Abstract
In this article, we discuss how ‘managerialist’ and ‘leaderist’ discourses (O’Reilly and Reed Public Administration 88:960–978, 2010; Organization Studies 32:1079–1101, 2011) are drawn upon in the context of the deregulation of Swedish higher education. As of 2011, there has been new legislation that frames Swedish universities as ‘autonomous’ and transfers most of the regulative responsibilities from the government level to university vice-chancellors. The aim of this article is to inquire into how tensions within and between managerialist and leaderist discourse are handled in the promotion of New Public Management reforms and the consequences thereof in terms of how leadership in the higher education sector is constructed. We analyse how these discourses are employed in the core documents leading up to the 2010 Riksdag decision to enact most of the proposed deregulations, and the subsequent evaluation undertaken by the social democratic government that took over in 2014. Based in this analysis, we suggest that the texts indeed draw upon notions of leadership and leaders as necessary for Swedish universities to survive and thrive in the future, but that the envisaged practise of this ‘strong leadership’ can either be characterised as a discursive void or described in terms of de-personalised, instrumental managerial surveillance and control.
Highlights
In this article, we discuss how ‘managerialist’ and ‘leaderist’ discourses (O’Reilly and Reed 2010, 2011) are drawn upon in the context of the deregulation of Swedish higher education
‘Managerialism’ and ‘leaderism’ are analysed as a ‘set of beliefs that frames and justifies certain innovatory changes in contemporary organisational and managerial practice’ (O’Reilly and Reed 2010: 960). We analyse how these discourses are employed in the core documents leading up to the 2010 Riksdag decision to enact most of the proposed deregulations, and the subsequent evaluation undertaken by the social democratic government that took over in 2014
In current research on the development of professional norms and ideals in public sector reform, the presence of discourse relating to forms of governance such as New Public Management (NPM) has been a recurring theme
Summary
We discuss how ‘managerialist’ and ‘leaderist’ discourses (O’Reilly and Reed 2010, 2011) are drawn upon in the context of the deregulation of Swedish higher education. Neoliberal discursive construct with a strong performative content: difficult, but not impossible, to subvert and resist (cf Morrish and Sauntson 2010) While these conceptions of managerialism and leaderism were studied earlier in relation to large quantities of material and/or time spans in order to trace general discursive developments (cf O’Reilly and Reed 2010; Currie and Lockett 2007), we are interested here in patterns in how such tensions are handled in texts advocating a specific NPM-inspired reform (cf Bresnen et al 2015). According to O’Reilly and Reed (2010), managerialism contains an aspect of entrepreneurship (non-bureaucratic organising for innovation in a competitive market) and an aspect of cultural engineering (aligning policymakers and public sector managers in terms of beliefs and strategic orientation) (Table 1)
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