Managerial Imperatives Research Articles

The systemic neoliberal colonisation of higher education: a critical analysis of the obliteration of academic practice

Within the neoliberal university, scholarship, education, students, academic staff, and practices are subordinated to managerial imperatives. University educators are denigrated and displaced by colonising neoliberal practices that systemically invalidate and invisibilise academic work. The present article provides an example of this by critically analysing the corrosive and Orwellian operations of neoliberal managerialism in higher education through the prism of my own experience of applying for ‘recognition of leadership’ in relation to teaching. I use a narrative ethnographic approach to generate new insights into the obliteration of academic practice in contemporary university contexts and to produce a counter-hegemonic discourse for understanding these processes. Following Habermas inter alia, it is argued that without radical reform, the uncoupling of the ethical and substantive dimensions of the (educational) lifeworld from systemic (neoliberal managerial) strategising will leave higher education in a state of paralysis. The analysis highlights the urgent need for resistance and provides a critical framework for academics to recognise and contest similar colonising processes occurring in their own experiences and contexts.

A Post-Covid Strategy for Event Planners

The authors propose a strategy to help event planners pivot and adjust to the post-COVID world. This involves the use of social media and sales force automation (SFA). The authors explain how both of these can be accomplished in a low cost, easy to learn and use manner by adopting LinkedIn. The authors also present three tools that will help the event planner assess if they and their personnel are ready to make such a change. The authors conclude with a set of managerial imperatives that include not only how to be proactive and competitive but also the operational adjustments that will be necessary for the mode of operation, the reach of the planner, how online presence and content will drive awareness, the role and definition of personnel, how client relationships are conducted, and how the different facets of the event itself will change.

Uncertainty or totalitarianism — a difficult choice for himanity

Humanity has always perceived uncertainty as an extremely negative characteristic of the environment. With a certain degree of convention, the entire development of civilization can be viewed as a struggle against uncertainty. And by the 2020s, people had acquired a powerful weapon for this struggle — information and communication technologies. They have created unprecedented opportunities to monitor and predict the development of a huge number of objects (or/and subjects).However, as is always the case in the development of society, clear success is coupled with serious problems generated by it. Minimizing uncertainty turns into total control over people. A new type of totalitarianism is emerging. In many of its features, it is similar to its predecessor of the twentieth century, but it also has its own characteristics. Whereas the “old” totalitarianism was built around the protection and implementation of ideological values, the new totalitarianism is based on managerial imperatives and the desire to avoid uncertainty. If within the framework of the “old” totalitarianism the subject of control was only the state with its specially designed structures, in the new totalitarianism people are controlled not only by state bodies, but also by corporations.The most important feature of the new totalitarianism is that modern technology begins to consistently destroy the lacunae of human freedom in all spheres of social life, and above all in the economy. The planned economy of the twentieth century could not completely subordinate the people’s economic behavior to a single center. The lacunae of freedom were used by a lot of people, who managed to produce and trade independently from the state.Today, humanity faces a difficult choice — either to continue to get rid of uncertainty, making society even more totalitarian, or to realize the positive aspects of uncertainty and begin to fight against the new totalitarianism.

Legal Project Management: Projectifying the Legal Profession

Post-Global Financial Crisis, global law firms and in-house departments have started to take up ‘Legal Project Management’ (LPM). LPM adopts and adapts project management methods for the law context as a means of streamlining, planning and costing legal work. This article examines LPM as an aspiring driver of managerialist change within the legal profession. In its reframing of all legal matters as ‘projects’, LPM is also an example of a more specific type of managerialist change, ‘projectification’: the process by which work activities, and our activities generally, are being organised and shaped as projects or temporary endeavours. Though we know managerialism is occurring, our understanding of how it manifests in, and is promoted by, specific practices and discourses within the workplace organisation is under-developed in the law context. It may be tempting to read managerialism as sullying traditional professionalism. But an extensive body of literature has documented the interactions of professional and managerial imperatives that result in what has been described as a hybridisation of different logics or belief systems. This article adds vital detail to the existing literature about managerialism within the legal profession by looking closely at LPM as projectification. To do so, it utilises Mirko Noordegraaf’s three dimensions of professionalism that represent core points of distinction: coordination of work, authority or the grounds for legitimacy, and values at stake. Through these facets, it analyses LPM’s somewhat contradictory aspects, illustrating the schismatic nature of projectification as both exciting and empowering, and ethically risky and dehumanising.

