Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education: A ...

Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management Vol. 27, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 19–34

Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education: A multifaceted discourse Sue Clegg* and John McAuley Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Debates about middle management in higher education have been largely confined to the dominant discourse of managerialism. In this paper, we argue for an engagement with the broader management literature, with its multiple discourses of middle management. We present an analysis of middle management as a multifaceted phenomenon and review literature on middle managers as representing: core organisational values; as self-interested agent of control; as corporate bureaucrat; and as repositories of organisational wisdom. In considering each of these views, we reflect on the relevant debates within higher education. We conclude that a more productive discussion of the role of middle management in higher education is possible by breaking with the simple managerialism/collegiate duality found in the higher education literature.

Introduction The concept of the middle manager has been at times understood, in organisational terms, as the quintessence of what it is to be a manager and at other times as the conservative impediment between senior management and the workforce (e.g. Jaeger & Pekruhl, 1998), with a number of positions between these polarities. The focus of this paper is that within professional organisations, of which higher education is a crucial exemplar, the concept of the middle manager is not well understood and that this has a number of consequences. The dominant framing in recent debates about management in higher education has been around the twin discourses of managerialism and collegiality. As such the range of theoretical resources brought to bear on the analysis of manager academics or academic managers in the UK have tended to draw on literature that deals *Corresponding author. Learning and Teaching Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, Adsetts Centre, City Campus, Howard Street, Sheffield S1 1WB, UK. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1360-080X (print)/ISSN 1469-9508 (online)/05/010019-16 ß 2005 Association for Tertiary Education Management DOI: 10.1080/13600800500045786

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exclusively with higher education (HE), or more broadly with changes in public sector management and, particularly, the health service (Deem, Fulton, Hilyard, Johnson, Reed & Watson, 2001). Research in the area has been fruitful in pointing to the dilemmas middle managers face in their dealings with colleagues on the one hand and with senior executives and externally driven audit agendas on the other hand (Hellawell & Hancock, 2001, 2003). Clegg (2003) has pointed to the ways in which middle managers may mediate tension between the core and periphery of an organisation. Deem et al.’s (2001) research has described the different routes into HE management: a minority of career track managers, mostly in the post-1992 sector; reluctant managers serving for a fixed term, mostly in the pre-1992 sector; and the ‘‘good citizen’’ route across the sector in which older academics take on management roles to contribute to the organisation. Such a diversity of routes, motivations and locations suggests a complexity that cannot be simply captured under the rubric of managerialism. The focus of this paper is on academic middle managers, but there is also an under-researched but important area of administrative managers who are of growing significance (Blackwell & Blackmore, 2003) and our general argument would also apply to work that considered these broader organisational changes. Fruitful though the work on managerialism has been, there has been little attention paid to the broader literature on middle management from mainstream management research. This research focuses attention on a broader understanding of the nature of management and the ways it can be enacted in organisations. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of these themes and consider how insights from the more general literature might shed light on higher education. In particular, we want to suggest that there are discourses within the management literature that point to the importance of middle managers in making a significant contribution, albeit somewhat unrecognised by senior management, to radical organisational change. Management as a Multifaceted Phenomenon When Taylor (1912) developed the theory of scientific management, he believed that the emergence of the management cadre was crucial to organisational success. The twentieth 20th saw the emergence of management as profession in its own right (e.g. Dawson, 1994), with its own distinctive mindset and claims to possession of a dominant discourse (Clarke & Newman, 1997). At the heart of this discourse, and claims for legitimacy in the conduct of organisational affairs, lie a number of key tenets that claim to explain ‘‘why businesses need managers’’ (Lorsch, Baughman, Reece & Mintzberg, 1978). These key purposes are (and we have deliberately preserved both the prescriptive nature and the gender specific possessive pronoun of these authors’ catechism), that: The prime purpose of the manager is to ensure that the organisation serve its basic purpose … The manager must design and maintain the stability of his organisation’s

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operations. The manager must, through the process of strategy formulation, ensure that his organisation adapt in a controlled way to its changing environment … The manager must ensure that the organisation serve those people who control it. (Lorsch et al., 1978, p. 219)

