Managerialism in UK Universities: Unstable Hybridity and the Complications of Implementation

It is common ground in this volume that ‘managerialism’ constitutes, not so much a single, distinctive and fundamentally technically defined approach to management, as a bundle or cluster of ideologies and practices, loosely and indeed contingently linked. This chapter aims to analyse the gradual emergence and evolution of a local embodiment of what has come to be known in the specifically British (or even English) context as ‘new’ managerialism in higher education. To do so, it sketches a theoretical account of ‘new managerialism’ (section 2); outlines a recent analysis of different facets of new managerialism/new public management and compares these with policy developments in the UK (section 3); reviews some relevant literature on the changing nature of academic work and discusses how this might affect its management (section 4); and reports some findings of a recent research project on the internal management of UK universities and its consequences for those working in them, whether as ‘managers’ or ‘managed’ (section 5).2

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