by providing more of an insider’s perspective, presenting the viewpoint of the professional support staff about their roles in higher education institutions.

The focus in this study is on professional support staff in Sweden within the fields of business liaison, internationalisation and strategic research support. The respective staff compositions in these fields can be seen as a consequence of and response to the need to ensure the capacity for handling changes in the wider society (Drazin & de Ven, 1985; Hannan & Freeman, 1977; Oliver, 1991). These three categories are also chosen as examples of support staff at higher education institutions that could be linked to changed external preconditions. The study aims to analyse and discuss who these professional support staff people are in terms of how they define their roles in the fields of business liaison, internationalisation and strategic research support at their institutions. Their own perspectives and self-understanding are at the forefront of the study. More specifically, the main questions are: How do they define their role and what do they perceive as success factors in their work? Are these three categories alike or are there differences?

The paper begins by outlining the theoretical approach taken, followed by a section discussing the three categories in a Swedish context, and an account of the methodology used. On the basis of the empirical findings, the paper concludes by discussing how professional support staff members define their roles and the main success factors for managing their undertakings. There are a number of designations used for this category of staff at higher education institutions. In this study, I will use the term ‘professional support staff’. Other categories of non-teaching staff, whose undertakings are more rule and routine based than those of the professional support staff, will be referred to as ‘administrators’.

Theoretical approach

The definition of a role in the context of this study is the expectations attached to a given position occupied in networks of relationships in the workplace, and the role identity is defined as the internalised role expectations (Stryker & Burke, 2000). In other words, the role of the professional support staff is accompanied by expectations from the people with whom support staff members interact, and these expectations are influenced by the cultural climate and situational context of the workplace.

In her research, Whitchurch (2009) identifies a category of professional support staff that she refers to as ‘blended’ professionals. These are individuals whose identities are built on both academic and professional, non-academic domains. One characteristic of these blended professionals is their sense of not ‘belonging’ entirely to either professional or academic constituencies. In their undertakings, they cross both internal and external institutional boundaries. Whitchurch (2009) also describes this group of professional support staff as ‘cross-boundary’, in that its members actively use organisational and institutional boundaries for strategic advantage and institutional professional capacity building. According to Whitchurch (2007) a further characteristic of these blended professionals is their lack of pretension and concern about formal status, which enables them to focus on the task in hand and on personal relations. Their identity is also more based on loyalty towards their undertaking than belonging to an organisational unit.

Musselin (2007) describes the logic of this category of staff as organising itself around a project with a point of departure in their competences rather than in formal qualifications. Autonomy at work, responsibility, accountability and individual performance within a group is more central than organisational belonging. This category of staff is not unique to higher education. Gouldner (1957) discusses the different roles an employee can fill by differentiating between manifest roles, connected to the expectations of the job position, and latent roles, which are not always visible, recognised or fully institutionalised. According to Gouldner, the latter can have significance for the study of complex organisations. He divides latent roles into ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘locals’. Cosmopolitans are more likely to be committed to their specialty than to the employing organisation. For locals however, loyalty to the organisation is more central than commitment to specialised role skills. Locals can be understood in terms of one of the social consequences identified by Weber (1983) within an organisation with bureaucratic authority, where a formalistic, impersonal culture is dominant and the work is performed sin ira et studio; that is, without hate or passion and without love and enthusiasm. In the context of this study, locals would be what Whitchurch (2009) label as bounded, a category of administrative staff who work within clear, structural boundaries.

Because this category of staff does not identify itself as belonging solely to the administrative or academic field, the boundaries between the two are blurred, both in an organisational and institutional sense (Whitchurch, 2008). Whitchurch refers to this as a ‘a third space’, providing a lens through which the roles, identities and working practices of professional support staff can be analysed in relation to an organisational and cultural context at higher education institutions. This is also where traditional academic values and norms, such as academic freedom, professional autonomy, allegiance to disciplinary fields and collegiality, are dominant (Kennedy, 1997; Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2016).The third space is not a unitary, single space, however. Existing rules and resources have an influence at the same time as new activities and practices may develop (Whitchurch, 2012).