Publish, perish, or pursue? Early career academics’ perspectives on demands for research productivity in regional universities

ABSTRACT The publish or perish adage is alive and well for early career academics (ECAs), who are under increasing pressure from higher education institutions for improved research performance. This paper explores the way in which ECAs respond to the managerial imperatives of one Australian regional university; specifically, a meta-reflexive lens was used to examine narrative data from ECAs to determine how institutional performance measures influence their participation in research teams. Three main themes were identified in the data: The ‘pull’ of institutional priorities, ‘Getting a leg up’ through teamwork, and Finding a way forward in personal values. ECAs responded to managerial imperatives through compliance and showed awareness of the importance of collaboration with established researchers in furthering their own personal career interests. At the same time, the data also reveal that ECAs working at this regional Australian university refused to compromise on the educational and research contributions they could make to their disciplines and the cultural capital of their local communities. This latter pursuit of autonomy provided these academics with personal satisfaction and a sense of academic integrity in relation to conducting research with impact while simultaneously meeting performance targets aimed at raising the reputation of their institution.

Crafting or mass-producing decisions: Technology as professional or managerial imperative in public policy implementation

Policy implementation is characterized by professional public service workers who make decisions about clients using knowledge and skill-sets acquired through years of training and experience. Their unique position separates them from other workers, provides them with autonomy, and enables them to challenge managerial directives. Information and communications technology is used to tame this power. Whereas public service workers have been criticized for having too much influence, technology may shift decision-making from a professional craft to technology-driven mass-production. This article studies how technology impacts policy implementation in seven sub-stages resulting in alternating professional and managerial imperatives in all sub-stages except for discretionary practices. Whereas managers, public service workers, and clients can appreciate that professional norms are strengthened, and managerial goals achieved, there is a growing concern about the role of technology and its influence on public service workers responsible for policy implementation. The article ends with suggestions for future research.

A Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) approach to pre-service teacher professional experiences in Australia: organisational friendships

ABSTRACTThis study explored how students (pre-service teachers) benefit from the support of having a peer with them during their first professional experience in preschool contexts, utilising a PAL (Peer Assisted Learning) approach. International students at a large Australian University were interviewed as part of this qualitative study. We found that peer engagement facilitated the development of friendships and social support among participants. Discussion is situated within a sociological framework of organisational friendship. This study extends conceptions of organisational friendships beyond managerial imperatives and peer relationships are highlighted as supportive, not competitive, engagements. The PAL approach highlights the benefit of collaborative professional learning.

Population-based approach and integration of services: their relationship to the territory in the context of Québec's integrative reforms

Context: Two major reforms 2004 and 2015 have transformed Quebec's health and social care system over the last twenty years. In 2004, the reform was based on a coordination model of integration in order to promote the implementation of the principle of population-based responsibility. The population-based approach emphasises planning and delivery of services aimed at improving the health and well-being of a geographically defined population. Concretely, this principle was manifested in 2004 by the implementation of Local Health Networks LHNs, which promote inter-organisational consultations between public, community and private health services of a given territory. On the other hand, the 2015 reform instead pushed in a fully integrated model that breaks down organizational and geographical boundaries over vast territories; effectively abandoning consultations. Aims: To analyze how Quebec’s health and social services system has succeeded in embodying and combining the principles that underlie the integration of services and the population-based approach. Methods: This research is part of an international research program implementing community based integrated care for older adults with complex health ICOACH. This presentation is based on data collected in Quebec from 44 semi-structured interviews with policy makers n = 11 and managers n = 33. The thematic analysis of interviews was based on the principles of the population-based approach Couturier, Bonin and Belzile, 2016, Roy, Litvak and Paccaud, 2010. Results: The population-based approach remained a core principle in the design and structuring of both reforms, but its operationalization weakened over time. For instance, an important operational indicator such as the presence of intersectoral consultation mechanisms, were undermined during the transition from the first to the second reform, thus favoring a managerial rather than participatory conception of governance. The LHNs which were the consultation sites, were intended, in principle, to enable integrated organizations to respond to the needs of the population under their responsibility, and to produce health upstream of traditional curative strategies alone. These LHNs were abandoned by the second reform, in favor of the creation of large centralized organizations, implanted over large geographical areas. Their essentially top-down governance is centralized, making consultation venues irrelevant, characterised by a curtailment of organizations towards their own internal priorities rather than the needs of the population. However, the population-based approach has recently re-emerged as a potential solution to the excesses of the second reform. The populational-based approach makes it possible to revisit the concerns about the relationship between the health system and the dynamics of local populations in their territories, which are small by nature. Conclusion: The population-based approach seems useful to positively conceive integrative reforms at the systemic level of healthcare systems. But its capacity to be durably translated into practices is limited by the implementation of such reforms. They primarily respond to political and managerial imperatives, hence, producing a more service-driven managerial logic rather than a population needs driven logic.