Over the years modernist constructions of the work of management have shifted within these dominant themes (e.g. Dopson, Risk & Stewart, 1996) and there has been the rise and fall of different professional rhetorics (Strauss, 1991) to meet (and to create) new exigencies that either justify or, in some cases, deny the legitimacy of different approaches to management as an activity. Classical understanding of the nature of management in capitalist societies has been ameliorated over the years by critiques of its ‘‘scientific’’ claims to linearity in management process, by attempts to humanise the concept, and by a ‘‘consideration of what managers really do’’ (Darwin, 2002, p. 19). Although such amelioration has not particularly questioned the concept of management itself, radical critiques of the concept and legitimacy of management as an activity have also emerged (e.g. Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). In this context, it is significant that a postmodern view of management suggests that it is: a category of human existence and sense making [that] is destined to become a fleeting image of order and control … Management is merely a transparent image, an arbitrary interpretive constraint on free-flowing commodification … Thus management disappears with the myth of human agency. (Gephart, 1996, p. 41)

These definitions of management serve to remind us that ‘‘management is not constituted by the number and scope of managerial jobs alone but also by the institutionalized meaning of management in a particular society’’ (Scarborough, 1998, p. 712) The middle manager has variously been discussed as ‘‘a general manager who is responsible for a particular business unit at the intermediate level of the corporate hierarchy’’ (Uyterhoeven, 1972, p. 136), ‘‘a hierarchy of authority between the operating core and the apex’’ (Mintzberg, 1989, p. 98) and/or ‘‘those below the small group of top strategic managers and above first-level supervision’’ (Dopson et al., 1996, p. 40). In the management literature the middle manager has a particular role as the pivot between the more strategic interests of senior management and the ‘‘local knowledge’’ of front-line managers and employees. Kanter (1979) suggests that middle managers can exercise considerable power in some organisational conditions: where they are not procedure bound, where there is capability for variety in work and innovation is rewarded, where middle managers can be at the heart of affairs (physically and emotionally), and where they can participate in high-level decisions and problem-solving situations. Where these organisational conditions are not present, middle managers can experience themselves as alienated and marginal. A fond myth of middle management is that, as a role, it is particularly prone to stress because of its very pivotal nature, although Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn and Snoek (1964) less charitably suggested that this stress was related ‘‘in part as a consequence of the

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still unfulfilled mobility aspirations of middle management, in contrast to the better actualised aspirations of top management people’’ (Khan et al., 1964, p. 382). Dominant Discourses on the Concept of Middle Management An inspection of the management literature since the early 1970s suggests four dominant discourses in the development of the middle manager in management theory:

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The first of these discourses (from the 1970s) depicts middle management as representing core organisational values and that through this values orientation middle managers become an agent of organisational control. In this sense, the middle manager is depicted as the buffer between essentially transient senior management and the essentially instrumental orientation of the employee. The second discourse, which emerged in the late 1970s but became particularly powerful in the early 1980s and perhaps represents the nadir of middle management, represents the middle manager as essentially a self-interested agent of control. In this discourse, the middle manager is essentially redundant, a layer of noise between the vision and strategies of senior management, and the to-beempowered employee. The third discourse, which became increasingly powerful in the mid-1980s, depicts the middle manager as a key actor in the development of the managerialist discourse. Here the middle manager is seen as a ‘‘corporate bureaucrat’’, agent of organisational control. In this discourse, the middle manager is essentially acting as the agent of senior management. The fourth discourse, which emerged in the 1980s but with a backward gaze at the discourse of the 1970s, is one in which the middle manager is conceptualised as transmitter of core strategic values through the enactment of the role as mentor, coach and guide. In this view, the middle manager is understood to be a repository of organisational knowledge who exercises essentially benign control through personal but organisationally located wisdom (McAuley, 2003).

Although these four discourses are distinctive and each has its adherents and detractors, they can coexist within any one complex organisation to a greater or lesser extent.

Conceptions of the Role of Management in Higher Education These conceptions of management and the role of the middle manager need to be placed into the context of higher education institutions’ very different understandings of the nature and role of management in their institutions. We would suggest (based on McAuley, 2002a) that there are four ‘‘ideal-type’’ (Gerth & Mills, 1948) positions:


