advanced industrial societies in the West. Our ongoing analysis of these changes centres on the academic work process, by which we mean the way academic work is organised and accomplished in the university setting. We take it as given that the purposes to be served by universities in society are intimately related to academic work itself. Therefore, changes in the nature of academic work that result from the manner in which it is organised and carried out will have significance for the role of universities generally. Our focus on the academic work process can serve as a window for viewing broader changes in universities and university systems. Our analysis locates these changes in the political and economic context of university expansion in the period after the Second World War, followed by contraction in the 1970s and 1980s. The pattern of development appears to characterise university systems [1] in most developed Western societies since 1945. We have argued elsewhere that the effects of rapid growth, followed by sometimes abrupt, sometimes gradual contraction has generated complex, even contradictory, effects (Buchbinder & Newson, 1985a, pp. 38-40). Furthermore, contraction has more recently been accompanied by the formulation of a new agenda [2] for universities both in government policy statements as well as in the academic literature on higher education. The new agenda stresses the need for universities to become more fully integrated with the pressing research and skill requirements of the emerging high tech society. The economic and political pressures contained in both the expansion/contraction pattern, and in the elements for high tech adaptation, prescribe the dual context in which universities are now functioning. Within this context, then, we will explore in this paper one significant aspect of these changes: that is, changes that have been taking place in the administration of universities. Literature on higher education has focussed on the development of new systems of, or approaches toward, administering institutions of higher education. Systems and approaches that may have been acceptable in the earlier phase of expansion of universities are seen to be less effective for the recent requirements of contraction, as well as for shifting universities towards the needs of an information-based society. Furthermore, government policies associated with budgetary retrenchment and the insistance on 'public accountability' have empha