Risking Subjectivity in Everyday Social Work Practice

ABSTRACTThis article considers the concept of risk by exploring the case of a young person, Bruce, 21, with whom I worked on a Through Care After Care (TCAC), social work placement. Bruce and I had developed an effective and caring working relationship. I question if this would have been if I had not demonstrated trust and compassion. I propose that modern-day social work practice falls foul to the relationship being reduced or replaced by a narrow ideological form of professional conduct. In doing so, I draw on concepts of dual relationships/boundary crossing and care ethics, highlighting the susceptibility of these being degraded in a neoliberal climate, which constructs some service users as a risk whilst simultaneously creating social conditions that are inimical to realising social work values. I contest that to affect long-term change, social workers must negotiate both the managerial imperatives of risk assessment processes whilst prioritising the actual needs of service users.

Professioneel handelen als puzzelen in de uitvoering van arbeidsactivering

De ontwikkeling van professioneel handelen krijgt de laatste jaren veel aandacht in het veld van arbeidsactivering. De verwachting is dat door professionalisering resultaten van activeringsdienstverlening zullen verbeteren. De vraag is echter wat precies onder professioneel handelen moet worden verstaan. In dit artikel wordt in het verlengde van onderzoek naar de uitvoering van activeringswerk en algemene wetenschappelijke perspectieven op hedendaags professionalisme een conceptualisering van professioneel handelen voorgesteld die beoogt aan te sluiten bij de vraagstukken en dilemma’s waar professionals in hun dagelijkse werk feitelijk mee te maken hebben.

Modalities of Managerialism: The “Double Bind” of Normative and Instrumental Nonprofit Management Imperatives

Nonprofit managers are influenced by managerial logics that guide their everyday understandings, decisions, and behaviors. This article identifies, conceptualizes, and examines these logics through the lens of institutional theory, which implies a distinction between normative and instrumental modalities of nonprofit managerialism. These modalities are contrasted across seven domains of nonprofit management—portfolio management, organizational growth and capacity-building, fundraising, collaboration and competition, effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability—generating insights for managers, scholars, and society at large. Specifically, the framework identifies contradictory managerial imperatives that can create a “double bind” for practitioners, provides a mechanism for organizing and positioning nonprofit management scholarship, and raises fundamental questions about the attainability of nonprofit missions and the function of the nonprofit sector in society.

Buea Students’ Attitude Towards Hiv/Aids Pandemic: Managerial Imperatives For Sustainable Socio-Economic Development

Buea Students’ Attitude Towards Hiv/Aids Pandemic: Managerial Imperatives For Sustainable Socio-Economic Development

Political Economy of Labour Market Segmentation: Agency Work in the Automotive Industry

This paper investigates cross-company variation in the core-periphery configuration of the workforce. The empirical focus is on four automotive plants in Germany, which differ in terms of their organisation of agency work. The comparison reveals that there is no automatic relationship between skills, products and company workforce structure. As traditional employer-driven explanations such as production requirements and skills fail to make sense of the variations encountered, the main argument of the paper is based on the power-resource approach. More specifically, the strategy devised by works councils in relation to managerial imperatives has a major role in shaping employment and the core-periphery configuration in the subsidiaries. The key power resources that condition the strategy adopted by worker representatives are constituted also beyond the workplace, insofar as the plant’s socio-economic context – including factors such as the local unemployment rate, or the threat of outsourcing and labour market deregulation – matters as much as the company-level industrial relations. The paper thus challenges the interpretation of segmented labour markets as a dual efficient equilibrium and points out the political and contested nature of segmentation. The empirical evidence presented here has a wider significance as practices in German automotive MNC, characterized by Europe-wide production networks, are likely to affect a large number of workers across Europe.

Counterfactual Thinking and Ethical Decision Making

The present study extends understanding of the self-regulatory aspects of ethical decision making by integrating and exploring relationships among counterfactual thinking, attribution, anticipatory emotions, and ethical decision-making constructs and processes. Specifically, we examine the effects of a manipulation designed to stimulate a counterfactual mind-set, which is found to significantly affect negative anticipatory emotions and intention associated with unethical conduct. Furthermore, we explore the basis of these effects by delineating and supporting responsibility attributions working through perceived negative consequences to influence both negative anticipatory emotions and intention to perform the unethical behavior. This research addresses both academic and managerial imperatives in the marketing education literature as to how to effectively influence ethical decisions through an understanding of how individuals combine theoretically significant cognitions.

