Higher Education Change and Its Managers

General perspectives on change – constructing change as business fate

Change has preoccupied human thinking and acting since the age of modernity started to unfold in 17th-century Europe (Giddens, 1990; White and Jacques, 1995). Since then, the notion of human agency and with it that of a human capacity to change its condition have informed the thinking and theorizing of philosophers, artists, historians and social scientists alike. Theoretical conceputalizations of change, individual or societal, can be modelled merely chronologically or sequentially, but writers from diverse fields have also developed explanatory models of change. As Van de Ven and Poole (1995) note, these range from biologically grounded life cycle and teleological models to models based on evolutionary thinking or dialectics. Equally concepts of radical or incremental change have been considered from an ontological, experiential or cognitive perspective. In management studies a managerial-prescriptive perspective prevails, based on unitary conceptualizations of the organization. As will be shown later, the underlying mechanism in management studies specifically seems to be to combine the assertion of a naturalistic and technological determinism with that of managerial choice to generate a managerial imperative (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996; Leonardi and Jackson, 2004). Such diversity in the theorizing about change, no matter which direction, exemplifies the discursive conquest of a human experience which is thus rendered open to a specific – political, or certainly not neutral – utilization. In this section the discursive reification of change will be traced in the context of organization and management, and, through this, the emergence of change as a management control variable.

Change, as Beer and Nohria (2000: cover) point out, ‘may well be the most oft-repeated and widely embraced term in all of corporate America’. Nonaka’s catch phrase that ‘uncertainty is the only certainty’ (Nonaka, 1991: 96) enjoys continuous popularity across the spectrum of discourse producers from undergraduate essays to management textbooks and change managers. The drivers behind the emergence of change as management challenge and management research issue include the oil crises of the 1970s, and, since then, the arrival of Japanese competition on the world market, the acceleration of technological progress, the deregulation of capital markets, the increasing power of international institutional investors and the concomitant shift to shareholder value as a business imperative. Located in the external environment, these have been identified as exerting immense competitive pressure on private firms and leaving no option other than change (Collins, 1996; Deal and Kennedy, 1999; Sturdy and Grey, 2003; also Burke 2002). The public sector, throughout the western world, mirrors the trend: in the UK, for instance, the International Monetary Fund stipulation imposed upon the then government in 1976 to drastically reduce public sector spending can be marked as the starting point of the radical change agenda which has encompassed all domains of the public sector since then.

In response to these external pressures, management writing has produced the discourse and knowledge constructs that provide the ontological legitimization of change as a management imperative, together with the recipes that translate the imperative into management practice and thus organizational reality. Change is thus both ontological category and alsoa management control variable. This takes place through a ‘discourse of inevitability’ (Leonardi and Jackson, 2004). As the environmental drama of change unfolds, rendering the world ever more threatening, uncertain and chaotic (Collins, 1996, 1998; du Gay, 2003), being seen as not changing equals corporate suicide. The rate of change is ‘becoming faster and faster and the demands on organizations to adapt and change themselves [is] becoming greater and greater’ as we now live in ‘the age of discontinuity for corporations, not continuity’ (Burke, 2002: 9, 5). Organizations, as Foster and Kaplan (2001) argue, must give up all notions of continuity and embrace change as normal if they are to survive: ‘creative destruction’, so the argument of their eponymous book, has become the desired corporate modus operandi (Foster and Kaplan, 2001). Management writers like Peters and Kanter have significantly contributed to the popularization (and popularity) of this discourse of inevitability (Collins, 1998). Peters constructs change as business Nemesis, as constant threat to business survival, a quasi-natural force with ‘the capacity to destroy businesses and managers’ (du Gay, 2003: 667). Management literature, however, by its own logic permits no fatalism but activates management agency and choice to counter these pressures: ‘if left unconfronted’ (du Gay, 2003: 667), if ignored or resisted, it is business Nemesis; if faced, it becomes business opportunity. Change, in other words, entails the quasi-moral exhortation to embark on managerial action as a means to ‘set free’, liberate or emancipate the organization from the power of this natural force (ibid.) and, implicitly, from the ties of the past. Similar to Peters (1988), Kanter (1985: 65) states: ‘The corporations that will succeed and flourish in the times ahead will be those that have mastered the art of change’, and the individuals ‘who will succeed and flourish will also be masters of change’ (Kanter, 1985: 65). Change, as du Gay (2003: 664) states, is thus an ‘unalloyed good’, which, if translated into management practice, outshines all sceptical voices.

