chapter 9
Managing
a University
in Turbulent Times
Gordon Redding
Reviews are presented in Chapters 10 and 11 of how the world of higher education
(HE) is changing rapidly, as globalization brings realignment of many factors in
societies, and as the revolution in information technology (IT) accelerates such
changes. It is also noted there that such changes bring consistent managerial challenges
that put many universities under stress. Examples are: the costs of meeting surging
demand based on rising expectations about access to HE; changes of organizational
culture carried into universities by the market-driven logics of new kinds of
competition; changes in relations with faculty as their traditional autonomies are
threatened; opening up of much wider university horizons entailing the complexities
of global commitments; political pressures in some societies as traditional freedoms
to study society itself are seen as threats to political order; and pressures from new
forms of industry to provide workforce capabilities such as critical thinking that do
not necessarily conform with cost-driven modes of learning.
Given the widespread and consistent nature of such challenges, a question arises as
to how universities may respond adequately, and whether their most senior executive
groups have acquired know-how of the kind that allows them to navigate their
organizations through a period of such deep and fast-moving change. Universities
belong to a very distinct organizational type, and cannot simply replicate the logics of
other organizational types. There is also within organization theory a quite clear
understanding of that university type. Evolving variations within it are explained in
Chapter 4. This chapter then is concerned with the craft of management as it applies
to all organizations of this type, suffering stresses of this kind, in historically distinct
surrounding conditions.
managing a university in turbulent times 3
The Distinct Nature of Universities as
Organizations
Universities have their own distinct character as organizations, being members of a
type defined in organization theory as the federated meritocratic professional
bureaucracy. It is worth taking apart this definition (Mintzberg 1983) so as to
understand the questions of direction and control that the definition illuminates and
the variety of academic subcultures it is designed to embrace (Whitley 2000). Such
organizations contain two main components. One of these is an administrative support
structure, essentially a rational bureaucracy without direct ‘line’ responsibility for the
behaviours that deliver ‘purpose’. The other, the ‘line’, or operating core, in the case
of a university is the set of departments that organize the research and teaching and
that supply interface roles to link with the administrative bureaucracy. This academic
component has traditionally dominated a university because of its monopoly over the
delivering of the core mission. In this part of the organization federated means that the
basic structure is of separate units each responsible for its own field of action.
Meritocratic means that authority here is allocated on the basis of performance defined
as legitimate within the individual units and accepted across the total operating core.
This performance is expressed mainly in scholarly reputation, determined by the
standards of the separate disciplines externally and usually globally.
As Burton Clark (1983) has observed, universities are culturally loaded
organizations, and the culture is that of scholarship. It shapes much of the most crucial
behaviour, as explained by Bartlett in Chapter 18. Professional means that the
standards of work set within the wider profession of an academic field induce certain
standards of comportment in research and teaching. These standards are then a form
of behaviour control and predictability. As they are external they relieve the university
hierarchy itself of much supervising of conduct, and so eliminate much of the
‘management’ found in more hierarchical organizations. There is, however, a natural
control overlap with the organization’s administration due to the latter’s responsibility
for employment contracts, conditions, support services to students, and the general
behaviour of staff. This control overlap has become a zone of tension as two different
logics of managing academic behaviour contend for priority, and as the recent growth
in many education systems has led to the number of employees in the administrative
function growing at the cost of the academic, for example across the United States
leading to a 40 per cent change in the ratio of admin to faculty between 1990 and 2012
(Desrochers and Kirshstein 2014). Bureaucracy means that most processes both within
the academic arena and elsewhere in the system are conducted—in an ideal system—
on the basis of rationality, objectivity, openness, and empowered debate.