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The ‘‘Corporate’’ HEI — this is the ‘‘well-managed’’ institution with a high emphasis on the capabilities of managers at every level in the organisation and in all aspects of the organisation’s life. Typically there is a high emphasis on core purpose and vision, on issues of organisation design and structure and on strategic business planning, and that the HEI is seen to be aligned to issues of change in the environment through the use of conventional (tried-and-tested) techniques and models. In this essentially top-down model, middle management has a complex role. Firstly, as the university develops a corporate sense of itself, it may be that there is a process of ‘‘delayering’’ to diminish the perceived threat of more ‘‘traditional’’ middle management groups. Secondly, if the remaining middle management is understood by senior management to be well aligned to the corporate goals, then some of them — occupying key symbolic leadership roles — can be seen to enact core organisational goals. Thirdly, other middle managers can be seen to occupy core ‘‘corporate bureaucratic’’ roles in enacting the managerialist agenda. The conduct of management is therefore conceptualised around the first three of the discourses discussed above, although there may be some aspiration to the fourth. The ‘‘Strong Culture’’ HEI — the HEI has a strong understanding of what it is to be this HEI. There is a strong and shared understanding of the purpose of the HEI and its place within the local, national and international environments. In this sort of HEI middle managers are the transmitters of the culture across boundaries (horizontally and vertically) and are concerned with organisational integration and the preservation of the sense of mission and purpose — i.e. the fourth discourse. The ‘‘Arena’’ HEI — here the language, rhetoric, discourse and claim to ‘‘truth’’ of middle management is one of many competing rhetorics within the HEI. It takes its place alongside the claims of senior management, academics (who themselves have different discourses of organisational life), administrators, the infrastructure experts (e.g. IT, facilities management), and so on, who constitute the arena of interest in the way the HEI ‘‘should be run’’. Sometimes their claims are transcendent, for example, when the deans or school directors are enabled to run their own faculty in their own way, and at other times other ‘‘imperialising’’ discourses come along that diminish the power of the rhetoric. Characteristically, we would suggest, the most comfortable discourse for the middle manager in HE is the fourth, namely transmitting core strategic values through mentoring, coaching and guiding. However, to achieve an imperialising discourse, chameleonlike the middle manager may adopt the discourse of managerialism, or the discourse of representing core organisational values. The ‘‘Communitarian’’ or ‘‘Collegial’’ HEI — essentially, the academics who comprise the beating heart of the organisation agree with one another (implicitly, as the psychological contract for working at the HEI) that they will work with each other whilst retaining their individual interest in teaching and research, or whatever. They claim to create complex networks of interest and mutual involvement and would eschew any attempt at active management. In this model

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S. Clegg and J. McAuley of the HEI, ‘‘colleagues are expected to live and let live. Universities are in their traditions a bit like monasteries. Once accepted into the community of scholars, people are left to do their own thing as long as the traditional rituals and duties are observed’’ (Matthew & Sayers, 2003, p. 4). In this model, any explicit discourse of ‘‘management’’ is eschewed (or accorded residual status in ‘‘support services’’), but in an implicit manner may be present in the form of the fourth discourse — the benign ‘‘senior person’’ who represents something of the university’s values and who acts as mentor, as guide in troubled times.

The above four ‘‘ideal types’’ of the HEI (and the many and complex variations on them) are a dominating discourse for the particular HEI, serving the institution as a definition of itself at a particular time. It is a public presentation of self to which its members maybe assent to willingly or maybe vigorously oppose. These discourses operate differentially, just as do management practices within different organisations in the same sector (Prichard & Willmott, 1997). Representations of Middle Management in Higher Education In what follows, we have taken each of the dominant discourses on middle management and, as well as reviewing the relevant management literature, we have made some suggestions about the ways in which the perspective might offer insight into the particular circumstances of higher education. The next four sections therefore present a review of the management literature contrasted with literature specifically on higher education that recognises these different interpretations of the role of middle management. These four periods may be represented schematically, as in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Four periods of middle management