Management writing, in consequence, is replete with accounts of the hero (change) manager, and a plethora of change management recipes available to them (Collins, 1998). The ultimate symbol of change as reified and rendered management control mechanism is the notion of the managerially engineered or autogenic crisis which is triggered – legitimately in the context of the managerial paradigm – to serve a strategically instrumental purpose (Barnett and Pratt, 2000). During this ‘engineered crisis’ top leaders deliberately create a sense or urgency, threat and uncertainty to create a sense of change urgency and change readiness among organizational members (Barnett and Pratt, 2000). Managers, so it seems, are the holders of privileged knowledge and understanding of change pressures, and knowledge about how best to manage it. Change is something that needs to be done to organizations by their managers, initiated and implemented from the top by a management elite of change heroes (Collins, 1998). Those not subscribing to the change agenda are defined in negative categories, as suffering from myopia or living in denial (Barr et al., 1992), as wishing to perpetuate an outdated status quo or being otherwise change-obstructive (Barr et al., 1992; Pardo del Val et al., 2003; Rumelt, 1995). Where change is thus ontologized and promoted as value per se, non-subscription to change is logically reduced to a symptom of obstruction or deviance, devoid of positive or constructive possibilities. Importantly here, non-subscription to change is two-dimensional, encompassing organizational members’ rejection of the official change agenda but also, and this is the important point here, organization members’ subscription to change in a discourse (a language, behaviour, practice) that is different from that of the change management elite, and which thus remains, deliberately, non-deliberately, unread. This is the central consequence of the discursive dominance of change. It traps alternative voices and practices in the corner of the ‘other’ that – within the logic of the discourse – needs to be controlled (Leonardi and Jackson, 2004).

But such life/life-threatening/death statements – and the values they entail – are a matter of discursive choices, processes of construction and selection. These choices are linked to the choice of metaphor drawn upon to conceptualize organizations (Burke, 2002; Morgan, 1997). Where organizations are viewed as open systems or life organisms, the life-death analogy, with survival predicated on continual adjustment to the external environment, is a logical conclusion, and the change imperative a natural law: consequently, as external chaos prevails ‘we are not so much masters of change as beset by it’ (Dixon, 1994: ix). But Morgan reminds us that the act of privileging one metaphor over another entails the ‘danger of the metaphor becoming an ideology’ (Morgan, 1997: 71). In fact ‘this is always a problem in the applied social science where images or theories come to serve as normative guidelines for shaping practice’ (Morgan, 1997: 71). It is precisely the privileging of organizations as open systems in a supra-system characterized by chaos and discontinuities, and consequently the implicit invocation of change as natural law, that has made change the dominant metaphor of management discourse.

Changing HE – accelerating the change construction effort

A similar process of discursive practice and construction of reality is evident in the public sector domain where ‘the discourse of organizational change mobilizes support for attempts to ‘re-invent’ or ‘modernize’ public administration as an institution of government’ (du Gay, 2003, 664; Hood, 1991; Pollitt, 2003) and consolidates new modes of control (Brunetto, 2001; Hoggett, 1996). Since the early 1980s the public sector, in the UK as in many other industrialized countries, has come under increasing pressure to transform itself and to enact the shift from ‘old’ public administration to ‘new’ public management (NPM). To legitimate and facilitate this transformation, public sector management literature has created its own discourse of sector change and change management, characterized by similar ontologization efforts and effects as those of the private sector management discourse. New public management and its arsenal of managerial concepts, techniques and technologies, for example, goal setting, strategic planning, performance management and measurement, standardization of processes and products, greater accountability, consequently, managers ‘right to manage’ are the new and thus seen as the ‘best way’ to deliver on change (Hood, 1991). As tools they require discursive effort to be anchored in and accepted by the system, its institutions and their employees. In NPM discourse, these concepts thus constitute the positively connoted items in the antinomies which structure much of the debate. This is illustrated paradigmatically in the academic discourse concerned with the transformation of the HE sector, and the responses of its participants, for example, academics, as teachers, researchers, managers of academics, to the various manifestations of new public management interventions. We will now consider the sector specific change construction efforts and more specifically the implications of these efforts.