In these circumstances control of a straight ‘corporate’ kind would be superfluous
because the academics largely control their own work by the professional standards of
4 gordon redding
their discipline, and heads of departments are normally appointed for their ability to
encourage this. Pressures to seek reputation for scholarship, by being internally
motivated within individuals, can be very strong. An important outcome of such a
control structure that at first glance might appear loose, is that it leads to the high levels
of individual professional autonomy necessary for the exercise of academic freedom,
that freedom being nevertheless within clear and motivating limits. It is that freedom
that can allow a university’s governance system to meet Rosovsky’s (1990) criterion
for university governance: prioritizing good teaching and research. Evidence from
higher educational systems that operate without that freedom, and are thus ‘hollow’
(see Chapter 4) suggests that scholarly quality suffers from the related limiting of
intellectual creativity (Karran 2009). There is also a wider concern, as expressed in
Chapter 2, that HE has a crucial role to play in fostering and maintaining a society’s
capacity to remain adaptive to changing forces that might destabilize it. This requires
the catalyst of intellectual autonomy if societal openness to such adjustment is to be
maintained.
The Still Obscure Essence of the Managerial
Challenge
In a review of research on managerial practice in universities Denton and Brown
(2010: 303) concluded that university leadership is ‘one of the most complex, yet
underresearched areas of university management’. Shattock (2003: 67) in a similar
review judged that ‘there is little modern research into academic organization which
can be said to offer clear pointers to a transferable successful model’. Within the recent
general literature on university leadership in an age of radical change, definitions of
managerial challenges recur. These tend to be concerned with the process, i.e. the
implementation (as opposed to the planned structure), of change. Within this dilemma
is the significance for performance of the attached social psychology among those
affected.
Dill (2012) revisited his 1982 study of the management of academic culture, and
referred to Clark’s (1972) defining of the three cultures involved: those of the
discipline, the enterprise, and the academic profession. He restated his earlier view
that the management of social integration was key and depended on the managing of
what need to become shared meanings (Dill 1982: 303), these latter being heavily
influenced by professional norms socialized within a discipline. He suggests more
recently (2012: 230) that ‘the need to develop collective processes for managing
academic culture . . . has likely become even more significant’.
Based on studies of the Dutch HE system, de Boer (2002) attributes the managerial
challenge to a problem of mistrust. He states ‘It is patently obvious that one of the
main problems in contemporary university governance is the lack of involvement and
commitment of many constituencies at nearly all levels within the universities’ (de
managing a university in turbulent times 5
Boer 2002: 54). He suggests that this affects the perceived trustworthiness of
executives. This in turn threatens the acceptance by faculty both of executive decisions
and of their obligation to implement new rules (de Boer 2002: 48).
From studies of the French response Musselin and Mignot-Gerard (2002: 74)
describe university evolutions that are ‘largely supported by the President’s team and
the administrators but are not viewed as legitimate by many other actors’. They
describe a scene with three commonly found dysfunctions: high individual faculty
resistance through circumvention and inertia; lack of executive attention to
implementation; and tension between a dominant coalition and a set of unconsulted
deans.
Similar findings have emerged from wide studies. Several such were reported in
Chapter 2 and will not be restated here. But three large-scale and pessimistic
statements, of relevance to the HE mission and so university strategies, are noteworthy.
Caplan (2018: 1) expressing despair from US experience states that due to ‘human
capital purism’ HE has become swollen in size because of a societal signalling effect
whereby ‘ studying irrelevancies still raises income by impressing employers’. The
context is one where ‘humanist fans of education grasp profundities typical economists
dismiss’ (2018: 239) so that ‘stimulating education is the exception that proves the
rule’. The result is that ‘eager students, passionate educators, and wise deciders are
hopelessly outnumbered’ (2018: 259).
A parallel view is expressed in Loughead’s (2015: 79) critique of the betrayal of the
essential university mission: that of engendering critical thinking, so as to objectify
perceptions. He sees a disjunction between university mission statements and what is
actually taught. As he puts it ‘We want to “have the cake” of a public-focussed
educational mission, but we want to “eat the cake” of business-driven, market-based
decisions and bankrolls. It is clear that modern academia is guilty of institutional
hypocrisy.’ This was similarly but somewhat more judiciously expressed by ViceChancellor Stephen Toope (2018) of Cambridge University writing: ‘Reducing
students to mere consumers makes sense only if the value of universities is simply
economic. That would be a fundamental error . . . the focus should be on what values
our society expects to see reflected in our universities, not only value for money . . .
Universities are not the problem, but part of the solution.’
What Lessons Can Be Brought from General
Management Theory?
