2020 Volume 9 Issue 1 Pages 82-87
Despite growing global diffusions of research managers and administrators (RMAs) in the higher education sector, both scholars and RMAs themselves have not reached a concrete definition and common expertise of RMAs yet. This conceptual mess partly comes from the RMAs development process: Most of RMAs cultivated their careers themselves. This paper introduces a theoretical framework from management innovation theories and attempts to classify RMAs for the identification of their expertise and to explain the diversified adoption process from a unified perspective. We conducted interview surveys for 11 RMAs in two public research universities in the U.K. and the U.S. We found avoidance of conflicts with traditional faculty roles is an essential factor of the adoption of RMAs who play a strategic role or correspond to tasks of research project management. Exceptionally, some information systems provide functions that slightly conflict with faculty roles; however, palpable their outcomes seem to overcome the rejection. Our explanatory analysis confirmed that the management innovation theory framework well explains the adoption process of RMAs, and thus, we can lead a further discussion based on this theoretical framework.
