Managerial University Research Articles

Micro-Emancipation in Academia? Subjectivation Processes of Jr. Academics in Austrian Universities

In this developmental paper, I am interested in processes of subjectivation of junior researchers in the dynamic context of Austrian universities. I especially focus on how junior academics deal with the requirements of the managerial university and how they appropriate and adopt identity regulation, drawing on a discourse analysis of 20 qualitative interviews. Furthermore, the paper discusses the potential for micro-emancipation that is embedded in the constitution of the 'academic subject'.

How does collegiality survive managerially led universities? Evidence from a European Survey

ABSTRACTToday's universities are, accordingly to Clark's entrepreneurial model, sustained by managerialism, whereas collegialism may remain in contrast or work in a different way. More recent literature suggests the clash such as the potential for coexistence between managerialism and collegialism. The study analyses data from a survey of 26 universities in 8 European countries, focusing on middle managers (MMs). The results show that at the level of the individual institutions, there are notable positive correlations between the presence of collegial and of managerial cultures. Multilevel regressions at institutional level are analysed, to ‘predict’ collegiality in light of the universities' managerial culture and other factors affecting organizational change: accountability; distribution of discretional power; funding; impact of quality assurance (QA) and evaluation. The results illustrate that in more managerial universities, collegial culture increases above all when MMs believe that distance-steering tools (QA and evaluation) have had positive impacts. We find that collegiality can indeed thrive, even when ‘managerially led’.

Evaluación de la Calidad en una Facultad de Medicina: ¿Control Periódico o Tarea Permanente?

La universidad sigue siendo hoy un espacio de reflexión, sin embargo enmarcada dentro del proceso histórico, es necesario que tome su rol como organización de servicio, ya que es una institución que administra académicamente información destinada a prestar servicios personales y generales al país y a la comunidad. Por su creciente complejidad existe la necesidad de una Universidad gerenciada y orientada a la Calidad Total y no meramente administrada para lo cual es indispensable la educación de los ejecutivos universitarios y replantear su papel. La gerencia Universitaria orientada a la Calidad total acarrea importantes beneficios para la Institución y permite que pueda seguir cumpliendo su misión y se proyecte al futuro, evitando que la Universidad como institución de espíritu, como espacio de diálogo, como lugar donde se recrea la historia, se convierta en una fría fábrica de profesionales, de servicios técnicos e incluso de productos de distinta índole. En esta revisión esbozamos principios que se desarrollan en la Facultad de San Fernando, considerando su verdadero potencial para realizar los cambios educacionales y organizaciones, incorporándolos dentro de sus planes como filosofía pedagógica y educativa, que son propios de nuestra facultad que aspiramos siga siendo líder en medicina.

Recalibrating Management: Feminist Activism to Achieve Equality in an Evolving University

In this paper we examine the process of incorporating gender equality into a higher education institution as it evolves into a managerial university. The case illustrates the ongoing processes between structure, activism and features of gender equality, and provides insights into how activists adapt to changes in governance and influence managerial responses to equality. Tracing the interaction of employee activism with new managerialism over nearly two decades, four phases of change are identified. These provide a basis for generating two concepts – managerial recalibration and individual activism – while challenging the social abeyance hypothesis of social movements.

Between “Imperatives” and “Reasoned Choices among Elegant Alternatives”: Humanities’ Futures in the Corporate Managerial University

Neither another lament for fall of the faculty nor a list of new directions for the humanities, this paper suggests a much more modest if difficult approach: to reflect on and reconsider the ways in which the humanities professoriate manages and values itself, our administrative units, and our relationships with other units in the corporate managerial university. Without underestimating the effects of neoliberal philosophies and practices on collegial governance and autonomy, this paper calls for a clear-eyed re-examination of those components of the profession over which we still exercise considerable control, such as performance evaluation, curriculum, and workload. We need to study how we manage and value ourselves as well as how we have come to be managed: resistance that is uninformed by knowledge of historical and current relations between universities and society and by sustained reflection on how we do things will be ineffective in the short and longer term. We particularly need to examine the contradictions by which we reject the privatization model of neoliberalism while holding tight to privatization within our professional practices in research, teaching, and service.

The Complexity of Policy Mirroring: The Connection between International and Slovenian Higher Education Policy Discourse

The contemporary economic imaginary of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ is changing the perception of higher education in Europe. The goals of higher education are changing and reform of institutions is predicted. The present article examines these reforms and conceptualisations of higher education by presenting the results of discourse analysis of 47 international policy documents at the European level and two comprehensive national strategies of the Republic of Slovenia for higher education, research and innovation. Based on the analysis of the European documents, the article suggests that two main discourses are constructed: a) ‘the research-based society and economy’, and b) ‘reforming the university’. These present the emergence of a new idea of higher education at the international and national levels. The article investigates the extent to which these discourses are present in Slovenian higher education policy. The findings show that Slovenian discourse hesitates to embrace them fully. In particular, the idea of the managerial university is marginal in Slovenian discourse.