The form of management we are concerned to analyse here is that operating at the
apex of the university, essentially the work of a vice-chancellor, president, or
equivalent, plus the small group of senior managers making up the ‘Executive’ of the
organization, perhaps a dozen people, often less. There is likely also to be influence
from a wider power structure such as a Council or Board of Regents representing
6 gordon redding
societal oversight, but its role is usually advisory rather than executive. This latter is
counterbalanced by an academic senate, but the work of the internal academic and the
external advisory bodies is normally separated, and coordinated only via the top
structure.
A university’s main Executive body, working as a relatively small committee or
board, formulates, defines, and then promotes the organization’s strategy, in effect
attempting to manage its foreseeable future. For that, the surrounding futures of
shifting forces in the environment need to be judged very carefully for their
implications, and completely for their possible relevance. The environments of higher
education have in recent years become more complex, more challenging, and so more
demanding of such careful reading.
From the standpoint of strategic management, universities take on different forms,
largely depending on the societal histories in which they emerged, but it is possible to
categorize them into four main types, as explained by Richard Whitley in Chapter 4.
These vary according to the degree of freedom with which they carry out their work.
Across the four types there are certain universal managerial essentials, but how these
are interpreted on the ground may well vary with the types along with the key influence
on their management—namely their level of autonomy from state control.
This chapter is written with reference principally to the most commonly found type
of university organization—the state-chartered form. (Implications for other types may
be deduced from the descriptions in Chapter 4 and from the discussions of types in
Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8.) Typical of the most common type, and influential in other
categories in different ways and degrees, is the sponsorship of the university by the
state. This implicitly acknowledges the central role of knowledge in promoting a
society’s progress. It also acknowledges the power of the global academic professions
to influence the work of all university departments within that profession. The form of
that knowledge may vary substantially, but in most universities, although not all,
discretion over choices in creating and spreading knowledge has so far largely been
left to the subject specialists in the faculty of the university. This in broad terms is now
changing as costs rise, and as various forms of external guidance often accompany the
flow of funding.
Two generic problems are commonly observed with the practice of strategic
management in any large organization, commercial, governmental, or professional.
The first stems from the unique nature of the senior executive function compared to
the other forms of management. In being strategic it relies on others to get things done
in the organization. These other forms of management are the coordinative and the
operating. The coordinative arranges connection vertically between the strategic and
the operational, and also manages links horizontally across the parts of organization.
It is seen in roles that pull together units of the organization across functions and it
also brings controls between levels. General managers, controllers, and country
managers do this in industry; deans, department heads, and chairs of committees do
this in universities. We will note later in this chapter Whitchurch’s description of these
coordination functions as an increasingly significant ‘third space’ in universities.
managing a university in turbulent times 7
Operating management gets the basic work done and is normally overseen by
coordinators such as academic department heads. The operating function in a
university is the work of the academics in creating and disseminating knowledge,
teaching, and examining. As earlier noted, it is largely self-controlled. Because faculty
are both the principal cost, and the principal raison d’être of the system, operating
management in the form of scholarly practice in universities logically has much higher
relative weight within the total decision system than does industrial production or
consumer servicing in most industry. But work skills needed to excel at the operating
level are not necessarily suitable to the coordinative level, and at the top of the pyramid
great operators/ coordinators sometimes fail to be great strategists, because the
strategic capabilities may take time to evolve.
In such conditions new appointments to the top may not always have had the right
level and type of grounding in strategy work, after earlier carrying out dutifully their
operating and coordinative roles. And few advisers specialize in fostering the relevant
capabilities needed by board members in HE. So two core problems attached to
strategy work in universities are that the role is unfamiliar to many incumbents, and
there may be little ‘apprenticeship’ or guidance for learning its complexity. This
challenge is heightened by the temporary nature of many leader appointments that
normally entail a learning period and a fixed term responsibility, although these
disadvantages are countered by the legitimacy of scholarly headship. Top management
is also constrained by having to operate within a system where the achievement of the
university mission rests heavily on the decentralization of authority. This in turn tends
to leave university leaders dependent on closeness of identity with those key players
below whose cooperation is crucial.