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Middle Management Seen as Representing Core Organisational Values According to this discourse, the repository of truth in many organisations lay in the middle managers; they were the people who really cared about the organisation (e.g. Campanis, 1970; Floyd & Woolridge, 1994; Grint & Case, 2000). This identification with the organisation is related to the nature of their pivotal role and their deep identification with the organisation. At the heart of this view of the role is the notion that the middle manager is essentially concerned with the enactment of the complex roles of ‘‘living’’ as a subordinate, an equal and as a superior, with the ability ‘‘not only to manage all three relationships but also to shift quickly and frequently from one to another’’ (Uyterhoeven, 1972, p. 137). More recently, this understanding of the role has been expressed as the middle manager working with senior management to create a ‘‘sense of shared organizational identity’’ in which the middle manager ‘‘fosters the linkages that intensive knowledge transfer requires’’ (Ghoshal & Bartlett, 1998, p. 196). However, beneath this humanistic positioning there could also be discerned an interest in organisational control; they are ‘‘placed in the role of maintaining the internal systems of the organisation, and may view themselves as disturbance handlers, resource allocators and negotiators’’ (Couch, 1979, p. 37). The work of Horne and Lupton (1968) indicated that the middle manager ‘‘needs technical and commercial knowledge of his own firm, and an understanding of relationships there. Perhaps more knowledge of formal procedures of organization and control might be useful … and the manager must facilitate’’ (Horne & Lupton, 1968, p. 32). The core values associated with this discourse on middle management has resonance in more recent understandings of the nature of middle management as, for example, in the assertion that long-term organisational success ‘‘is found in old-fashioned organization, leadership, and an employee-orientated infrastructure. These are the tools of the middle manager’’ (Skrabec, 2001, p. 21). The higher educational literature that might fit with this discourse suggests that middle managers, rather than representing core organisational values, see themselves as representing core academic values. This is where core values are seen to reside, particularly in those HEIs in the ‘‘Unmanaged’’ and ‘‘Strong Culture’’ ideal types. While these values may have been moderated by the increasing emphasis on managerial organisational priorities in the 1990s, attachments to both discipline and organisation continue. Henkel (2000) suggests that academics’ identities are formed by ‘‘the cross-cutting imperatives of discipline and enterprise (the university or college)’’ (Henkel, 2000, p. 17). For many academics their national and international connection with the wider community of scholars is the central axis for identity and development. Moreover, it is important, because as Becher (1989, 1994) showed, many of the basic orientations of academic staff are based in these essentially disciplinary practices (Moore, 2001; Neumann, 2001; Smeby, 1996). There is evidence that broadly academic identities are significant for middle managers and that, moreover, heads of department and other middle academic managers frequently disassociate themselves from managerialist practices, which they identify

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only at the most senior levels, while they rely on consent and negotiation within the confines of mutually understood norms of collegiality to bring about changes involving the mass of practitioner academics (Hellawell & Hancock, 2001). Moreover, because formal organisational structures based on collegiality are often at odds with the actual dynamics, middle managers engage in forms of ‘‘hiding’’ from both their superiors and those they manage (Hellawell & Hancock, 2003). Middle Managers Seen as Self-interested Agents of Control During the 1990s, a different discourse, one that was middle management averse, began to develop. This discourse had a number of strands. At one level, the discourse took the very strength — commitment to organisational values — that was embedded in the earlier discourse. The argument ran that just because they care, middle managers are also likely to be conservative in organisational matters. At a deeper level tensions in the performance of the pivotal role there rests the potential for such matters as the prevention of ideas from lower levels being transmitted to the senior echelons of the organisation (Kanter, 1986), the possibility of senior management being ‘‘protected’’ from bad news (Argyris, 1999) And a low level of aspiration for the self and the organisation (Clarke, 1982). These manifestations of dysfunctional control are caused, at least in part, by a premonition that the pivotal role has built into it a degree of impotence as middle managers are ‘‘squeezed between demands of strategies they don’t influence and ambitions of increasingly independently minded employees’’ (Kanter, 1986, p. 19). Furthermore, so the discourse runs, where senior middle managers do have power they will use their power to divisionalise their organisation, a tendency to ‘‘balkanise the structure, to concentrate power in their own units’’ (Mintzberg, 1989, p. 112). It has also been suggested that in many organisations the development of electronic communication, particularly from the mid-1990s, has caused them to ‘‘become more holistic and less highly differentiated. One manifestation of this is the oft-discussed flattening of the organisation, the elimination of layers of middle management that had existed to coordinate organizational knowledge’’ (Nohria & Berkeley, 1994, p. 121). Whilst there have been attempts to characterise academics more generally as conservative (particularly in political rhetoric), it appears quite difficult to plot the trajectory of middle managers against a simple conservative/radical axis. The 1980s and 1990s saw the transformation of HEIs from elite to semi-mass institutions. The sorts of ‘‘delayering’’ described in the literature through the dramaturgy of the mission-led top creating a relationship with purposive bottom did not occur (at least as far as the literature on higher education is concerned) to any significant degree in higher education during the period in which this discourse was at its ascendant in the general management literature. The growth of student numbers and the development of the managerialist agenda (discussed in the next section) led to the growth of the management cadre in the academic arena, particularly in the post-1992 universities and in at least some of the pre-1992 HEIs.