School culture at risk of political and methodological expropriation

Abstract The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of school culture both as a concept and as a subject of investigation. It deals with the historical roots of this concept and the fact that it is shrinking—a consequence of the managerial imperatives of effectiveness and accountability in education. School culture, in relation to the quality of schools and the quality of education, has become the subject of audits, arrived at through a developed network of standardisation in education, testing and evaluation. The methodology of evaluation currently lending particular substance to school culture, however, generates different methodological perspectives on investigating school culture and thus research is becoming an instrument of political power. In the research it is then necessary to either abandon the concept of school culture or to free it from spinning round the cycle of evaluation/self-evaluation—a change in school culture—improving the “quality of the school”—a new evaluation/self-evaluation. One way to do this is to employ ethnographic approaches in research into schools and to understand school culture as a system of texts.

The rise of the balanced scorecard! – Relevance regained?

This paper investigates whether the balanced score card has contributed to regaining practice relevance of management accounting research. The paper subscribes to Kaplan’s claim that accounting research should increase its relevance by directing more attention to accounting in contemporary business practice and strive to develop improvements for this practice. We also believe that Kaplan is fundamentally right when he states that even though efforts have been made to overcome the problem, the issue remains important for management accounting research. However, the paper is wondering why was the relevance gap not somehow covered by the widespread interest in and use of BSC?The increased demand for research that is relevant to managerial practice can be seen as an example of the traditional change of a profession from being a craft to becoming a scientific practice; a transition that has characterized all professions in modern society. Accordingly, the problem of relevance is not considered to be a limited technical problem, but it is seen as a general problem of incompatibility between the speech genres of managerial practice and scientific research. Therefore, we address the speech genre in use in the major works on BSC.Our analysis uncovers that the BSC is defined in a way that can provide management with some kind of generally overarching model, but the model lacks realistic scientific characteristics and favors some strong characteristics of myth. The extreme focus on cause-and-effect statements in BSC that makes everybody involved draw arrows in all directions seems especially arbitrary or mythical. The mythical nature of the BSC speech genre, on the one hand, may be handy to use in practice because it generates hypothetical managerial imperatives, but on the other hand it is incompatible with research and thereby it actually increases the relevance gap. Our analysis consequently points towards methodological issues that are to be solved especially with respect to the usage of cause-and-effect statements if research is to become more relevant and replace the use of somewhat unrealistic myth. To overcome this problem and regain research relevance the article recommends a more scholarly speech genre that pays more attention to various usages of inferential statements and specifically a pragmatic constructivist perspective for analyzing construct causalities.

The Trouble with Labour

Every commodity has its peculiarities. However, to the extent that labour is a commodity, its characteristics are arguably, in a league of their own. At the Constitutional Convention of 1878 Benjamin Franklin pinned down the essence of these peculiarities, with reference to slave labour, with the quip: 'Other cargoes do not rebel'. (1) He could have added that other cargoes may leak, radiate, explode or simply entail significant logistical challenges relating to their transport, transfer and use. They may be troublesome, but they never rebel against their owner. The emergence of capitalism represented a great change in labour relations. Successive waves of commodification emancipated bonded labour and turned societies that featured some markets (including markets for slaves) into fully fledged market societies. Vibrant markets for the labour services of free men and women underpinned exponential economic growth. The labour contract had arrived and humanity's productive capacities were enhanced immeasurably. And yet it is questionable whether feudalism's receding tide left behind a labour market which works, even approximately, like other markets. Whether the market for labour actually is a market, and whether it works like the market for coal, are questions that have found their way into the policy domain, notable in view of the ILO's pronouncement (1919) that labour is not a commodity. To many, the ILO's policy statement that labour is not a mere commodity seems, understandably, self evident. Unlike commodities, the labour units for hire must, uniquely, remain physically attached to their 'seller' during the period it takes the 'buyer' to use them up. Thus, labour remains the only 'commodity' with a mind of its own; with a consciousness that its buyer can never fully tame because of its obligatory attachment to the seller. While the ghost in the machine is a metaphorical anthropomorphism by which to declare our puzzlement with our own artefacts, labour power is possessed by its seller in the most real and enduring manner. Once 'purchased', or more precisely hired, a grid of social relations between its individuated units, and also between them and their buyer, continually determine the buyer's utility from the purchase (see also Biernacki 1994). Characteristics distinguishing labour from commodities include agency, group identity and actions which challenge the notion of the workplace as a realm of consensual or pure exchanges (Thompson and Ackroyd 1995). Collective action, individual resistance to managerial imperatives, the links between productivity and workplace norms; these are all reasons to think of labour as an inalienable resource; an activity that combines, without conflating, work and labour, cooperation and resistance, constrained freedom and the opportunity to develop. (2) The value of labour is, therefore, derived not simply in relation to economic factors but also cultural, political and legal concerns (Orren 1991; Deakin and Wilkinson 2005). Nonetheless, despite the obvious arguments distinguishing labour power from other commodities, many economists resist such a distinction passionately. And since the influence of economics on public debate, not to mention government policy, is ubiquitous, it is important to re-visit this question, asking: Why does labour's distinctive character warrant a serious examination? Does it matter whether it is ontologically a commodity, akin to for instance electrical power, or whether it is in a category of its own, a special resource? The idea behind the workshop that led to this special issue is that the mere possibility of an affirmative answer to these questions renders them important. It is an idea which, we believe, grew in pertinence with the events of 2008 and beyond. As the papers in this issue were being prepared, the world was shocking itself in a manner not seen since 1929. The credit crunch of 2008, which spawned a global recession that is still reverberating, caused the greatest monetary and fiscal injection the world has seen. …

