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While the university as an institution is a great success story, one hears the constant chatter of the crises in higher education usually associated with the organizational transformation of universities. Regardless of one’s normative assessment of these observations, the institutional success of the university has been accompanied by the emergence of universities as organizational actors. I reflect on how these changes could alter the university as an institution, using the Australian higher education sector as an example. In doing so, I explore how universities as organizational actors, in responding to the demands of their external environment, set in motion a series of changes that redefine highly institutionalized categories, and, in doing so, radically remake the university as an institution.

The creation of a Unified National System of Higher Education in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawkins_Revolution) in the late 1980s resulted in many new universities and significantly increased research funding for the sector. The result was the emergence of the modern Research Management Office (RMO) and eventually the establishment of the Australian Research Management Society (ARMS) to support the development of research management professionals in the region; including Singapore, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, and Papua New Guinea. In 2013, ARMS launched an accreditation program to recognise and develop careers in research management. There are now more than 3,500 ARMS members with nearly 30% only having been in the profession for less than 5 years. The role of ARMS in helping Research Managers and Administrators (RMAs) redefine their roles and upskill is ever important in growing the profession and its leaders.

This chapter describes the beginning of the RMA profession in Australasia and its subsequent development over the last 35 years to what is now a recognised profession supported by a popular and well-accepted accreditation programme. RMAs are increasingly seen as an integral support to research and researchers, mainly in the higher education sector but increasingly in government agencies as well. Through the local professional society (the Australasian Research Management Society or ARMS), RMAs are collaborating with other professional support elements of the research ecosystem to facilitate high-quality research.

Based on a review of professional staff (PS), which includes research managers and administrators, in 54 academic publications, I propose a novel definition for this category of staff: ‘degree holding university employees who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructures that enable education, research and knowledge exchange’. The proposed definition facilitates the development of new research questions that target the level of the organisational fields of higher education and science, to complement research on the university and individual levels. This view supports the study of the contributions of PS to higher education and science. I anticipate that such a broader focus will help to counter and nuance accounts of ‘administrative bloat’ by focusing on how PS as a group shape and are shaped by the organisational fields of higher education and science, rather than dismissing them as superfluous or parasitic.

Recent changes in university systems, debates on academic freedom, and changing roles of knowledge in society all point to questions regarding how higher education and research should be governed and the role of scientists and faculty in this. Rationalizations of systems of higher education and research have been accompanied by the questioning and erosion of faculty authority and challenges to academic collegiality. In light of these developments, we see a need for a more conceptually precise discussion about what academic collegiality is, how it is practiced, how collegial forms of governance may be supported or challenged by other forms of governance, and finally, why collegial governance of higher education and research is important.

We see collegiality as an institution of self-governance that includes formal rules and structures for decision-making, normative and cognitive underpinnings of identities and purposes, and specific practices. Studies of collegiality then, need to capture structures and rules as well as identities, norms, purposes and practices. Distinguishing between vertical and horizontal collegiality, we show how they balance and support each other.

Universities are subject to mixed modes of governance related to the many tasks and missions that higher education and research is expected to fulfill. Mixed modes of governance also stem from reforms based on widely held ideals of governance and organization. We examine university reforms and challenges to collegiality through the lenses of three ideal types of governance – collegiality, bureaucracy and enterprise – and combinations thereof.

While a growing body of literature reveals the prevalence of men's harassment and abuse of women online, scant research has been conducted into women's attacks on each other in digital networked environments. This chapter responds to this research gap by analyzing data obtained from qualitative interviews with Australian women who have received at times extremely savage cyberhate they know or strongly suspect was sent by other women. Drawing on scholarly literature on historical intra-feminism schisms – specifically what have been dubbed the “mommy wars” and the “sex wars” – this chapter argues that the conceptual lenses of internalized misogyny and lateral violence are useful in their framing of internecine conflict within marginalized groups as diagnostic of broader, systemic oppression rather than being solely the fault of individual actors. These lenses, however, require multiple caveats and have many limitations. In conclusion, I canvas the possibility that the pressure women may feel to present a united front in the interests of feminist politics could itself be considered an outcome of patriarchal oppression (even if performing solidarity is politically expedient and/or essential). As such, there might come a time when openly renouncing discourses of sisterhood and feeling free to disagree with, and even dislike, other women might be considered markers of liberation.

This chapter provides first insights into identities and communities of educational staff in one of the largest, multi-campus universities in Italy. This group of managers refers to those supporting teaching and learning in the light of emerging demands from the European strategy for universities which is positioning education at the frontline in today’s higher education institutions (HEIs).

These insights are compared with common issues surveyed among research managers and administrators (RMAs) working in the same as well as in other international HEIs using Evans’ ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ models of professionalism.

Among findings, educational managers (EM) show awareness of their identity only as ‘professionals’ while RMAs may feel like ‘hybrid’ profiles. Unlike RMAs, EM report not having a strong sense of belonging to one community but feeling like they belong to a plethora of groups. In conclusion, there are no dominant ‘extended’ or ‘restricted’ traits for any of the two groups and they have both these attitudes to a certain extent as the results of this chapter will further explain.