To come closer to how professional support staff members view their role and what the success factors are in a higher education context, Whitchurch (2010) has identified three aspects of identity construction, expressed as processes. These processes could be interpreted as indicating how mature a specific problem is in terms of what the success factors for handling the tasks are. In practice, these three processes can occur either sequentially or in parallel. The processes can be used to capture the dynamics of how the three categories of professional support staff define their roles in relation to an assumed third space.

In the first process, contestation, academic norms and values are seen as the default, while ‘other’ [professional] staff members tend to find themselves negotiating their positions. This process typically reflects challenges arising from working across professional and academic spheres. The second process is named reconciliation, in which there is a belief in collaboration between stakeholders and that they both can contribute to and gain from a joint endeavour. There are also aims to which stakeholders can feel ideologically committed, such as the utility of business development and the values of internationalisation and excellent research. The reconciliation process may also be interpreted as a space facilitating understanding and development across different spheres.

The reconstruction process is the last stage. This is where the original rules and resources in the reconciliation phase have been contested by the stakeholders with a common aim. The reconstruction process allows for active contribution by individuals to the development and formation of a new, plural space with new activities and practices. New identities appear and individuals are likely to develop networks that support them in contextualising problems.

Background

Three categories of professional support staff

All three professional support staff categories – internationalisation, business liaison and strategic research support – could be linked to changed external preconditions for higher education institutions in Sweden. These fields are also regulated in different ways under the Swedish Higher Education Act (HEA). All higher education institutions are subject to the same legislation, but also have the mandate and responsibility to interpret the act. This implies that the size and structure of the higher education institution will affect the constitution of competences available. The three categories of support staff in this study are examples of development in the sector; there are numerous other categories of staff that represent functions that most organisations must have.

Legislatively, the role of business liaison professional support staff falls back on the HEA, under which higher education institutions are obliged to interact with the surrounding society (HEA, 1992:1434, ch.1 §2). When interaction with the surrounding society was integrated into the HEA in 1998, it formed a lever for many institutions in need of legitimate arguments for being more active. Once interaction became a legislated mission, it changed from being dependent on bottom-up activity through the responsibility and interests of individual academics to a top-down strategic priority driven by the central management of the university (Benner & Sörlin, 2015; Clark, 1998; Krücken & Meier, 2006). The obligation to interact with the surrounding society is often also referred to as the ‘third mission’ or as third stream activities, alongside teaching and research (Laredo, 2007). The role of business liaison professional support staff at higher education institutions implies having an approach both to academia and to the business world, where enterprise and innovation are natural ingredients. The close connection to the business world also explains why the term ‘business liaison’ is commonly used to describe collaborative tasks. Business liaison often implies a close connection not only to innovation, but also to research. There are no absolute borders between these fields (Perkmann et al., 2013).

Internationalisation in Swedish higher education institutions also has its basis in the HEA, which states in chapter 1 that higher education institutions ‘should promote understanding of other countries and of international circumstances’ (HEA, 1992:1434, ch.1 §5). This is elaborated in chapter 4, where it is determined that students from states included in the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EES) or Switzerland are not charged a fee, unlike students outside those areas (HEA, 1992:1434, ch.4 §4). The role of professional support staff working with tasks concerning internationalisation experienced an explicit change with the introduction of the Bologna process at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Teichler, 2012). This category of professional support staff was also immediately affected by a governmental reform in Sweden in 2011 that introduced fees for students coming from outside the EES or Switzerland. Overall, this led to a significant drop in the number of students from countries outside Europe. From an internal steering and professional support staff perspective, the introduction of fees and the decrease in this category of students meant a number of new tasks. The new higher education ordinance on student fees (2010:543) had to be interpreted and converted into local regulations. New methods for handling fees had to be invented and strategies for attracting fee-paying students again had to be agreed.

The role of professional support staff with the task of supporting higher education institution research activities demands a wide array of competences. Research is naturally one of two core activities at a higher education institution and, according to the HEA, the higher education institution is also obliged to ensure that benefit is derived from their research findings (HEA, 1992:1434, ch.1 §2). This section of the act has become increasingly emphasised in line with the increased expectations from the wider society.

