@article{TEXTUAL,
      recid = {10031},
      author = {de Jong, Stefan and del Junco, Cay},
      title = {How do professional staff influence academic knowledge  development? A literature review and research agenda},
      journal = {Studies in Higher Education},
      address = {2023-09-21},
      number = {TEXTUAL},
      abstract = {Changing relationships between government and the higher  education system have created a wide range of new tasks  within universities. Many have been adopted by an emerging  workforce known alternately as professional, non-academic,  or support staff. Its rapid growth has sparked a debate  about ‘administrative bloat’. We aim to move beyond this  negative, dismissive framing by reviewing the literature to  explore whether and how professional staff influence  academic knowledge development. While this specific  question has received little scholarly attention, we found  relevant research in 54 documents from a diffuse group of  journals and authors. Our review makes two specific  contributions. First, we examine the competencies and  relationships of professional staff and their influence on  conditions and processes in universities. We find that  professional staff increasingly have a private sector  background, but that the implications of such a background  for competencies remain opaque. Furthermore, their  relationships with university leadership and academics as  well as actors beyond the home organization place them in  strategic positions in their networks. We claim that their  involvement in strategy development and implementation,  daily management, and academic practices demonstrate a  potential to influence knowledge development. Second, we  propose a research agenda to understand this influence. The  agenda is built around the institutional logics of  professional staff, the institutional work that they engage  in to promote these logics, and the resulting influence on  knowledge development. We hypothesize that professional  staff stimulate convergence in knowledge production and  strengthen the higher education system’s external  legitimacy as a producer of knowledge.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/10031},
}