New administrative and managerial functions: emerging roles and reconfiguration of identities in Argentine universities

MARQUINA, MÓNICA; OBEIDE, SERGIO

Roma

Congreso; 27th CHER Annual Conference ?Universities in transition: shifting institutional and organizational boundaries; 2014

The Argentine university is a unique organizational model characterized by a governing body elected periodically, composed by representatives of teachers, students and graduates, under the political leadership of a rector, usually coming from the faculty, who also is elected by the university community. This model has historically been run by eminently non-teaching staff dedicated to administrative tasks . Especially in the more traditional and larger universities, this body was growing incrementally in response to various logics that did not have the training and meritocratic access as its main purposes. The reform of the 90 in the Argentine university system , that emerged in the light of the paradigm of New Public Management, involved the emergence of new functions and roles in the current operation of universities, which gradually are held by different profiles from the academic, administrative and policy spheres in areas that meet the new demands of the measures implemented at national level (e.g: accreditation, e-learning, internationalisation). This reconfiguration has consequences for the identity of the actors and for interactions produced between the different áreas of work. In this paper we will make a general characterization of the traditional administrative staff of universities in Argentina; then we will identify, from  the new emerging management areas, what are the new tasks, new roles and the skills required. Subsequently, we will offer as a preliminary basis, from a case study, an overview of who perform these new functions, in terms of profiles and spheres of origin, in order to show to what extent and under what patterns the university management is being reconfigured, and possible implications of these changes on the traditional relations of power within institutions .