In Sweden, a little more than half of governmental research funding is channelled through the research councils and other public agencies that fund research. In 2015, just under 50 percent of higher education institutions’ funding for research came from direct governmental funding. Between 2005 and 2015, external research funding increased faster than did direct government funding, which confirms the long-term trend of the past decade. In comparison with other countries, research at Swedish higher education institutions has a high proportion of external funding. One consequence is that the higher education institutions’ own priorities are partly overshadowed, and emphasis is laid on finding ways to obtain funding in competition, both nationally and internationally (Öquist & Benner, 2012; Universitetskanslersämbetet, 2017, p. 1).Together, these preconditions create the need for specialised support that can understand and manage activities in the surrounding society and support the needs of individual academics. This is where strategic research support staff members have a role.

Methodology

The data for this study comprises 19 interviews undertaken in the autumn of 2015 with professional support staff at three technical universities. The professionals interviewed had their main undertakings in the fields of business liaison, internationalisation and strategic research support. In most cases, the potential interviewees were identified by searching the chosen universities’ web pages for organisational affiliations and titles. In some cases, additional names were suggested by the respective university in the study. In the end, five interviewees were selected from the area of internationalisation, five from business liaison and nine from strategic research support. Depending on how the administration at the higher education institutions was organised, it was more or less difficult to find staff with these tasks. One difference was whether a professional support staff member carried out a process or a function. One consequence from this was that, of the total 26 interviews, 19 interviewees were support staff with clear roles in one of the three fields. Three were university directors and four had roles as more overall coordinators.

The interviewees were selected from what Whitchurch (2006, p. 163) defines as the project domain, inhabited by ‘hybrid workers or multi-professionals who are not only more proactive within given structures, but are able to traverse inherited practices and fields to deliver broadly based projects across the university’. The scope is restricted to the understandings that the informants have of their own identities, roles and success factors. The interviewees were also selected as examples of roles that are likely to have been affected by changes in the surrounding society. Interviews followed a semi-structured format, with essential topics identified in advance (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009), and lasted approximately one hour. They were conducted in Swedish and quotations were translated into English by the researchers.

Interviewees were asked to describe and analyse their educational background and work experience, why they took their present job, what their driving forces are, and how they introduce themselves professionally at work. They were also asked to give concrete accounts of how projects are undertaken, for example, in terms of work methods, co-workers, stakeholders, roles and responsibilities. A cross-cutting theme in the interviews concerned the challenges that interviewees experience in their daily work. The means of handling these challenges are in this paper interpreted as success factors for managing the job. Following transcription, interviews were thematically coded, categorised and analysed using qualitative analysis software.

Findings

The chart below gives an overview of some of the characteristics of the informants in the study.

Role requirements

As shown in Table 1, all informants are academically trained and a majority of the interviewees from the fields of business liaison and research have a higher education degree in engineering or the natural sciences. Those working with internationalisation mostly have degrees from the social sciences. Nearly all of the business liaison staff and 4/9 of the informants working with strategic research support have experience of business life. A majority of the informants in the fields of internationalisation and research are recruited from the public sector and about half of the informants in the strategic research group have experience of other roles in the higher education institution sector.

Table 1. Characteristics of informants.

	Informants working with support concerning
	Business liaison	Internationalisation	Research
Education	*5 with a master degree whereof:	*5 with a master degree whereof:	*9 with a master degree whereof:
	-2 engineering,	-1 engineering-	-3 engineering sciences,
	-1 natural sciences,	4 social sciences,	-4 natural sciences
	-2 social sciences	*1/5 has a Ph.D. degree	-2 social sciences.
	*1/5 has a Ph.D. degree		*6/9 have a Ph.D. degree
Work experience	*4/5 business life/self employed,	*2/5 business life,	*4/9 business life,
		*2/5 public sector	*1/5 public sector,
	*1/5 HEI-sector	*1/5 HEI-sector	*4/9 HEI-sector
Title	*Chief Executive Officer, director,	*Strategist,	*Coordinator,
		*Coordinator	*Project leader,
	*Collaboration coordinatior,	*Communicator	*Specialist,
			*Head of unit
	*Project manager
Role	Project leader/coordinator for:	Project leader/coordinator for:	*Communication/information/advisory/support
		*Strategies, coordination, support
	*Training and programs
	*Commercialisation
	*Services for small and medium-sizedenterprises
	*innovation support
	*partnership work

Professional support staff members working in the business liaison field claim that their extensive external work experience is essential for the role. They have been working as consultants, process leaders, business owners, project leaders and researchers – experiences that they use when bridging the interests of the university leadership, academics and external stakeholders.