The Functions of the Executive
The above sub-heading pays tribute to a foundational analysis by Chester Barnard
(1938) of how an Executive group should function, a constantly reprinted classic book
with perhaps the greatest staying power in management theory, and written by a
successful chief executive with a strong interest in the theory of organization. As
Kenneth Andrews wrote in his Introduction to Harvard’s thirtieth anniversary edition,
the Executive must make decisions that add quality and morality to both the
coordination process and the formulation of purposes. By addressing these issues it is
‘the most thought-provoking book on organization and management ever written by a
practitioner’ (xxi). Its advice is condensed here as being constantly relevant to the work
of a senior executive group in a complex organization of whatever kind. Continued
respect by organization theorists for its grounded insights has been recently
reconfirmed by du Gay and Vikkelsø (2016).
Barnard identified four key components in the collective role of the Executive
group:
(1) Monitoring the changing environment.
(2) The formulation and definition of the organization’s purposes.
8 gordon redding
(3) The dissemination of those purposes into the component parts of the organization
along with the control of their being achieved.
(4) The generation throughout of a spirit of willing cooperation.
In describing the nature of the authority that would most effectively allow these
processes to work, Barnard argued that real authority flows upwards, given by willing
cooperators, when deserved on grounds of both respected character and
performancebased merit. If authority is simply claimed and imposed from the top it
risks becoming a weak form, especially in the professional organization, except in a
crisis.
A very large literature on ‘leadership’, and an efflorescence of teaching and
consulting on the subject, have not altered or added to these early-stated fundamentals.
When fully applied they are deep and challenging enough to remain crucial in a much
more connected and faster world. Nor have the endlessly reinvented managerial ‘fads’
been able to supplant them. ‘Leadership’, Emotional Intelligence, Six Sigma,
Management by Walking Around, Core Competencies, MbO, TQM, KPRs, Business
Process Re-Engineering, etc. etc. remain abandoned in the files of many organizations.
These do not last because they do not deal adequately enough with certain deep and
subtle features that define the work of any successful Executive group. Such work
faces three large challenges; (1) managing at this level requires the addressing of high
and widespread complexity and this cannot be dealt with using ‘magic keys’; (2)
systems of organizing complex processes go through cycles of change as the worlds
with which they connect also change; and (3) (today most crucially in HE) changes of
organizational structure and process need to be coordinated with adaptations in
organizational culture. This latter element works largely invisibly and attempts to
measure it are often incomplete; but it sits at the heart of Barnard’s ultimate and
perhaps most testing requirement—the generation of a spirit of willing cooperation.
Cooperation is a social-psychological aspect of the total complex, and inside an
organization it reflects forces in the environment that may not be wished for but can
become limiting factors affecting the willingness to cooperate. Examples of such
forces currently affecting HE would be rising costs of the learning process, New Public
Management, changing technologies for teaching, changing student expectations,
drives towards competition between institutions. These are all changing the social
psychology of cooperation in universities.
Organizational culture is always key among things being managed and—because of
the many effects that flow from it—it may often prove to be the most crucial source
of organizational quality and reputation. It is notoriously elusive, and even more
notoriously subject to the over-simplifying of its nature in 5-point scales, although
such may be at least better than not asking. The negative effects of mis-managing this
difficult challenge are visible in the widespread resentment and concern expressed by
academics at the handling of current changes, as reported in Chapter 2. Seen societally
by Beck and Grande (2010) the managerial challenge in HE is an outcome of
‘Modernization 2’ in which most industry—under the pressures of globalization, new
managing a university in turbulent times 9
technology, and more intense competition—loses the ability to guarantee long-term
stable careers to staff. This leads to the individualization of risk; hence the personal
frustrations of partial employment. Cooperativeness is now both more difficult than it
used to be, while having become more crucial a component in achieving university
reputation.
When an organization has achieved a high level of cooperativeness, that
achievement will persist as long as there is an accompanying delivery of success in
two different tests of organizational viability. These are effectiveness and efficiency.