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There are, however, indications from scattered empirical evidence that delayering may be developing as a strategic structural feature for some HEIs. For example we know of developments in both a pre- and post-1992 university where corporate reorganisation has involved changes to schools and faculties towards flatter organisational structures. The features that lie behind the restructuring are concerned with the promotion and development of a corporate vision for the university. One of the many aspects in these reorganisations involves the perception by some senior manager that the parts of the university have become ‘‘too diversified’’ in their staffing, their teaching profile, research outputs, and so on. In one instance, a delayered structure is being designed to develop greater uniformity in the implementation of the corporate plan across the university. Middle Managers Reinvented as Managerialist ‘‘Corporate Bureaucrats’’ The managerialist discourse became the conventional view of the nature of management during the 1980s and 1990s. It is a model that seems to persist in many public sector organisations and is known as new public management where it is claimed (perhaps not accurately) to replicate standard management practices in business and industry (Pollitt, 1993). Reed and Watson (1999) argued that managerialism has become, given the decline of socialism and the intellectual exhaustion of capitalism, the replacement global ideology. Within the managerialist perspective, the ‘‘managerial monologue … is an effort to integrate multiple meanings and alternative realities into one coherent voice … There is one voice, one logic and one moral’’ (Salzer-Mo¨rling, 1998, p. 111) that flows from the managerial discourse. McCabe and Knights (2000) suggested, ‘‘under the guise of discipline and surveillance, hierarchy will continue to thrive as it elevates those who conform whilst punishing those who rebel’’ (McCabe & Knights, 2000, p. 69). Whilst claims to managerial omniscience are vigorously contested (e.g. MacIntyre, 1981; Locke, 1996) and it is asserted that members can, indeed, overcome the claims of managerial dominance (e.g. Prichard & Willmott, 1997; McAuley, Duberley & Cohen, 2000), the managerialist rhetoric has been powerful in issues of requisite design for organisations. There are two aspects to the development of the managerialist discourse. One is the growth of numbers of people in the organisation who specifically have a management role, whose management work is defined by the sorts of definition of management discussed in earlier sections of this paper. Where this has happened, it has resulted not only in the development of an academic middle management cadre, but also the morphing of what were ‘‘administrators’’ and ‘‘technostructure experts and professionals’’ into ‘‘managers’’. As a further development of this managerialist discourse, Gordon (1996) argued that the urge for control in organisations has led to the growth and development of what he terms ‘‘corporate bureaucracies’’. These have, built within them, the very conditions for their expansion and development. What is more, he claims that far from exercising the claimed pivotal role, they erode, because of their interest in

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dominance and control, the bases of accountability to the most senior echelons of the organisation. In the general management literature, these corporate bureaucrats are experts, professionals who undertake such tasks as corporate planning, business process re-engineering, the development and maintenance of processes for quality assurance, the implementation of processes of human resource management, and so on. The managerialist discourse has been dominant in attempts to theorise changes in higher education in recent years. It has been argued that while traditionally many of the core functions of the higher educational professionals have been considered to be in the control of the individual, with institutional governance characterised by collegiality (Shattock, 1999), there have been more recent attempts to restructure higher education through the adoption of new forms of governance and managerialism (Parker & Jary, 1995; Prichard & Willmott, 1997; Trowler, 1998; Deem, 1998; Salter & Tapper, 2000). Trowler (1998) summarised the key features of managerialism in higher education as involving: management’s right to manage; a top-down approach, involving a ‘‘technology’’ of management and a ‘‘policy scienc’’ approach; an orientation towards the market and customers; individualism and acceptance of the status quo; and in education ‘‘an atomistic and mechanistic understanding of knowledge and learning’’ (Trowler, 1998, p. 94). Additionally, Salter and Tapper (2000) have identified the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), a national body with the remit to assess the quality of learning and teaching, as part of the attempt to bureaucratically control and regulate knowledge. At an institutional level, the corporate bureaucrats are those, whether academics or from other parts of the HEI, who pursue a zealous interest in systems and procedures that control, with appeals to ‘‘this is what the QAA [or whatever external agency] requires’’. These shifts form part of the rhetoric of shifts from ‘‘unmanaged’’ or ‘‘arena’’ HEIs, particularly in the older universities, towards the more ‘‘corporate’’ HEI, which is more completely accomplished in newer universities. However, the managerialist project is far from uncontested. Most of the authors cited above, as well as describing the managerialist impulse, also examine the ways in which academics have drawn on strategies of resistance. At a national level the activity of the QAA has been heavily contested and the scope of its activities curtailed. Moreover, as Deem et al. (2001) have pointed out, managerialism has been considerably less radical in its scope in higher education than, for example, in health, where managers recruited from the private sector have taken on a much more extensive restructuring role. It is our suggestion that in large professional organisations ‘‘corporate bureaucracies’’ may serve as a substitute for the lack of comprehensive development (as opposed to growth) of the middle management cadre. The research by Hellawell and Hancock (2001) suggested that middle managers in the ‘‘newer’’ UK universities they studied experienced themselves as more vulnerable, more exposed to difficult pressures than the staff they managed, and that they had ‘‘very few sanctions of any kind available to them in dealing with the full-time staff nominally under their


