Knowledge Higher Education And The New Managerialism

The authors analyse changes in the management of recent professional academic work in British universities, examine the implications of mass higher education, and look at the impact of 'new managerialism' in 'knowledge-intensive' organisations.

The book examines whether educational reforms are attributable to 'new right' ideologies or to broader notions of 'new managerialism', before looking critically at concepts of active citizenship, what constitutes lay administration of schools, and the knowledge resources drawn upon by lay school governors. Careful attention is paid to issues of class, gender and ethnicity, and the voices of both governors and teachers are heard throughout. The book will be relevant to anyone concerned with critical public policy, the governance and management of schools and/or educational reform, including school governors, teachers and headteachers, policy makers and politicians. All three authors are experienced school governors.

This book examines the impact of neo-liberal reform on the traditional caring ethos of public services such as education, exploring how these reforms influence the appointment and experiences of senior management across the education sector.

Dissident Knowledge challenges the audit-based, neoliberal culture that is threatening the foundational values of higher education institutions everywhere.

The nature of Higher Education in the UK has changed over the last three decades. Academics can no longer be said to carry out their work in 'ivory towers', as increasing government intervention and a growing 'target culture' has changed the way they work. Increasingly universities have transformed from 'communities of scholars' to 'workplaces'. The organization and administration of universities has seen a corresponding prevalence of ideas and strategies drawn from the 'New Public Management' ideology in response, promoting a more 'business-focussed' approach in the management of public services. This book examines the issues that these changes have had on academics, both as the 'knowledge-workers' managed, and the 'manager-academic'. It draws on a detailed study of academics holding management roles ranging from Head of Department to Vice Chancellor in sixteen UK universities, exploring their career histories and trajectories, and providing extensive accounts of their values, practices, relationships with others, and their training and development as managers. Drawing on debates around 'New Public Management', knowledge management, and knowledge workers, the wider implications of these themes for policy innovation and strategy in HE and the public sector more generally are considered, developing a critical response to recent approaches to managing public services, and practical suggestions for improvements which could be made to the training and support of senior and middle managers in universities. The book will be of interest to all teaching, researching, or managing in Higher Education, Education policy-makers, and academics and researchers concerned with Public Management, Knowledge Management, or Higher Education.

This book provides a rigorous examination into the realities of the current university system in Britain, America and Australia. The radical makeover of the higher education system which began in the 1980s has conventionally been understood as universities being transformed into businesses which sell education and research in a competitive market. This engaging and provocative book argues that this is not actually the case. Drawing on lived experience, Watts asserts that the reality is actually a consequence of contradictory government policy and new public management whose exponents talk and act ‘as-if’ universities have become businesses. The result of which is ‘market crazed governance’, whereby universities are subjected to expensive rebranding and advertising campaigns and the spread of a toxic culture of customer satisfaction surveys which ask students to evaluate their teachers and what they have learned, based on government ‘metrics’ of research ‘quality’. This has led to a situation where not only the normal teacher-student relationship is inverted, academic professional autonomy is eroded and many students are short-changed, but where universities are becoming places whose leaders are no longer prepared to tell the truth and too few academics are prepared to insist they do. An impassioned and methodical study, this book will be of great interest to academics and scholars in the field of higher education and education policy.

Offering a unique comparative analysis of the emergence of managerialism in eleven different countries, this book examines the response and adaptation of higher education institutions to their external environments. It addresses the key question of how changes in management thinking and practice are affecting internal institutional dynamics and is relevant to scholars and students, institutional managers, government officials, university administrators and university board members.

This book analyses how growing managerialism and the marketisation of higher education has undermined educational standards and pedagogical integrity. Specifically, it provides a thorough critique of how the pandemic, and the move to online learning and MOOCs, has reinforced these developments. The book outlines the limits of new managerialism, which is replacing critical mass with a culture of compliance in higher education. Employing an ethnographic approach, the book explores the impact of the sudden shift in teaching delivery from in-person to online for example, the changing role of the PhD supervisor during the pandemic, and the impact on students’ willingness to engage and their (in)visibility in the classroom, and further considers how these impact class interactions, social relationships and learning. Ultimately, this book argues that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limits of marketisation of education and revealed the distorted managerial response to a crisis.