This book provides an alternative means of discussing the
development and significance of managers and management in
universities and colleges. It is particularly concerned with the
way 'managing' involves the development of different ways of
talking, acting and relating to people at work. Yet this is often
difficult, and variably successful, as it confronts often strong
professional and occupational work identities and cultures. The
book provides a detailed look at the 'manager' in contemporary
further and higher education in Britain as post-compulsory
education has been required to operate on more commercial basis,
and universities and colleges are increasingly regarded as small to
medium sized enterprises.
It draws upon interviews with more than 70 senior post-holders.
It explores, for example, the work of the traditional university
vice-chancellor who came to see himself as the new chief executive,
schooled himself in the works of international management gurus
Henry Mintzberg and Tom Peters, and engaged his 3000 staff in the
virtues of 'thriving on chaos'. The result, as one seasoned higher
education observer has noted, was '18 months of misery' for
university personnel. It tells the story of the professor of
material science who came to see himself as a small businessman
responsible for maintaining a 2 million a year departmental
turnover. But at the same time he considered this new identity to
be constantly hamstrung by the bureaucratic centralism of his
university. It tells these stories of senior women administrators
who, empowered by their appointment as managers, challenged the
deeply embedded paternalism of their senior academic colleagues.
And it tells the stories ofnumerous heads of department and
sections repositioned as managers in the 'new marketized further
education' who have struggled to re-imagine students as funding
units, and colleagues as 'their staff'.
Craig Prichard provides a highly nuanced, theoretically
sophisticated, and critically informed account of the repositioning
of senior university and college academics as managers. This is
important reading for those interested in post-compulsory
education, public sector management, and the sociology of work and
education; and, of course, for university and college managers
themselves.
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