His research and scholarship centers on community colleges and addresses them from multiple perspectives including theoretical and scholarly, practitioner oriented, and policy. He is particularly concerned with faculty work and professional identity, colleges as organizations, and the transfer function from the perspectives of individual students, institutions, and state-level policies. Professor Wagoner’s interest in community colleges is deeply grounded in his own experience as he graduated with an AS degree from the College of Eastern Utah in Price, Utah and has worked as an administrator and adjunct professor at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.