Antecedents and consequences of structural change in North American retailing 1990–2010

In this article secular trends and market conditions in North America are examined and linked to a series of major structural shifts and changes in US and Canadian retailing over the last two decades (1990–2010). Antecedents and consequences of developments, such as the emergence of category management as a new marketing paradigm, formation of a new value ‘Trinity’, and the rapid movement of markets towards dominant lower cost (value) retailers are reviewed, and their collective impact on other competitive market spaces, (for example, the department store industry and shopping centres), are critically examined. The study also reviews the emerging managerial imperatives in retailing – focusing especially on the centrality of inventory management, the rapid movement of merchandise and information, and the significance of new business processes beyond systems and analytics – as the key elements in a new strategic frontier for higher performance. The paper concludes the strategic review of the last two decades with a preview of the next two, as expectations for the North American retailing scene, both locally and globally, are outlined. The authors fear that the ‘extreme market share’ in the hands of a few retailers may be leading consumers to end up with less choice to shop, researchers with less ‘variance’ to examine, and a continent bereft of any significant retailing innovation in the years to come.

Power and Resistance in Further Education: Findings from a Study of First-Tier Managers

This article presents findings from a study of first-tier managers in four further education colleges as they attempt to manage perpetual change within a context of performativity and mistrust. It begins with a discussion of power in the sector before presenting findings of routine resistance against ever increasing control and surveillance within colleges. First-tier managers were found to be primarily the audience for routine resistance rather than the target and so faced the dilemma of colluding with resistance to maintain cooperation, or challenging the behaviours. The article concludes that despite the demonisation of critical opinions in the lifelong learning sector, resistance in further education, far from contravening the principles of academic citizenship, is a form of educational fundamentalism and an attempt to prioritise learners in the face of financial and managerial imperatives.

Clinical governance in operation – everybody's business: a proposed framework

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe a framework for the implementation of clinical governance (CG) within a mental health and addictions service at all functional levels within the system (consumer, clinician, team, service and unit level). It aims to include and enlarge on the functional subdivisions of CG (as practised in the National Health Service (NHS)) by identifying 11 component domains of interest.Design/methodology/approachThe paper briefly reviews the varying interpretations of the concept of CG in the literature and associated difficulties in its implementation.FindingsSeveral authors have pointed out the difficulties in the implementation of CG at the operational level. In particular, CG is often seen as top‐down, “managerial” in its focus rather than providing clinicians at the coal‐face with a device for quality assurance and improvement.Practical implicationsThe framework asserts that the 11 component domains are relevant at all levels within a healthcare delivery system; in fact, conversations already occur around these domains at all levels with variable frequency, with a focus that is relevant to that level, determined by the needs at each level.Originality/valueThe paper describes a practical framework for implementation of CG within a mental health and addictions service that addresses some of the criticism levelled against the concept of CG in the literature. This conceptualisation provides a seamless merging of the so‐called managerial and clinical imperatives around clinical governance.