Universities’ pursuit of inclusion and its effects on professional staff: the case of the United Kingdom

Abstract

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.

The insider view: tackling disabling practices in higher education institutions

“…Pertinently for this paper, that includes of course, disabled people who apply or who hold posts as members of staff. However, as Baltaru (2019) argues from a recent policy analysis, each Higher Education Institution (HEI) has interpreted these requirements in different ways, with its own set of policies and procedures. Nearly all HEIs in the UK have equality officers, and keep statistics to monitor equality issues amongst staff and students, with the HEI in this paper reporting in 2016/17 that 5% of their staff had declared a disability.…”

Evaluación de la Inclusión en Educación Superior Mediante Indicadores

“…Por una parte, coincidiendo con García-Aracil y Palomares-Montero (2012), ponen de manifiesto la idoneidad del Método Delphi para la construcción y validación de indicadores educativos. Y, en segundo lugar, ofrecen como una herramienta de autoevaluación que permite a las universidades identificar sus puntos de partida con respeto a la inclusión, monitorear su evolución y establecer marcos comparativos con otras instituciones (Baltaru, 2018). Se ha subrayado la debilidad del sistema universitario español a la hora de atender, de manera eficaz, a la diversidad de su alumnado y se concluye que, de continuar así, el sistema universitario estaría más próximo a ofrecer una educación exclusiva que inclusiva (OECD, 2017).…”

Exploring the status of diversity in policies and practices of Spanish universities. An asymmetric dual model

“…Accordingly, a growing interest is seen in this attribution in scientific literature that looks at the reforms undertaken by universities ( Larrán-Jorge and Andrades-Peña, 2017 ). Within this context, an important task assumed by higher education as part of its social responsibility is training in global citizenship skills ( Horey et al., 2018 ), but another very important subject is attending to individual and group diversity, particularly in reference to vulnerable groups, where universities design inclusive pedagogies ( Stentiford & Koutsouris, 2020 ) and other strategies oriented towards the pursuit of inclusion ( Baltaru, 2019 ). For example, they provide access to a greater number of citizens, but also qualify such access and promote personal, professional and social development among all groups of citizens ( Smith, 2020 ).…”