The Managed University

The paper will take a critical look at the changing face of British Higher Education and relate this to contemporary work on the sociology of higher education (Becher, 1989; Rustin, 1992) and public sector management (Farnham and Horton, 1993). The huge expansion of the numbers of students in higher education and the changes in funding criteria has been paralleled by changes in the organisational contexts within which that teaching takes place and these will be the focus of the paper. In general we will suggest that the two key results of external pressures are moves towards greater managerial control and a diminishing sphere of academic professional autonomy (Miller, 1991; Wilson, 1991; Trow, 1993). These changes are reflected and reinforced by administrative structures like modularity which are rhetorically grounded in notions of student/consumer choice but in practice also erode the “responsible autonomy” (Friedman, 1977) that professional academics have historically exercised over their labour process. This ‘marketisation’ of the external and internal contexts of HE is equivalent to the process that has been happening in other public sector organisations for the last ten years (Farnham and Horton, 1993). The valorisation of ‘management’ that it implies has obvious resonances in contemporary writing on organisations which seeks to replace administered bureaucracies with flexible, mission driven, loose‐tight structures.