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control’’ (Hellawell & Hancock, 2001, p. 193). In this context, it is perhaps interesting to note that the ‘‘vision’’ of middle management in the universities presented by Hellawell and Hancock for the future development of the role is that he/she ‘‘with his or her subject and resource expertise now plays a crucial role in following business precepts by ensuring that the organization stays ‘close to the customer’ so that ‘repeat business’ can be ensured (Peters and Waterman, 1982)’’ (Hellawell & Hancock, 2001, p. 195). They eschew what they construe as the traditional view of middle management as the implementers and communicators of senior management’s strategic plans, although they concede that ‘‘it still appears to be a vital part of the middle manager’s job in HE to gain the cooperation of the staff despite the fact that the rate of innovation may be making interpersonal relationships more fraught’’ (Hellawell & Hancock, 2001, p. 195). They are thus presenting what might be termed a neo-managerialist agenda for the middle manager. Middle Managers Seen as Transmitters of Organisational Wisdom Underpinning this discourse is the notion that middle management should be regarded as a strategic asset (Uyterhoeven, 1989) through recognising the link beween middle management with organizational core capability and competitive advantage (Floyd & Woolridge, 1994) and their crucial role in developing and maintaining the firm’s core competencies (King, Fowler & Zeithaml, 2001). Ghoshal and Bartlett (1998) suggested that crucially middle managers are concerned with the management of the tension between long- and short-term organisational purposes, linking dispersed knowledge and best practices across the organisation, and the development of individuals in embedding processes of change and renewal into the organisation. King et al. (2001) emphasised the significance of the development of consensus amongst managers for the development of ‘‘competitive advantage regarding knowledge and skills that are valuable in an industry’’(King et al., 2001, p. 97). This consensus (where it exists) aids interpretation and communication of ‘‘broad top-level vision and strategies to lower-level managers’’ (King et al., 2001, p. 97). We would suggest, however, that within professional organisations understandings of middle management are characteristically not expressed as consensual (unless the HEI has developed a highly corporate environment) nor with the clarity and within the hierarchical boundaries suggested by King et al. Huy (2001) suggested that in contemporary business organisations middle managers make a significant contribution, albeit frequently unrecognised by senior management to radical organisational change. He suggested that built into the role itself middle management ‘‘often have value adding entrepreneurial idea. [T]hey’re far better than most senior management at leveraging the informal networks. [T]hey stay attuned to employee’s moods and emotional need. [T)hey manage the tension between continuity and change’’ (Huy, 2001, p. 73). They are also claimed to act as the ‘‘synapses within a firm’s brain’’ as they ‘‘reconcile the top-level perspectives and the lower level implementation issues’’ (King et al., 2001, p. 95).