Experience from, for example, project leadership is considered useful in such tasks. One informant puts it thus:

for researchers and teachers, knowledge is the substance somehow, but for professionals it might be more about support, systematics, to lift things … which means that … I use quite a lot of my work experience … such as process development.

The informants working in the business liaison field state that project leader competence is central, together with experience of what it takes to move from an idea to a result in an innovation process.

When it comes to professional support staff in the field of internationalisation, the informants have more of a mixed work experience. A common denominator, however, is that they in various ways have international experience from either living abroad, working in an international context, or working in the counselling of international students. The educational background of professional staff working with strategic research support differs in that most have a Ph.D. degree and a background as active researchers.

When asked if they have job descriptions for the tasks they perform, it becomes clear that they have all shaped the roles themselves, to a large extent. One of the informants suggests that if someone else had been recruited for the job, the job itself might have been different:

because there is no role model for this job. What would it be? … it would be difficult to have a set model as the role develops continuously, depending on the ever-changing surrounding conditions.

A possible drawback of this, according to the informants, is that the role becomes dependent on a specific person being present.

The informants shared the view that the opportunity to shape their own roles is largely an attractive ingredient of the job. The same goes for the ambiguity and insecurity of not knowing exactly what your next task is going to be. This is seen as more of an attraction than a problem. Having the freedom to propose activities or changes within their respective fields is perceived as an important motivation when taking the job.

if you want to carry through on something you believe in … you have that possibility.

When describing their role at a more general level, they use titles such as ‘strategic support’, ‘project leader’, ‘coordinator’, ‘advisor’ and ‘specialist’. In addition, they use terms such as ‘communicator’, ‘mediator’, ‘inspirer’ and ‘gatekeeper’. When asked if they ever introduced themselves as administrators the answer was almost unanimously negative. According to the informants, an administrator has tasks that are less complex and works with more clearly defined rules and routines.

All three categories describe their role as working closely with the university leadership. However, the role entails both the provision of elements for analysis and decision-making, and the implementation of these decisions within the organisation. The informants describe their role as building bridges between different parts of the institution by translating, interpreting and anchoring the decisions made by the university leadership. In addition, there is what is described as the role of ‘advisor on demand’. One informant describes this as

some sort of interplay between requests from the university leadership, academics in the organisation and possibilities I find myself.

and

I’m like a little electrical distribution board with widespread connections to reach all the necessary parts.

One difference between the three categories is who they see as their employers. On a daily basis, the business liaison support staff members in this study work closely with mainly researchers within their university, but just as important are the external stakeholders, such as representatives from business life. The interviews with business liaison staff show that research cooperation is more emphasised than education. Strategic research support staff members have their main stakeholders among the researchers within the organisation. Staff members within the internationalisation field work with educational matters, which means that teachers and students are their employers.

When asked who they see as their main principal or employer, the answer in many interviews was either the vice-chancellor or the whole organisation. The objectives of the organisation are a guiding principle in their work.

I try to have the perspective of viewing everything [administrative activities] we do in terms of benefiting our education and research.

Success factors for managing the job

The interviews also included questions about what the professional support staff perceive as challenges in their job and what work methods they use to meet these challenges. These could be turned into success factors for managing in their role.

A majority of the informants mentioned administrative models and methods in their respective fields as a major contribution in their support role. The ability to organise a project and to take into consideration relevant aspects builds trust in relation to the stakeholders and is thereby a key to success.