Effectiveness is the achievement of the cooperative purpose; it is social and nonpersonal in character and attaches to the organization as a whole. It is essentially
reflected in the organization’s reputation in its environment, and so it reflects what
values society currently has. Efficiency is a connected feature but operates at the
personal level among members; it stems from the satisfaction of individual motives
and represents motivation to work, in another word, morale. The effective and the
efficient processes are reciprocally intertwined. An organization with dissatisfied
members (so not efficient) is unlikely to become reputable (so not effective), and vice
versa. The fusing of these two elements becomes the ultimate test of the Executive and
of its ability to engage with key contributors. It is a severe and complex test.
In handling such issues we do not here suggest a total ban on using management
techniques that may come to be seen as fads. We suggest instead that they be seen as
parts of a more complete general toolkit, each for a distinct purpose over a set time,
and not seen as alternatives to grappling with the wider complexities that lie within
the formulating of fully thought-through strategy.
For Barnard (1938: 60) encouraging cooperativeness rests on two considerations:
The processes of cooperation ‘must be discovered or invented’, in other words the
bases on which people become willing to cooperate with the purposes of the
organization must be matters of conscious attention by the Executive. Morale affects
performance directly. It is built under certain conditions, and evolves through certain
processes, and is not accidental. Such processes may need to be orchestrated. Second,
cooperativeness will adjust as external changes press upon it. If surrounding changes
break down this positive force, there is an Executive duty to find a means of restoring
it for the good of the organization.
As distilled experience related to Executive mentality, we give now the principles
of university governance proposed by Henry Rosovsky from long experience as Dean
of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard (Rosovsky 1990: ch. 15), and written
after a period of serious student turbulence.
(1) Not everything is improved by making it more democratic.
(2) There are basic differences between the rights of citizenship in a nation and the
rights that are attained by joining a voluntary organization.
(3) Rights and responsibilities in universities should reflect the length of commitment
to the institution.
10 gordon redding
(4) In a university those with the knowledge are entitled to a greater say.
(5) In universities, the quality of decisions is improved by consciously preventing
conflict of interest.
(6) University governance should improve the capacity for teaching and research.
(7) To function well any hierarchical system of governance requires explicit
mechanisms of consultation and accountability.
Rosovsky also remarks on certain built-in sources of tension in many universities:
the nature of power is complicated and contentious; the requirements of schooling and
adulthood can be difficult to reconcile; with universities as agents of social change,
initiated by academics who may be seen as privileged, external interest groups may
seek influence; universities are capable of becoming rich in assets and in people, and
their foundations and enterprises can attract wide and legitimate societal scrutiny;
taking money from public funds means attracting interest in how authority is
exercised.
Accepting or not such advice, and having to live with the inevitable constraints, the
essential Executive challenge begins with monitoring change to identify what might
be significant. This is a test of an Executive group’s range and depth of vision, and its
complexity can be daunting. So how may it and other functions be managed? I now
metaphorically open Barnard’s four boxes.
Monitoring the Environment
Universities have complex environments and are usually designed to deal with the
most obvious of them using a habitual set of responses, such as Executive members
dealing with one each, reporting on it to the group, and then joining in the forging of
policy consensus. Overwhelmingly the most important influence in HE is the
surrounding world of scholarship and knowledge dissemination. This for most subjects
is global and for most aspects is dealt with by the faculty acting professionally within
their subject fields. It may be taken then that the monitoring function for the academic
subject world is well entrenched. This leaves the other sources of influence on
universities: political, financial, societal, technical, each with further subdivisions.
It is not the aim of this chapter to discuss the coordinative and operational functions
of managing a university’s relation with the specifics in these several fields, as that is
the remit of the handbook overall, out of respect for the detail and range of responses
available. Instead I focus now on the managerial principles underlying the university’s
strategic function on the understanding that they are likely to remain influential across
many more specific responses.
What needs to be monitored within the process of strategy-making? Put in abstract
terms it is anything that will change the university’s ability to achieve high levels of
externally-related effectiveness (the accomplishment of agreed purpose) and
internallyrelated efficiency (the productivity from willingness to cooperate). It is
useful to conceive of what needs to be watched—for opportunity or threat—as either
managing a university in turbulent times 11
facilitating or limiting factors. In other words forces that affect the links between the
activities of organization members, and the achieving of agreed purposes.