Here, as in the dominant mainstream management discourse, a sense of urgency prevails as fear for survival is combined with the exhortation to embrace present and future challenges. Here, too, change is said to be accelerating (Boyett, 1996) and unrelenting (Gordon, 1995), creating ambiguity, uncertainty and outright existential fear (Gregory, 1996; Ketteridge et al., 2002; Trowler, 1998, 2001). University managers have to prepare for ‘unexpected environmental shocks’ (Gordon, 1995: 21) if institutions are to survive. Moderate voices state that change and renewal have been a feature of the past 500 years (Ketteridge et al., 2002; Taylor, 1999), but for others the turbulences are apocalyptic, and ‘[t]he Western university is at an end’ as the world enters a state of ‘super complexity’ (Barnett, 2000: 11). Change creates the post-modern boundary-dissolving and dislocated university, a site of possibilities (Barnett, 2000) and with it an imperative for post-modern management. Change, once more, is an inevitable natural force against which universities have to brace themselves as those unwilling to change are threatened with extinction (Rutherford, 1992). Kanter’s change masters are needed (Boyett, 1996) to help universities survive, and finding ‘new ways of behaving’ or ‘new ways of operating’ (Patterson, 1999: 9) becomes imperative. Against this dramatic picture of change as quasi-natural force, academics writing about academic management offer guidance on possible best ways to bring about the required changes, at times with quasi-religious undertones. Only radical managerial intervention offers salvation or rescue from the change apocalypse: ‘resurrection is possible only through death; the death [of the old university] is required’ (Barnett, 2000: 11). More sober voices articulate broad consensus that political, economic and demographic change pressures require HE managers to prioritize productivity, efficiency, flexibility, the standardization of academic processes, greater accountability, and the measurement and evaluation of the strategies introduced to achieve corporate objectives (Ford et al., 1996; Meyer, 2002; Middlehurst, 1995; Osseo-Assare and Longbottom, 2002). In short, the HE sector is advised to subscribe to the key tenets of manageralism grounded in instrumental or economic rationality (Bolan, 1999), to ‘adopt the private sector solution to the public sector ‘problem’’ (Dixon et al., 1998: 164), as ‘universities must rapidly improve their ability to position themselves pro-actively in more differentiated and turbulent environments’ (Meyer, 2002: 535). To that extent universities are required to square a circle by combining managerialist intervention through performance management and control with greater entrepreneurialism (Meyer, 2002). As new, these techniques are – through the implicit logic of the change discourse – the best response to the ‘inevitability’ of change. As ‘best response’ they are the benchmarks against which the existing or old system is measured.

Discourse, as stated above, is a process of multi-directional co-production, resulting in objects of knowledge, applied or theoretical, which serve specific political purposes. A concurrent reading of academic and political statements on sector changes shows such co-construction – as academics argue for continuous ‘environmentally fitting organizational change’ (Richardson et al., 1995: 15) to render universities more able to be ‘more institutionally innovative’ (Dearlove, 1998: 73), as academic texts offer recipes for (or analyses of) ways to ‘create’, ‘shape’, ‘develop’, ‘realize, ‘lead’, ‘restructure’ or ‘innovate’ the university for the 21st century, policymakers keep the same pressure up. Admittedly, the official verdict is that universities have been successful and successfully adapting in a changed climate (Dearing, 1997), and have been responsive to responded remarkably effectively to new national priorities ( Leadership and Management,2003), but the challenge to find new and improved ways of managing and organizing will continue (Dearing, 1997). Policy makers remain concerned that the sector is as yet unable to fully respond to these pressures but must instead seek to develop, improve significantly and professionalize its leadership and management calibre if it is to survive ( Leadership and Management,2003). The imperativeto find new ways so as to become efficient and educationally effective remains firmly at the centre of the debate. The direction of the imperative is, as elsewhere in the public sector, to reduce and shift power bases from professional academics as decision makers to managerial roles as locus of decision making (Dearlove, 1998). Such shift requires legitimization. This is provided in the discourse concerned with the responses of academics to the change agenda. Academics are framed not as participants or otherwise contributors to change but as its objects, targets, victims or obstructions, as will be illustrated in the next section. The discourse or inevitability thus combines with a discourse of deficiency to enable extended managerial control.

