Recent European research has revealed growth in the number of administrators and professionals across different sections of universities-a long established trend in US universities. We build on this research by investigating the factors associated with variation in the proportion of administrators across 761 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in 11 European countries. We argue that the enactment of expanded and diversified missions of HE is one of the main factors nurturing universities' profesional and administrative bodies. Our findings support such an assertion; regardless of geographical and institutional differences, HEIs with high levels of "entrepreneurialism" (e.g. in service provision and external engagement) are characterized by a larger proportion of administrative staff. However, we find no empirical support for arguments citing structural pressures and demands on HEIs due to higher student enrolments, budget cuts or deregulation as engines driving such change. Instead, our results point towards, as argued by neo-institutionalists, the diffusion of formal organization as a model of institutional identity and purpose, which is especially prevalent at high levels of external connectedness.Keywords Higher education . Professional and administrative staff . Organizational expansion . Functionalism . Neo-institutionalism . EntrepreneurialismThe last couple of decades have marked a shift in the very nature of higher education (HE) as a knowledge institution. The early nineteenth century Humboldtian model of an elite institution prioritizing the pursuit of knowledge on its own left its place to the late twentieth century myth of the knowledge society (Meyer et al. 2006). Higher education institutions (HEIs) are facing High Educ (2018) 76:213-229 https://doi.

Universities are increasingly engaging with non-academic professionals in facilitating performance outcomes, reaffirming themselves as purposive organisations, i.e. institutions with the ability to organise strategically in the pursuit of goals and standards. However, there is little empirical evidence for the impact of professional staff on university performance. Drawing on a sample of 100 British universities, the author assesses whether the changes in the ratio of professional staff to students (from 2003 to 2011) influence subsequent university performance. The author finds that universities that are moderately increasing their share of professional staff display higher levels of degree completion, but no significant differences can be observed in terms of research quality, good honours degrees and graduate employability. University performance is largely determined by reputation, prestigious universities performing higher in all dimensions. The findings contribute to the emerging empirical research assessing the impact of professional staff in higher education.

This paper explores the proliferation of non-academic professionals as a cultural response to universities' mission of inclusion. Departing from a neo-institutionalist perspective, the author argues that the diffusion of highly rationalised models of institutional action shapes universities as formal organisations who engage with new levels of professional expertise in the pursuit of goals and missions. The United Kingdom (UK) offers an illustrative example, the emergence of statutory equality duties on public institutions (race equality duty 2001, disability equality duty 2006 and gender equality duty 2007) nurturing an image of universities as strategic for the pursuit of demographic inclusion. Using yearly longitudinal data on 109 UK universities from 2003 to 2011, the author shows that universities increase their professional staff in catering for demographic inclusion in terms of ethnicity and disability, revealing highly rationalised institutional responses to the aforementioned equality duties. The findings contribute to the neo-institutionalist literature drawing attention to the transformation of universities into organisational actors (i.e. highly integrated entities, strategically oriented towards the pursuit of formally articulated goals and targets), which contrasts with traditional conceptions of the university as an institution with a taken-for-granted societal role and loosely defined organisational backbone. The findings provide the impetuous for further empirical research into the role of professional staff as universities assimilate new goals and missions.

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