The Trouble with Outcomes: Pragmatic Inquiry and Educational Aims

Although outcomes assessment (OA) has become “common sense” in higher education, this article shows that the concept of outcomes tends to limit and compromise teaching and learning while serving the interests of institutional management. By contrast, the pragmatic concept of consequences tends to expand our view of teaching and learning, and contests the technical rationality of the managerial university. Though I challenge outcomes assessment, I recognize that OA is the coin of the educational realm. Therefore, this article outlines ways to frame and use educational aims to minimize the negative tendencies of outcomes assessment and to maximize the positive tendencies of “consequential assessment.”

Revisiting feminist activism at managerial universities

PurposeIn this paper the authors aim to examine the forms in which feminist activism is played out at contemporary managerial universities and pose the following question: what notions of feminist activism and feminist theory have to be revisited in order to sustain the target of gender equality and support its move further into the centre and the mainstream of managerial universities?Design/methodology/approachBased on action research the authors document a workshop which they organised for different constituencies (administrators, researchers and feminist activists) working towards gender equality at an Austrian university and discuss its results in the context of feminist theory.FindingsThe five voices collected at the workshop show that feminist theories are still the underlying guiding principles for feminist activism towards gender equality at managerial universities. As this is the first time that different generations of feminist activists have been present at managerial universities and are working in a top‐down environment supported by administrators responsible for gender equality, common practices that have been successful to implement gender equality in the past have to be refined and new spaces for collaboration established.Originality/valueThis is the first paper that explores the multiple voices amongst those engaged in the process of transformation towards gender equality at contemporary managerial universities. It shows that an open discussion of complementary and conflicting ways in which the representatives can construct their selves, their strategies and their actions is required in order to start “managing the management” anew – from a higher level than the feminist grassroots activists in the 1980s and 1990s.

Policy implementation and academic workload planning in the managerial university: understanding unintended consequences

Within an increasingly dynamic and volatile external environment, university managers are charged with implementing strategies including models that attempt to distribute complex academic workloads fairly and transparently in order to meet institutional goals. However, the impact of such models on individual academic behaviour is often unexpected. This paper explores a theoretical approach based on perceptions of fairness, to explain the unintended consequences arising from the use of a workload allocation model. Using results from a case study to illustrate theoretical constructs, we identify the reasons behind academic resistance in response to such models.

Gender, power and managerialism in universities

This article explores the role of senior managers in consolidating and interpreting new managerialism in higher education in Australia, South Africa and Portugal, and perceptions of potential effects on gender. The impact of managerialism on decision-making in Australia was increased centralisation with the Vice Chancellor operating as a Chief Executive Officer; in South Africa tension existed between collegial and managerial models evident in power struggles between Vice Chancellors and faculties, plus overt risk and strong political considerations; while in Portugal decision making remained collegial with Rectors seeing themselves as primus inter pares (first among equals). The major finding was that while women as senior managers had an increased capacity to impact on decision-making in managerial universities, mainly related to ‘soft’ management skills, these were not valued in a competitive management culture strongly focused on research output. Thus managerialism presents a great challenge for women in senior management in higher education.

The Managerial University and the Decline of Modern Thought

In this paper I discuss the managerial template that has become the normative model for the organization of the university. In the first part of the paper I explain the corporatization of academic life in terms of the functional relationships that make up the organizational components of the commercial enterprise and their inappropriateness for the life of the academy. Although there is at present a significant body of literature devoted to this issue, the goal of this paper is to explain the genesis of this phenomenon through a reference to the ideology that characterizes our modern secular age. This is the subject of the second part of the paper. Most texts seek to explain this ideological development either through the ever increasing dominance of economic rationalism, perceived conservatism of collegial forms of governance, the necessity to transfer fiscal responsibility in tight budgetary periods, the decline of the Keynesian ‘welfare consensus’, or the legacy of the power regimes that began to take shape in the liberal societies of the 19th century. I trace this development to the beginnings of Modernity and the Cartesian bifurcation that separated the material world from its spiritual and intellectual source and thereby overthrew the hierarchy of related values that informed both nature and human organization. In articulating this argument I make reference to the thought of Jacques Maritain, Charles Taylor and René Guénon.