Implementing change equals marginalizing alternative voices

As change is privileged, a map of binary oppositions is constructed. In the discourse of change, innovation, risk, new ventures, entrepreneurialism and change heroism (Boyett, 1996 ) combine with the techniques of the rational management paradigm as positive values that relegate notions of stability, continuity, considerate assessment, collaboration and adherence to substantive rather than economic values to the margin. From the perspective of the former, the latter is read as deficient, counterproductive, retrograde or in other ways standing in the path of progress – and in any case in need of cure. The HE sector is paradigmatic for this discourse of deficiency and the non-ambiguity of its blame attribution.

The source of sector deficiencies is located in the nature of academic work and the deeply rooted traditions of the sector – traditions clearly being a non-word in the ‘new HE’ (Jary and Parker, 1998). As academic communities, universities stand accused of change reluctance, and resistance to the required efficiency drives (Jackson, 1999; Meyer, 2002; Osseo-Assare and Longbottom, 2002; Rutherford, 1992; Tyack and Cuban, 1995). By and large, the individualistic, self-motivated nature of academic work, the participative and consensual system of collegial decision making are seen as indicative of the inherent non-manageability of academics, or their ‘limited manageability’ (Lockwood, 1985: 40). Allegedly averse to rational structures and systems in the organization of their work, academics are seen as preferring organizational anarchy (Dearlove, 1998), amateurism (Middlehurst, 1995) or the weak management typical of a Weickian loosely coupled system (Reponen, 1999; Weick, 1976) that would ensure the continuation of donnish dominion (Halsey, 1992). Academics, in other words, are seen as resisting change as it challenges their power base; to counter this they seem to prefer an approach to organizing that has the connotations of the irrational, informal or chaotic, notions which, in the rational – abstract – management paradigm, are deemed implicitly subversive.

Alternatively, academics are cast as victims of change, but victims of change who carry much of the blame for their own predicament (Knight and Trowler, 2001). Feeling ‘disillusioned and ill-equipped to deal with contemporary demands and … at odds with the new values and practices of their particular university’ (Martin, 1999: 1) they hamper change as they fail to recognize the opportunities, which go hand in hand with the changes experienced or imposed (Winter, 1996). Academics as change victims need treatment, cure, they need to be ‘taken forward’ (Middlehurst, 1993: 84), they need to ‘be made to understand’ (Barnett, 2000: 110), and, above all, ‘academic staff need the concerted support and help of their universities if this is to happen’ (Martin, 1999: 59).

Given the seeming inadequacies of academic staff and their much attested reluctance to ‘think, and to reason and to collaborate with the aim of serving change rather than constraining it’ (Martin, 1999: 69), academic (self-)management skills and capacities are similarly projected onto the map of binary polarities of old/new, change/stability et cetera. Here notions of collegialism versus managerialism, academic versus economic, substantive versus instrumental-rational logic et cetera complete the map, and once more the deficiencies remain located in the academic community as it associates with the second constituent of these ‘polarized antinomies’ (Townley, 1999: 290) referred to so far. A core problem, so it is argued, is that academics are unwilling to embark on management roles at local or corporate level, for example, volunteer to become head of school or head of department, but have to be coerced into the role instead (Barnett, 1992; Dearlove, 1998; Jackson, 1999; Meyer, 2002; Rowley and Sherman, 2003). Consequently, they are ‘poor managers when they do manage’ (Dearlove, 1998: 73). Reluctant to privilege corporate over local or personal interests, or the expectations of their research community, academic managers do not seem to wish to ‘rock the boat’ (Allen, 2002: 70), or to take strong managerial decisions. This would make their return to faculty very difficult after a temporary stint as manager (Jackson, 1999; Rowley and Sherman, 2003). Even recent studies seem to confirm the academic middle manager as ‘shirking’ management responsibilities (Johnston, 2004) and therefore largely responsible for the sector’s inefficiencies.

