Pro vice-chancellors weave a "web" that straddles the corporate and academic worlds in a way that is vital to the function of their universities.

This is the conclusion of a study of the role of pro vice-chancellors, universities' second leadership tier, in the current edition of Higher Education Quarterly.

David Smith, director of the University of Leeds Higher Education Policy Unit, and Jonathan Adams, director of the data-analysis firm Evidence, interviewed 73 pro vice-chancellors and their senior colleagues from 13 UK universities.

They conclude that pro vice-chancellors "maintain a complex corporate-academic web, balancing two sometimes contradictory roles". They combine a "firmly academic" role, maintaining cross-institutional responsibility for core academic values and mission with a more "operational, bureaucratic and executive" function concerned with accountability.

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"The roles interact and the pro vice-chancellor sees and keeps the balance between mundane operations and their deeper implications for academic values and mission," the study says. It adds that pro vice-chancellors use "influence" rather than "command" to gain authority.

Dr Smith was surprised that despite pressure on them to become more executive, pro vice-chancellors saw and explained themselves primarily in terms of their academic credentials. He said: "It is important for the institution that an understanding of academic life and values is there. If you did not have that, an institution could find a gap opening between its academic core purpose and values and where it was going in other senses."

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The paper, Academics or Executives? Continuity and Change in the Roles of Pro Vice-Chancellors, builds on a previous study of pro vice-chancellor roles published by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.

zoe.corbyn@tsleducation.com.