The informants pointed to the importance of transparency about what the support offer is as another key to succeeding in their roles. The freedom and opportunity to shape their own roles also means that they constantly have to work on the clarification of the role in different situations, meeting new stakeholders within the university. The role demands an ability to balance and manoeuvre several interests and motivations.

Part of being clear about the role is not overstepping the boundary where the university leadership or academics should be leading the way. The professional support role normally means staying in the back office. In the context of this study, the term ‘back office’ means leaving the decision-making, presentations and all visible results to either the university leadership or academics. According to the interviewees, this can be a delicate matter because they work closely with the university leadership, providing elements for analysis and decision-making and implementing the decisions. In some situations, they are the voice of the university leadership and at other times, they need to stay in the back office.

The informants stress the strengthening of the relationship with the university leadership as an important success factor. According to the interviewees, one of the challenges can be making academics listen to a professional support person who is neither a member of the university leadership, despite representing them, nor one of the external stakeholders. One informant says

If you don’t have a door opener [within the university leadership] … well, then you will have to work your way up to get the academics to answer your e-mails.

A success factor, although ambiguous, mentioned by some of the informants is that the level of education can be important as a door opener:

Nearly all of my staff members have a Ph.D. qualification … unfortunately, it is still important. This means you have the basic academic credentials. They are staff members with a Ph.D. qualification who have been working as researchers. And there are two parts to it. One is kind of a human aspect, which I can understand … when we have a dialogue with academics, the researcher knows that we can understand the conditions for research … The other aspect is the academic environment being rather arrogant in the sense of having a Ph.D. or not. Which I do not really accept, but it is just the way it is.

Another informant said:

To gain understanding in the organisation, I prefer to be more on their side [the academics] with a Ph.D. You have to show and prove that you understand them [the researchers] and their conditions.

One consequence of this is that:

for the staff members working here [at the office] and for those who are recruited, we put great emphasis on finding personalities who are strong enough to live with this culture. You have to have leadership qualities.

The combination of having access to the university leadership and a Ph.D. is, according to the informants, more relevant for support staff working within the business liaison and research fields. Support staff members who work with internationalisation have a different situation because they deal only with educational matters.

Given the ambiguous roles, professional support staff members need to lean on something stable that is known by the actors in the organisation. This is where the objectives of their organisation are emphasised by the informants as a success factor, used to legitimise the roles and activities of the professional support staff. To have the objectives as their guidelines means that their work is about long-term issues, processes and developmental matters. This implies that it will take time to know the results and to know who contributed what. One of the interviewees exemplifies such a situation with the case of an academic leader at a start-up meeting for a new partnership saying:

Well, we’ll see if we can get a return on your salary this spring.

To handle the challenge of many tasks being long term and thus hard to measure, informants point to the role also necessitating someone with their feet firmly on the ground and who does not expect instant feedback. One informant put it thus:

I believe that you have to be unpretentious when working [in professional support] at a university, because it is the professors who count and [as professional support staff] one needs to be satisfied with this, I believe … if I wanted to show off, I would have to be a consultant at a management company or a CEO in the business world. Here [at the university], you need to have other types of motivations.

Concluding discussion

The aim of this study was to reach a deeper understanding of how professional support staff members view their roles and what they perceive as success factors. It became obvious in the study that such success factors could also be viewed, from another perspective, as challenges. The three categories of staff to some extent have these challenges in common. Firstly, their roles are not clearly defined and fully institutionalised (Stryker & Burke, 2000). Secondly, the professional support staff members view themselves as back-office actors. Thirdly, they are actors in a culture dominated by academic values and norms. Taken together, these factors make it difficult for academics to understand the roles of the professional support staff.

This study confirms that this category of professional support staff has a role in how higher education institutions as organisations are fulfilling their missions (see also Karlsson and Ryttberg (2016)). With the long-term objectives manifested in the strategic documents of their higher education institutions as their guidelines, the support staff members define their roles as translators, interpreters and facilitators aiming for an understanding between the different stakeholders involved. The objectives in such documents are often relatively abstract, which is in line with this category of staff both having the capacity and the motivation to suggest approaches that balance present preconditions against the objectives.

