Research Managers at German Universities: Role Perception and Enactment within Heterogeneous Institutional Contexts

In the context of increasing societal and political expectations universities have experienced a multiplication of its missions. In order to orchestrate these increasingly complex interrelations with society, state and corporations universities have established organizational units and recruited specialized staff in different functional domains of university management like quality management, funding, knowledge transfer and internationalization. With this expansion of non-academic tasks and spaces, the roles, and identities of university managers have become more differentiated. The institutional practice of these research managers is thereby characterized by dealing very with heterogeneous demands and amidst ambiguous institutional bureaucratic, professional and corporate logics. But how do research managers cope with heterogeneous institutional demands and differing forms of occupational control? Based on a survey and interviews the paper investigates the role perception and institutional practice of research managers at German universities amidst heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting institutional logics.