The real tests of strategic effectiveness in dealing with such factors are that (a) the
understanding of them is complete in its coverage and (b) their implications for the
behaviour of the organization are fully thought through. Surprises such as loss of
institutional reputation, desertion of good faculty, student revolt, financial stress, are a
sign of inadequate or too late response to a changing world. It is also common to find
that the short-term and urgent issues drive out the long-term and important issues. This
tyranny of the urgent can mean that organized deliberation of the longer term and the
nebulous is not always framed within a fully informed set of briefings with time
allocated for debate.
To counteract such administrative risks a comprehensive set of fields of enquiry
needs to be built into Executive processes. Information needs to be gathered and
analysed by someone responsible for reporting regularly to the Executive on what is
happening in a field of concern, and what its implications are likely to be. There are
normal responses to this need in the obvious areas such as finance, academic
performance, physical infrastructure, student relations, etc. Individual members of the
Executive are likely to be responsible for reporting on these clearly defined fields.
There may also be specific issues that need monitoring, as now in many UK
universities trying to forecast the impact of Brexit, in the United States the overhang
of student loans, in Hong Kong new HE policies arriving from China. But there remain
other less clear fields where it is harder to assess significant change. It is in these fields
that new forces may emerge and remain puzzling but significant for strategy. Some
examples are:
(1) The impact of lower faculty morale on quality and quantity of professional work.
(2) The impact of rising student expectations—stemming from market competition—
on adequacy of facilities.
(3) The impact of new information technologies on modes of teaching and learning,
and consequently of educational experience and quality.
(4) The impact of new technology on industrial roles and what capabilities are needed
in response, e.g. currently led by ‘critical thinking’ (World Economic Forum
2016).
(5) The impact of New Public Management on the traditional structures of authority/
identity/motivation within disciplines.
(6) The impact of globalized markets and new criteria for student choice, on the
supply of students, and so of revenues.
(7) The impact of rankings on the tendency of universities to copy a seemingly
successful formula, so weakening their ability to be distinct.
(8) The impact of new sources of external influence, often political or religious in
origin, on academic freedom and so on critical thinking, and eventually
institutional reputation.
12 gordon redding
(9) Changes in government policy and of social ideals affecting universities.
To understand such issues and their implications often requires the reconciling and
fusing of different perspectives, the tracing of potential side effects to avoid
unintended consequences, discussion of the more obscure issues such as morality,
motivation, impact on community, and societal contribution. Such thinking may need
a team approach, and the use of specialist advice, especially that of those affected.
There is a danger of such high level thinking being displaced, especially when another
issue is seemingly urgent and is represented in apparently concrete numbers. Strategic
thinking is rarely straightforward and Barnard (1938: 286) defines four principal errors
found in this aspect of Executive work:
(1) An over-simplification of the economy of organizational life, in other words an
ignoring of the detail of the various ‘economies’ involved, each with its ‘factors’
(contributing influences) and ‘utilities’ (ways of satisfying human needs or
wants), many of them not comparable with the others quantitatively. These
‘economies’ include (a) the material, such as the facilities that affect the quality
of HE experience, (b) the social, such as the forms adopted to create senses of
belonging and support, (c) the individual, as with the encouragement of personal
scholarly ideals and behaviour, and (d) the organizational, such as the quality of
communications and the inspiring of contribution.
(2) A disregard of the fact, and the necessity, of informal organization. Herein lies the
mistaken temptation to think that redrawing the organization chart has solved the
problem.
(3) An ‘inversion of emphasis’ upon the objective and the subjective aspects of
authority; thus the seduction of simplistic data. This can lead to ‘false emphases
upon matters concerning which there is already much knowledge and appropriate
language . . . like in accounting and financial practice, in certain aspects of
personnel work and measures’ (Barnard 1938: 286). Often missing is
consideration of ‘the economy of incentives’ and the subjective aspects of
authority in terms of its leadership legitimacy and effectiveness.
