Is New Public Management redefining professional boundaries and changing power relations within Higher Education Institutions?

The literature on higher education tends to assume that changes in higher education institutions promoted a redefinition of boundaries between academic and administrative staff. Academics perceive a decrease in the control over their own work due to the increasing presence of non-academic managers. The presence of new public management and managerialism has also been apparent in Portugal since the end of the 90’s. Several studies have been developed to understand the impact of these changes, but few of them concentrate on the administrative side. The aim of this paper is to examine the changing landscape of professional boundaries in higher education institutions in a binary system like the Portuguese one. Our main finding is that even though non-teaching staff are nowadays recognised as more qualified and more relevant even in terms of the visibility of their work, the traditional roles assigned to both the teaching and non-teaching staff are still pre-dominant, especially in terms of the clearly asymmetrical power relations between these two groups.