International Office Professionals: An Example of Street-Level Bureaucrats in Higher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well written article on a topic that is relevant, in particular in the type of countries analyzed in the paper. It doe snot provide surprising outcomes but confirms previous research and practice. It is an omission not to distinguish between those in managerial positions and others in the findings, as there might be a substantial difference on the three aspects analyzed. This could be improved but for the rest the study is well done and fine.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper addresses important aspects of street-level bureaucrats—professional and institutional challenges during their course of job—and how they exercise discretion in line with policies of their organization. I think the paper is well-written, based on in-depth interviews of 32 international office professionals in Poland and Turkey, who were underexplored SLBs across various social science disciplines. I thus believe the paper has good potential for both research and practice, but before being published, I have several suggestions to improve the quality of this manuscript.

First, I would suggest putting section 3 (SLB Theory and IPs as SLBs) before section 2 (The Management of International and International Office Professional). I think section 3 can serve as a sound theoretical ground of the current study, while section 2 provides the context of this study. Therefore, it would be helpful to start from broad literature reviews and narrow them down to your focus and provide the context of this study by reversing the order of the two sections.

Second, I would suggest putting more discussion on how authors distinguish practical and institutional challenges of international office professionals. For example, authors say “International challenges include the general management of internationalization, the temporary status of academic leaders…”  but issues in general management also included their professional challenges during their course of job. I think both challenges are somewhat related and intertwined, so probably there needs some clear explanation/criteria on how authors distinguish those two challenges and whether interviewees received different questions regarding those two challenges, etc.  

Third, I would suggest putting some differences between IPs in Poland and Turkey. Authors put some language on common points of those two countries, but each country would have different cultural settings and somewhat heterogeneous internationalization policies. Also, the international policies may vary depending on each university even in the same country. These are worth mentioning in the Discussion and Conclusion section and can be one insightful contribution of this study.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf