Steering from a distance: Power relations in Australian higher education

Conventional liberal frameworks - in which power is seen as the property of states, and repressive in character, and market and state exclude each other - are unable to comprehend the recent changes in liberal government, including the government of systems and institutions in higher education. Neo-liberal government rests on self-managing institutions and individuals, in which free agents are empowered to act on their own behalf but are 'steered from a distance' by policy norms and rules of the game. In the universities government-created markets and quasi-markets have been used to advance both devolution and central control, simultaneously, and national government and institutional management are increasingly implicated in each other. These issues are explored in relation to recent higher education literature, and empirically, the latter by examining the changes in the Australian higher education system in the last decade. The Australian system provides an example of a quasi-market in which the development of a stronger institutional management, the introduction of government-institution negotiations over educational profiles, and the new systems of competitive bidding, performance management and quality assessment have all been used to steer academic work and to install a process of continuous self-transformation along modern neo-liberal lines. Following a change of government in 1996 there has been some movement from a quasi-marl,et to a more fully developed economic market, but no relaxation of government control.