This is the picture constructed by the prevailing management discourse. It is echoed by policy makers and public media alike (Johnston, 2004). As change is privileged, academics and their actual efforts to organize their work, their resources, their colleagues and communities are read as the inadequate, out-moded ‘other’ unless they concur easily with the norms of the managerialist change agenda. This, however, applies only in a minority of cases. For the majority, Rowley and Sherman’s (2003: 63) verdict holds that ‘many academics must become better leaders’.

The final conclusion of this discourse of deficiency is that more management intervention and education are justified, indeed required. Change management intervention is legitimized through this process, and management training essential to enable academics to become ‘coach and proactive facilitator of a department’s strategic change’ (Meyer, 2002: 545), to help them overcome ‘the collegial fiction of equal and universal involvement’ and to transform them into ‘good citizen leaders’ who can rally their fellow academics ‘to achieve the kind of cooperation that will … enable [the institution] to be more institutionally innovative in responding to the pressures on universities to change’ (Dearlove, 1998: 73).

Academic and policymakers’ discourses complement each other as they agree that if universities are to survive change pressures, academics need to be more effectively change-managed. As the ‘new ways of doing things’ is privileged, this discourse concurs with the widely shared private sector creed, promoted by Kanter and others, that traditional or past procedures can no longer provide guidance for present and future action.

The paradox of change

The dominant HE change discourse creates a bi-polar static picture of the sector and its participants: corporate change managers seem confronted with a solid phalanx of a change-averse academic community managed more or less by default by change-subverting academic middle managers. This is the picture of reality as constructed by the dominant discourse. By ordering academic change responses around binaries, by pathologizing change resistance and denying academics the legitimacy of their change responses, this discourse, in the words of Alvesson and Karreman (2000: 1127, quoted in Grant et al., 2005: 8) ‘acts as a powerful and ordering force’ as it strives to bring about organizational change. We have shown how this discourse of knowledge becomes a discourse of power as it limits and restricts the way academics and their change interactions are portrayed (Grant et al., 2005). The following sections will posit the counter argument: we draw on case study data to illustrate that the dominant discourse has marginalized an alternative discourse and consequently alternative – yet complementary – management practices which evolve in interaction with, and not simply as a challenge to the dominant managerial discourse.

An illustrative example: academics as change participants – constructions and self-constructions of academic middle managers

In this section we report on case study data gathered as part of an ongoing study of academic management practice. For this exploratory case study a group of 10 academic middle managers at head of school/department level, all appointed in the conventional way as temporary managers, and members of the university executive were interviewed about their management practice in the context of ongoing change. We used semi-structured interviews. The selection of topics covered was determined by the thematic aspects emerging from the reported construction efforts of the mainstream discourse and its main binaries. Around these open-ended questions were asked which served as prompt to interviewees. The interviews lasted approximately two hours each, and were recorded and transcribed. To analyse the data we undertook thematic content analysis.

The university was a traditional university that had performed very well against the key indicators of research and teaching assessment. The data confirmed some of the polarities commented upon as held by both executive and academic managers, but also suggest that organizing practices operated by academic managers at local level do not easily fit into the categories into which they are conventionally pressed by the managerial discourse. Instead the data suggest that a ‘recategorization’ or rereading of local management practice might be more constructive than is commonly assumed.

Confirming the dominant discourse

The executive perspective confirmed the presence of the dominant discourse to the extent that academics were presented as being change reluctant, unwilling to be managed and tied by collegial and professional obligations including a strong adherence to academic freedom that limited their managerial efforts and effectiveness when they became academic managers themselves. Where good management practice was displayed at school level this was attributed to ‘personal style’ of ‘highly talented people’, that is, a matter almost of default rather than of effective deliberate organization or management practice. Personal exceptions were recognized but it seemed that most academic middle managers were still rooted in the world of traditional academe. Academic middle managers were seen as suspicious of change management initiatives coming from the centre as these seemed to collide with their seeming preference for academic independence: ‘a sequence of heads of school who have made very little adjustment to the way things are. They have simply adopted a role which is within the collegial system and not intending to impose any changes to that collegial system.’ Academics were seen as ‘suspicious of structured thinking about management’, partly because ‘this notion of collegiality is so deeply rooted that it precludes recognition of the need to manage’. The familiar nexus between ‘old practice’ (tradition) and change averseness (new system) is not only confirmed here, but causality explicitly stated: As academics are still trapped in the old world, their managerial effectiveness is deemed inadequate.