The Academic Profession and the Managerial University: An International Comparative Study from Japan

Traditionally, academics like to think that they further society by furthering their academic disciplines. The managerial university focuses on rationalization and efficiency, and believes in market mechanisms. These different viewpoints lie at the root of many conflicts. Moreover, one cannot see these issues in isolation. The logic of the managerial university reflects a shift from knowledge communities to knowledge enterprises. This conflicts with the logic of the academic profession, valuing academic autonomy and academic freedom. In the 2007 Changing Academic Profession survey, Japanese academics regarded the threats of the looming bureaucracy as almost as dangerous as did the academics surveyed in 1992 in the context of the Carnegie international comparative study on the academic profession, which was carried out in Europe and the US. This report intends to analyse the results of the CAP survey in order to compare the similarities and differences of academic staff’s reactions to the managerial university from an international perspective. More specifically, the focus will be on the following topics: (1) the role of knowledge and academic vision; (2) decision making; (3) the role of institutional missions and profiles; (4) the impact of incentives and sanctions; (5) supervisory mechanisms; and (6) cooperation.

The Future of the University

I am not a prophet, nor can I look into the future – not even at the end of this productive conference on essential changes in the higher education system. When the work situation of the academic profession, its diversification and academic freedom are at issue, the university as a whole is called into question, at least the university as we have known and appreciated it for a long time. Will that university have a future? This is not clear at all, especially when we consider the managerial university and the ever increasing marketisation of all aspects of university life. In the following, I present a few remarks about the continuously fading theory of the university, centred on the keywords education, university, universality, and quality.

Auditors of the managerial university: neo‐liberal business advisers or paternal controllers?

Universities are increasingly being seen as commercial enterprises, and are represented as particular types of business entities in manuals provided to university managers. Critical discourse analysis is employed in this paper to construct an analytical framework for the study of managerial advice, which is then used to examine the manual provided to Australian universities for the conduct of institutional audit by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). Institutions are represented as businesses, but contrary to the rhetoric of universities being colonised by ‘new managerialism’, the manual constructs institutions more as localised and constrained businesses than globally networked entities.

Mapping Academic Resistance in the Managerial University

This article explores the phenomenon of academics' resistance to managerialism in the contemporary university. Drawing on interviews with 30 academics in ten Australian universities, it employs a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to map and analyse the forms of resistance to managerialism enacted by these academics. In particular, it draws on the work of James C. Scott, including his notions of the `weapons of the weak', and the `hidden transcript' of the subordinated and powerless, to frame an account of organizational resistance in higher education. It is argued here that Scott's anthropological studies of resistance make a useful contribution to an understanding of workplace resistance, complementing recent theoretical developments within this field which emphasize the importance of discursive resistance.

Carving out time and space in the managerial university

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the ways in which recent “managerial” changes in Australian universities affect academics' experiences of their working lives; and the significance of time and space in academics' resistance to managerialism.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on interviews with 27 academics from eight Australian universities, in which they explored their experiences of managerialism. The analysis reported here focuses on academics' experiences of time and space in the managerial university. A Foucauldian approach to power and resistance underpins the overall research approach employed in this study.FindingsThe paper finds that academics in this study argued that managerial practices in their universities imposed significant time‐burdens in already full workloads. However, many of them also employed time and space – often in highly creative way – in resisting these same practices. Much of this resistance involves academics “fiddling” time and space from themselves in order to fulfil their obligations as teachers and research. Such resistance has implications for further academic demoralisation and burnout.Originality/valueWhile other studies have acknowledged academics' opposition to managerialism in their universities, this study focus specifically on the ways in which this opposition is enacted in resistance.

Globalization Practices and the Professoriate in Anglo-Pacific and North American Universities

Dans les universites nord-americaines, europeennes et oceaniennes les gouvernements ont impose aux universites une gestion tres rigoureuse des fonds de provenance publique et une ouverture au financement prive, ainsi qu'une vision de l'universite pourvoyeuse de ressources humaines sur le marche du travail. Les organisations internationales comme l'OCDE ou la Banque mondiale ont vehicule ces modeles de la mondialisation. C'est Roland Robertson en 1985 qui donne la premiere definition du mot mondialisation : un concept qui fait reference a la reduction du monde et a la prise de conscience que le monde forme un tout, cette mondialisation ayant differentes dimensions internationales : economiques, politiques et culturelles. C'est la dimension economique de la mondialisation qui a le plus touche les universites avec ses contraintes de performance et de gestion. L'etude relatee ici sur ces questions des pratiques mondialistes : criteres de performance et gestion universitaires a ete menee de 1994 a 1997 aupres de plus de 250 universitaires en Austalie et aux USA et completee par des entretiens au Canada et en Nouvelle Zelande. Les conclusions plaident pour une forme de responsabilite universitaire qui ne repose pas seulement sur des criteres de performance, la responsabilite democratique ayant ete negligee au profit de la responsabilite financiere.