(4) A confusion of morality with responsibility, since—although the two may
overlap—they are worth considering separately. Those in Executive roles, who
normally work in a context of both complex morality, such as ideals of market
logic versus scholarship, and high responsibility, may be assumed to express a
moral assumption built into their technical functioning. Their executive behaviour
would ideally be seen as both appropriate and fundamentally ‘decent’. But the
matter of organizational morale does not end there. The Executive role carries
with it the burden of creating moral codes for others. This may entail aligning the
ideals of workers with the laws of the society, with the operating principles of the
organization, with the notion of the good of the organization as a whole, and the
acceptance of general ethical standards. The managing of these invisible forces is
a great test of strategic competence. As Barnard suggests: ‘Organizations endure
managing a university in turbulent times 13
in proportion to the breadth of the morality by which they are governed. This is
only to say that foresight, long purposes, high ideals, are the basis for the
persistence of cooperation’ (1938: 282).
So the monitoring of the environment needs to be complete in its range, and deep
enough to pick up the less obvious matters of potential significance. It then needs to
be folded into the Executive process as a set of forces that will interact in complex
ways as they force change. This complexity needs to be brain-stormed, ruminated
upon, scenario’d, and fully debated. As options about what to do evolve from this
process, the choosing of priorities should be guided by two principles: an inspirational
set of moral ideals that exist within the defined purposes that evolve; and the related
and orchestrated protection and enhancement of a spirit of willing cooperation by the
members of the organization.
Barnard’s pioneering advice is today echoed and reinforced in a study of failures in
organizational change across large organizations in general, based on twenty years of
consulting experience (Garden 2017). As Bartunek (2018: 144), a past President of the
Academy of Management, commented in a review of Garden’s book, ‘there is
considerable informal agreement that most organizational change efforts fail’, a
position echoed by the Brightline consultancy coalition’s claim that ‘only 1 in 10
strategic initiatives is completed successfully’ (The Economist, 20 January 2018, 1).
Garden’s study, written from a position of being haunted by consultants’ incompetence
as well as cruelty, specifies their eight deadly sins as follows: self-deception, i.e. not
understanding what they are doing; destruction of the organization’s identity;
destruction of the organization’s cohesion; cult-like jargon reflecting a covert agenda;
ignoring behaviour change connected with strategy; creating new and different, but
not necessarily better action; a distorted view of resistance to change; and inadequate
acknowledgement of the deep trauma of redundancy.
The Formulation and Definition of the Organization’s Purposes
From an understanding of surrounding change, a next step is to review, in the light of
that, what the organization should now be for? This may mean reaffirming what it
always was for, but either response carries major implications.
Cooperation requires that there is something to be done together, the more
meaningful the better. At the base is a set of scholars, each of whom finds an identity
that either provides self-respect based on the perceived respect of society, or does not.
As noted, foresight, long-term purposes, and high ideals, foster the cooperation that
normally accompanies organizational efficiency and effectiveness. But formulating
such purposes can be trapped in high-flown language, and we are reminded by Barnard
(1938: 92) that a valid purpose can only be achieved via a series of concrete acts and—
in more recent jargon—‘deliverables’. The value of seeing purpose in these more
grounded terms is that it can be more easily related to by those doing the delivery. Also
over time, as the specific delivery processes adjust to external change, the overall
purpose itself may adjust, starting at the edges. By being open to adjustment, the
14 gordon redding
central mission can remain relevant and inspiring. All of which is to say that thinking
about and communicating purpose should not rest entirely on high abstract ideals, but
should remain grounded in references to action.
Even so, common purpose and individual motive are not the same thing. Bridges
need to be built between them. Purpose belongs within the organization/environment
relation. It is externally focused, objective, impersonal, although it may be interpreted
subjectively. Motive by contrast is internal and subjective. But the university world
has within it an unusual and distinct feature, namely an organizational purpose that,
more than in many fields, can be at the same time a source of personal motive. This
unifying ideal is scholarship, a central norm in HE elaborated on by Ronald Barnett in
Chapter 18. By defining this as the key criterion for respect, and then acting it out, it
becomes the glue that holds together much of the cooperation in universities. Threats
to this ideal are thus strategic issues (Neave 2015), and they abound in the new
conditions as they induce a separation between (in an extreme view) two classes: a
‘plutonomy’ of managers; and a ‘precariat’ of scholars (Chomsky 2014).
