Just how managed is the McUniversity?

This paper seeks to illuminate ways in which the introduction and use of management knowledges and practices in U.K. universities overlaps, intersects and confronts established knowledge and practice in these sites. While broadly supportive of the general directionality of work in this field by other authors (Parker and Jary 1995; Winter 1995; Miller 1995) who argue that U.K. universities are becoming increasingly corporately managed around a 'Fordist' mass production arrangement, the paper offers an empirically based exploration of some of the contradictions and struggles that make this broad shift unstable, partial and by no means inevitable. In particular the paper critiques and extends points made by Parker and Jary's discussion (1995) of the changing character of U.K. universities. To do this, the paper begins by reviewing a range of conceptual resources that can be brought to bear on this issue. Following a brief discussion of Bourdieu and Giddens, we suggest that a framework outlined by Fiske (1993) offers a potentially illuminating resource for addressing the changing character of universities in the U.K. This conceptual resource is used to interpret empirical materials drawn from discussions with nearly 40 senior post-holders in two pre-1992 and two post-1992 universities. In the analysis of this material, we argue for the relevance and value of foregrounding the way that management knowledge is at work in processes of change that are underway. We conclude that management knowledge and practice, which provides resources through which the life of the university is thought and done in new ways, at best only partially reconstitutes and displaces existing knowledge and practice.