The formal requirements in terms of educational and work experience background do not come to the fore in this study. Rather, a higher education degree is taken for granted. The business liaison category in this study stands out, in that experience of the business world is conceived necessary because it provides the staff members with a toolbox for understanding the practices, norms and values of the private market. There are a number of more tacit, informal requirements that the three categories have in common and that also can be described as success factors for the job. The lack of a job description, meaning that they have to have the ability to shape their roles themselves, is largely what makes the position attractive. This also implies that a certain amount of ambiguity and insecurity comes with the job, which informants describe both as a motivation for taking the job but also a challenge from time to time. For many other categories of administrator, this insecurity would probably be conceived as frustrating and stressful. With this freedom to shape their roles comes the responsibility to perform in line with the higher education institution’s needs, which in turn means that the professional support staff in these roles constantly have to prove themselves to be trustworthy.

This study confirms, in line with Whitchurch (2008), that this is a category of professional support staff that clearly does not identify itself as ‘administrators’. Neither do these staff members hold academic positions. This makes them more akin to actors in a ‘third space’ (Whitchurch, 2012). They also regard the task at hand as more important than belonging to a defined organisational unit. In all, this is in line with Whitchurch (2009) and her concept of blended professionals working in a third space, as well as with Musselin’s (2007) description of project-oriented employees.

With regard to Whitchurch’s (2010) framework for describing identity construction by way of the three processes of contestation, reconciliation and reconstruction, there are both similarities and differences among the three categories of professional support staff. An obvious difference is that the situation for the business liaison staff is, to the greatest extent, consonant with the reconciliation process. The interviewees report that university leadership, academics they work with and external stakeholders are ideologically committed to the aims of business liaison. There is also a win-win result to be achieved by this collaboration. The professional support staff members are employed to work closely with the university leadership, and the business world sees them as representatives of the higher education institution. Furthermore, in the context of this study, many of the business representatives are former engineering students and many academics also have a track record in industry. The study indicates that, on the surface at least, the undertaking of balancing the different stakeholders’ interests with the wide array of goals of the higher education institution is working well.

Even though there are close connections between the business liaison staff and the strategic research support staff, there is a difference in that the professional support staff members supporting research tasks perceive things less in terms of reconciliation than do the business liaison staff. The former work more intimately with academic staff and constantly have to prove that they are trustworthy. The professional support staff members working within the research field might, therefore, be understood as identifying themselves more with the process of contestation. The professional support staff members working with business liaison and strategic research support have in common that they both stress the potential double value of having a Ph.D. degree in some situations, when approaching academics. A background in research can contribute to a better understanding of the internal support that different academic institutions within the university need. More often, however, the Ph.D. qualification is a potential legitimising factor in interaction with academics.

In their operational work, staff members involved in internationalisation partly support university management in implementing the organisational objectives and partly support the organisation. That higher education institutions are obliged to work with internationalisation, and that this is seen by the academics as important for the competitiveness of the institution, means that the reconciliation process is the most relevant description for the identity construction of this category of professional support staff.

Just as the reconciliation process signals that the actors are in some sense on the same level, so the professional support staff members in this study are clear about viewing themselves in a back-office role, paving the way for university leadership or academics. A well-established working relationship with the university leadership is central. The downside of being back-office actors is that the role of professional support staff members is not, according to them, actively discussed. As Whitchurch (2010) puts it, the back-office role, with its long-term, project-oriented undertakings, with their hard-to-measure contributions, requires the ability to recognise and handle tensions and ambiguities that are typical characteristics of the contestation process.

High on the wish list of professional support staff members is for their higher education institutions to start discussing their role. The aim should be to reach a culture in which both sides – academics and professional support staff – have mutual respect and appreciation for each other’s contribution to the organisation. Professional support staff have to be recipient to and have relevant knowledge of the preconditions of academic life. The academics in turn have to trust legal certainty and analytical administration from the support staff. This balance is an important step towards what Whitchurch (2010) calls the ‘reconstruction process’, in which new activities and practices are developed jointly by employees with academic positions and professional support staff.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [grant number SGO14-1247:1] supported Lars Geschwind.