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Professional Staff Identities in Higher Education

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions

Definition

Professional staff working in higher education.

Synonyms

Higher education professionals; Third space professionals

Introduction

The literature on professional staff identities as a discrete entity began to develop in the late 1990s and early 2000s, although this group has long suffered from problems of nomenclature. The lack of a vocabulary with which to provide a more precise perspective on them is illustrated by the range of terms that have been used to describe them, including “non-academic staff”, “academic-related staff”, “general staff”, “support staff”, “managerial professionals”, and “para-academics”. It was not until the mid-2000s that “professional staff” became commonly used to describe those staff who were not employed on academic contracts but who had administrative and management roles, both in academic departments and schools and in specialist areas such as finance, human resources, and estates. The picture has been further complicated in recent years by the...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London Institute of Education, London, UK

    Celia Whitchurch

Authors
  1. Celia Whitchurch
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Correspondence to Celia Whitchurch .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Jung Cheol Shin

  2. CIPES, Faculty of Economics, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Pedro Teixeira

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Whitchurch, C. (2017). Professional Staff Identities in Higher Education. In: Shin, J., Teixeira, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_302-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_302-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9553-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9553-1

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