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In this sense, the academic as middle manager may be seen as analogous to the concept of the master craftsman (Industriemeister in the German tradition). These operate, in environments in which teamwork is valued, as ‘‘motivator, moderator, or coach’’ (Jaeger & Pekruhl, 1998, p. 94). The Industriemeister operates within the pivotal role as manager but also possesses a stock of knowledge of the substantive area of expertise or knowledge. This approach to the assimilation of expertise and management capability can be a powerful approach to management in professional organisations (e.g. McAuley et al., 2000), although this capability often seems to occur through personal predisposition rather than through processes of management development. There is evidence from the literature on HEIs that middle managers (particularly in the newer universities) are at the forefront of change in key areas such as learning and teaching and in the advancement of core pedagogical and academic, as well as organisational, goals. The concern with pedagogy, for example, has established critical roots in the debates about critical pedagogy (e.g. McLaren, 1994; Torres, 1998; Hill, McLaren, Cole & Rikowski, 1999), including feminist pedagogy (e.g. Marshall, 1999; Rigg & Trehan, 1999). Morley (2001) has pointed out that a focus on the student experience can highlight areas where many women academics have been active. More recent innovations involving creative use of new media, and ideas of network learning, have been pioneered by individual enthusiasts (JISC, 2001). Many newer middle managers come from layers influenced by these traditions based on expertise and knowledge and are ready to innovate (Clegg, 2003). In research there is a parallel development of newer innovative research managers whose credibility is based on expertise but with a clear management orientation towards the funding of research. A core question for higher education is therefore whether a developed middle management cadre, framed in the humanistic mode, could enable change to take place in a less confrontational and abstracted manner through their deep understandings of the networks within the professional organisation, through the requirement on the role to act as colleague during times of trouble and as people who are seen to learn with their colleagues in times of change (Huy, 2001). In this sense, the middle manager may be seen as responsible for the development of newer forms of collegiality rather than agent of managerialist control. The newer middle managers described above might form the basis for such a cadre, dependent as they are on peer esteem, but ready to innovate in creative ways in response to the changing external environment. Concluding Remarks The discourse of the collegiate/managerialism dualism tends to position the activity known as ‘‘management’’ in a negative light. However, if we change the frame of reference from ‘‘managerialism’’ to the roles, more neutrally conceived, of middle managers, it is possible to recognise that middle managers can play a creative and


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innovative role in organisations. This shift in focus is important because one of the dangers of the collegiate/managerialism dualism is that it tends to down play some of the negative aspects associated with older collegiate forms of governance, including gender-biased practices. We have tried to show in this paper that there is a complex dialectic between pressures towards managerialism co-existing in tension with collegiality, and between different and contested interpretations of core pedagogic concepts. Whilst not all reforms are welcomed, it is important none the less to recognise that genuine innovation has taken place across the sector. Middle managers have often been central to ensuring that organisational change has brought benefits to various consistencies, most importantly to students, despite underlying problems of falling unit costs. It is also important to recognise the ways in which middle managers may operate to limit some of the more dysfunctional consequences of both executive action and external policy. We believe that a more creative engagement with a broader range of existing management literature, which we have summarised in this paper, can extend the boundaries of current debates within higher education. The managerialist/collegiality dualism by mis-describing the complexity and range of possibilities for conceptualising developments in higher education has become part of the problem. It oversimplifies and exaggerates many of the negative consequences of managerialism it seeks to critique. Imagining more productive relationships in higher education, in ways that do not look nostalgically backwards to an older, more elitist system, may be part of the first steps towards realising universities as more humane places in which to practice. References Alvesson, M., & Deetz, S. (2000). Doing critical management research. London: Sage. Argyris, C. (1999). On organizational learning (2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell Business. Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press/SRHE. Becher, T. (1994). The significance of disciplinary differences. Studies in Higher Education, 19, 151–161. Blackwell, R., & Blackmore, P. (2003). Towards strategic staff development in higher education. Buckingham, England: Open University Press/SRHE. Campanis, P. (1970). Normlessness in management. In J. D. Douglas (Ed.) Deviance and respectability: The social construction of moral meanings. New York: Basic Books. Clarke, J., & Newman, J. (1997). The managerial state. London: Sage. Clarke, R. M. (1982). Middle management today: Who’s calling the shots? Management Review, 1, 21–25. Clegg, S. (2003). Learning and teaching policies: Contradictions and mediations of practice. British Educational Research Journal, 29, 803–820. Couch, P. D. (1979). Learning to be a middle manager. Business Horizons, February, 33–41. Darwin, J. (2002). The rationalist approach to strategy and change. In J. Darwin, P. Johnson, & J. McAuley (Eds.) Developing strategies for change. London: Prentice-Hall. Dawson, S. (1994). Changes in the distance: Professionals reappraise the meaning of management. Journal of General Management, 20, 1–22.

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