Interacting with the dominant discourse – Constructing an alternative change imperative

The senior management perspective contrasts with the views from heads of school and the way they saw their role. As they make sense of their organizational environment and work therein, they produce their own discourse of change which fuses and blends multiple perspectives on change resulting in a change discourse which speaks of efforts to effect rather than to obstruct change. At the centre of the discursive effort here lies the attempt to clarify the meaning of change.

Interviewees produced their own binary of change as they criticized ‘change for the sake of change’ and summarized the broad array of change initiatives in the sector as petty changes of an often merely bureaucratic nature, concerned with standardization of process rather than with substantive issues of quality and quality enhancement. Interviewees noted a loss in creativity in teaching and in research, replaced by greater homogeneity, instrumentality and commodification, and fostering strategic behaviour (‘we have all become better at playing the game’). At the same time, greater standardization was recognized as a requirement (to protect against litigation, or in response to a mass education system), and the imposed changes were also seen as having quality benefits as ‘we are forced to be reflective’, resulting in better teaching and research as ‘departments have practically gone out to strengthen themselves and to make themselves uniformly good across the board’. Measures such as the national teaching quality and research assessment exercises respectively (TQA and RAE) had helped academics to ‘do a better job’ and to ‘rejuvenate universities’.

In other words, interviewees displayed a differentiating attitude to change: they neither embraced nor rejected the official change agenda but worked through it to reach a more differentiated and complex view that combined a recognition of what had been lost with a clear appreciation of the need for, even desirability of substantive and purposeful change. Indeed, all interviewees seemed to have embarked on their headship with a purposive change agenda aiming at improvement of operational professes as well as more substantive and strategic changes, both clearly informed by a recognition of need for change. In the terminology of standard change literature, all heads of school displayed a felt need or expressed an extent of urgency for change (Burnes, 2004). Need for change was seen as vital at both departmental and university-wide level: ‘when I first came here the place was like a badly run, hopelessly under-resourced finishing school. I have seen the place transform itself into a leading modern university’. The past was not reflected on nostalgically but as a chapter in history that needed to be overcome to shift the sector from a ‘kind of gentlemen’s club atmosphere and old boys’ network’ to a modern ‘open and democratic’ system that would result in the ‘empowerment’, or emancipation of hitherto marginalized groups and minorities.

Consequences of change

While change was supported as beneficial interviewees also reflected on the long-term consequences of sector changes as they affected the nature of academic work: Talk was of life losses as academics responded to increasing productivity pressures, and of the long-term consequences: talented academics would be less likely to join academe and where they did so more likely to focus on what they were measured against, teaching and research, ‘as there is now an onus to perform’. The loss was seen on two dimensions, the social fabric of universities, and the capacity of universities to manage themselves as fewer academics would either be competent or willing to undertake management and administrative functions. Interviewees doubted whether, given these pressures, current levels of success could be sustained. And yet, importantly, even this critical view did not result in a rejection of change or a wish to either obstruct change initiatives or protect their own territory. That change had a price was adamantly ‘not the green light to go back to the old ways’.

Becoming a manager managing academics

None of the interviewees had ‘wanted the job’, one of them simply stated ‘I hate it’. Being head of school was no longer seen as an ‘ideal career move’ – although pragmatically it was recognized that doing the job would not harm their career prospects within the university – but rather as something that got in the way of teaching and research. To that extent interviewees confirmed the notions expressed earlier that academics are unwilling to assume management roles. Interviewees had neither planned for nor enthusiastically embarked upon the academic management job, and they all expressed the intention to return to mainstream academic work after their stint as head of school. The rationale provided for agreeing to undertake the job was grounded in discourse of academic collegiality, duty and obligation. ‘I felt a sense of duty that I should do it. It seemed a kind of fair pay back. … I felt I could do the job and I recognized that it was my turn to do it.’ Importantly this sense of duty and obligation related not only to the immediate locality of the school/department but to the university as a whole: ‘Having the right motivation. Loyalty to the school and the university rather than the attempt to further one’s own career.’ This contrasts sharply with the opinion expressed by the executive member that academics often seemed to prefer ‘to muddle through the appointment’ as they felt ‘duped’ into accepting it in the first instance. Instead, heads of school interpreted their role as situated at the interface between local and corporate level.

