Movement and Coalition in Contention: Gender, Management and Academe in England and Sweden

Abstract

The article opens by considering recent change in higher education, examined through the literature on new public management. In this literature the direction of change is decided in advance, assumed to emanate from above and conceptualized as moments fixed in time. As a consequence, it is argued, the rich processes of change enacted through time, which seek to take account of the motives of those involved, are elided. It is further argued that change is more appropriately understood as contested than as consensual, and that civil society is implicated in processes of public sector change in the organizations affected. An attempt is made accordingly to analyse the presence of civil society influences through social movement processes in universities, as organizations that are not social movements. Arguments are considered for and against the status of the new public management as a social or managerial movement, which is taken to be a coalition rather than a social movement, acting as the organizational glue of many neoliberal regimes. It is then shown that women's movements, understood conventionally as social movements in the literature of social movement theory, are alive and well in the halls of academe, engaged in direct and indirect struggle and forms of symbolic contestation in the furtherance of gender equity in the milieu of management reform. It is concluded that empirical work that makes use of social movement theory is necessary to explore management change attempts in order to take fuller account of those involved, and of movement and coalition in contention.