The Book as a Medium of Management

Abstract

The literature on management in education either reflects and follows or leads and influences practice. A series may have a policy to help those managing to improve practice in the here and now, managing efficiently and effectively; or it may be reflecting critically on present practice, trying to identify future options, and preparing the ground for change. The Cassell series on education management, for example, is explicitly of the latter kind, offering a critical commentary on policy as well as indicators to good innovatory practice as a precursor of worthwhile change. The latest batch of books in the Routledge series, unlike some earlier works in the series inherited by Routledge from Croom Helm, appears at first to be of the former variety. This is justified by the series editor by the background of a 'welter of innovations from central government', with little help to professional practitioners. It is for teachers who 'feel themselves overwhelmed with innovation, new legislation and change'. The books in the series are 'designed to help teachers to manage more effectively for the good of their institutions, their students and themselves'. One question for publishers is how such books are now used. Management literature as a whole has proliferated on to railway bookstalls. The occasional management guru has emerged, to be quoted ad nauseam. After a slow start in the 1960s, departments of education administration or management have become commonplace in higher education, with constant deliberations on their relationship with base disciplines for education, with business management schools, and on the balance of theory and application which might combine academic and professional recognition. The government was persuaded in the early 1980s to support short-course management training for heads and senior staff in schools, and the 13 designated university centres for the training of management trainers were accompanied and followed by a cascade of