Abstract
One fundamental aspect of organizational transformation in higher education is the change to the profile of universities’ non-academic workforce. Key staffing trends identified in recent studies conducted in a variety of national settings include an increase in the proportion of non-academic staff at universities and a shift toward more highly qualified and remunerated non-academic roles. This paper examines the extent to which these trends have played out at Australian universities over the period 1997 to 2017. Drawing on unpublished sets of staffing data, the analyses show that while the proportion of non-academic positions at Australian universities has remained largely stable, there has been a striking and uniform growth in management-rank positions, concurrent with a substantial decline in lower-level and less expensive support roles. This has some significant implications, in particular the growth in more complex “corporate” structures, the relatively fewer staff to support academic work, and the increase in the relative costs associated with maintaining the non-academic workforce at Australian universities.
Highlights
Change to the staffing profiles of universities is one fundamental aspect of broader organizational transformation in higher education
To examine the two above trends identified in many countries, this paper focuses on tracking, first, the proportion of non-academic staff working at Australian universities and, second, the internal composition of the non-academic workforce over the reference period
The analyses presented in this paper complement recent studies of staffing trends in European higher education systems that were relative latecomers to New Public Management (NPM) reforms (e.g., Gornitzka and Larsen 2004; Stage and Aagaard 2019; Krücken et al 2013) as well as inviting comparison with other early NPM adopters such as UK universities whose staffing dynamics have received attention in the literature (e.g., Whitchurch 2013)
Summary
Change to the staffing profiles of universities is one fundamental aspect of broader organizational transformation in higher education. The above categorization facilitates systematic analysis of the changing prevalence of key groups of non-academic staff in terms of seniority, including for both senior and middle management ranks, to a level of detail that goes beyond what has been possible for many other national contexts.
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