Politics Managerialism And University Governance

This book explores the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education, and the complex linkages between politics and public universities in Hong Kong. Since the mid-20th century, literature on the state, market, and higher education has focused on the state’s shifting role from the direct administration to the supervision of higher education, and its increased use of market and managerial principles and techniques to regulate public universities. However, very few studies have addressed the political influences on university governance produced by changing state-university-market relationships, the chancellorship of public universities, or students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to sensitive political issues. The book examines both the positive and problematic outcomes of using market principles and managerialism to reform public higher education; questions the longstanding tradition of university chancellorship; explores the issue of external members holding the majority on university governing boards; probes into the dilemma of either relying on the system or a good chancellor and external members to preserve universities’ autonomy and academic freedom; and assesses the cost of students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to politically sensitive issues.

This book explores the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education, and the complex linkages between politics and public universities in Hong Kong. Since the mid-20th century, literature on the state, market, and higher education has focused on the state's shifting role from the direct administration to the supervision of higher education, and its increased use of market and managerial principles and techniques to regulate public universities. However, very few studies have addressed the political influences on university governance produced by changing state-university-market relationships, the chancellorship of public universities, or students' and academics' civic engagement with regard to sensitive political issues. The book examines both the positive and problematic outcomes of using market principles and managerialism to reform public higher education; questions the longstanding tradition of university chancellorship; explores the issue of external members holding the majority on university governing boards; probes into the dilemma of either relying on the system or a good chancellor and external members to preserve universities' autonomy and academic freedom; and assesses the cost of students' and academics' civic engagement with regard to politically sensitive issues.

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.

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.

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.

Providing a comparative overview of developments in the governance of universities since the 1980s, the book assesses if, to what extent, and with what success recent changes in state intervention have transformed the political and organizational management of universities. Drawing on case studies of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Switzerland, the book demonstrates the varied impact of increased state intervention on higher education, and explores why countries like Italy have been much less affected by the new managerialism than the United Kingdom. It highlights in particular the major changes in some countries in the 1990s that represent a significant shift in the level of state intervention.

This volume studies how the world of governance has witnessed a transition from the Weberian model of bureaucracy to the new managerialism. It examines the differences in the extent to which France, Canada and Britain have embraced these ideas.

This collection presents a critical dialogue on managerialist forms of government between philosophy, political thought, organisational and management theory. The volume brings together essays that are concerned with technologies of government that are articulated as different iterations of managerialism. The hallmark of managerialist discourse is value, considered as a quantifiable abstraction, where the intention is to always ‘add value’. The central question addressed here by a team of international expert authors from across a range of disciplines is this: in what ways has this abstraction of value impacted on the substantive work and ethical integrity of government and the public sector, and, more broadly, of the professions (including that of management itself)? Has it displaced this work, or simply recast it? The volume addresses audiences in social sciences, philosophy, management, business, and organisational studies.