From this starting point, interviewees embarked on their job with a purposive and substantive change agenda that was to some extent geared towards consolidating or protecting the position of the school within the university but which, importantly, was also intended to ensure that the school was making a contribution to the corporate whole. Strategic thinking was accepted as part of the role to ensure that ‘we are develop our potential to maximize what we are giving to the university, to our colleagues and to our customers if we use the jargon’.

Consequently ‘it is incumbent upon me to ensure that we have those strategic decisions … and that we have a vision’ concerning ‘new directions’, new fields, ‘the long-term direction the school is moving in’. Consequently ‘one of my responsibilities is to remind people that we are part of the university and not a little independent fiefdom’ which may well require the need to ‘explain to colleagues what the institution’s aims are and how their ambitions can be achieved within that institutional aim’. That this entailed conflict was accepted: ‘you have to determine that the institution has its goals and its procedures, and if people are not prepared to follow those procedures and work collectively in the institution than the conditions of their employment have to be looked into’.

Interviewees recognized that they were ‘split in between’ colleagues and corporate interest. Mainstream discourse presents this split as the cause of weak and unwilling decision making among academic managers. Once more the change discourse produced by the interviewees challenges this notion. The job was seen as lonely because of the tough decisions that were expected and none of the interviewees shirked from such touch decisions: ‘you cannot walk away’ and ‘in the last resort I decide’. Having said this, the collegial consensual approach was preferred as a decision making process – for reasons of principle as much as tactical reasons: ‘If you are going to move the school in a particular way, you want it in a consensus way. So you have to work quite hard to get the results you want’. People ‘may hate you but you have to detach yourself from that’.

Managing and implementing change

Interviewees presented their management practice fluently in the terms of what we would call the soft managerial discourse, a discourse firmly located in the mainstream managerial discourse and used to effect management control through commitment (reference). Irony was consistently used to maintain positional distance – ‘if we use the jargon’ — and interviewees cast themselves as often challenging the rhetoric of senior management discourse. This enabled them to articulate their management practice in terminology derived from the dominant discourse yet signalling that they colonized or appropriated it on their own terms: ‘I would describe my management style as very softly consensus but also being strong where it needs to be strong’, ‘light-touch management, but not laissez-faire’, ‘distributive management’, involving ‘all stakeholders’, ‘team-based management’, ‘showing people that we can move forward together’. These are ‘soft management tools’ widely used or recommended to bring about organizational change. In their understanding of how to organize and work with their staff, interviewees thus seemed to share at least some concepts and basic understanding with professional managers in charge of change in private organizations. At the same time interviewees stated that what allowed them to implement change was not a managerial authority – or accepted ‘right to manage’ – but a broad level of collegial trust which they were adamant to oblige or honour as they saw it also as a prerequisite to do the job effectively. Once more we see the academic middle manager committed to a change process but aiming to achieve it through a fusion of managerial and collegial notions of interaction, and through a discursive ambivalence which allowed them to opt into or out of this discourse and its associated practice on their own terms.

Interacting with discourses

These local narratives reflect a complex and multilayered notion of change and change management practice. This is manifest in a fusion of managerial discourse and an academic practice discourse informed by reference to values such as collegiality and consensus, professional duty and obligation, or commitment to teaching, education, or research beyond instrumental or economic demands. Familiar dichotomies were articulated but were seen as neither inescapable nor insurmountable. While critical scepticism and the need to resist managerial invasion into local territory was considered as vital, this combined with the recognition of the importance of the institutional frameworks and what were seen as reasonable demands. Interviewees balanced managerial discourse (you have to ‘show colleagues’) and the discourse and concepts grounded in academic and collegial values; instrumental reasoning with reasoning grounded in moral obligation. And irony served to create a discursive space that placed these academics turned managers of academics in a discursive space inside and outside as well as between the two discourses.

Rather than being uncritically change-averse, academics in this case study seem to be engaged in dialectical management practice and mostly in negotiating across domains and their discourse. Neither the local corporate level perspective – nor the dominant discourse discussed earlier – seem to productively acknowledge the presence of such local level discursive conceptualizations and practical translations of such efforts.