The formulation and definition of purpose in a professional bureaucracy is not then
a monopoly of the Executive, despite the latter’s responsibility for its being formally
crafted. Instead in most organizations there is a pyramid descending from the more
abstract, longer-term conception of it to the more immediate and tangible versions
spread throughout an organization’s different parts. As Barnard (1938: 233) notes: ‘In
this fact lies the most important inherent difficulty in the operation of cooperative
systems— the necessity for indoctrinating those at the lower levels with general
purposes.’ Without constant up-and-down coordination between the Executive and the
ultimate contributors there is always the danger of Executive isolation, and of layers
of misunderstanding separating them from reality. Necessary skills at the top include
interpretation and imagination alongside the rational delegation.
Ground-rules in downwards communication are then (a) that it has meaning for the
recipient, (b) that it is consistent with the purposes of the organization, (c) that it is
compatible with the recipient’s interests, and (d) it can be realistically complied with.
All this in the university world takes place in circumstances where individual scholars
look not to the university to establish their respectability as scholars, but to their global
disciplines. For teaching and administration, internal judgement is usually more
relevant. But because performance criteria attached to the university itself now tend to
include research output, the clash of identity for scholars becomes more serious, as
their discipline criteria may contend with those of their employer. For both the scholars
and the Executive this becomes a complex web of choices and trade-offs in the
negotiating of purposes, assuming there is negotiating.
Disseminating Purposes and Controlling Action
In the context just outlined, handling the issue of control requires careful attention to
context. In this form of organization much initiative and creativity can be assumed to
occur independently of direct ‘managerial’ control. This assumes the availability of
appropriately skilled and motivating heads of department. I acknowledge here the
managing a university in turbulent times 15
significance of growing ‘corporatization’ in affecting both the definition and
dissemination of purposes, and the channels of control. But due to the great variety of
ways in which these tensions are playing out, I can only point to certain key lessons
which will be folded into the concluding topic on cooperation: the acid test of the
Executive role.
Generating A Spirit of Willing Cooperation
The threats to cooperativeness in HE are now such that it has become more than ever
a source of tension in universities globally as they deal with universal stresses from
the IT revolution, social change, and globalization. A glance at recent policy literature
in HE indicates the agenda in book titles: The Changing Face of Academic Life,
Reconstructing Relationships in HE, Managing Reform in Universities, Education—
an Impossible Profession?, Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money,
Reconfiguring Knowledge Production, Reshaping the University, to name but a few.
Running through such commentary is the central concern with reconstructing
relationships so as to retain cooperativeness, i.e. the commitment of faculty, in changed
conditions.
To illustrate the management challenge of that core dilemma, findings from a series
of UK studies are presented by Celia Whitchurch in Chapter 7. A brief summary of
this research programme’s findings (Whitchurch and Gordon 2017) is that retaining
relationships so as to realize institutional strategy rests on building new middle
management capacity—a third space—able to provide a buffer to absorb academic
anxieties and career uncertainties. This reconstructing of roles and relationships
includes some blurring of the traditional academic/admin divide, a tension that can be
eased by the greater use of collaborating groups working across the boundary.
Managerial responses of this nature illuminate Barnard’s central point about the
ultimate Executive responsibility for retaining cooperation; so too the carrying of an
organization intact through environmental turbulence.
More speculatively there may be emerging from such inducted blending new
identities based on innovative linking across professions, disciplines, and institutions.
An unintended possible consequence of this is the institutional favouring of disciplines
such as business studies, engineering, and bio-science that can easily connect with
industry. Unlike the humanities they may be ‘safer bets’ in an age of financial
stringency. More issues that can foster linkages include graduate employability, new
modes of IT-based learning, and community relations. Such networking is also clearly
predictable across borders as globalization brings with it new alliances, partnering,
collaboration schemes, and exchanges.
As a concluding and integrating theme in Whitchurch and Gordon’s study, there is
an echo of Barnard’s central lesson about Executive responsibility in managing
complex organizations. For their informants involved in organizational change, the
recurring central theme is willing cooperation.
16 gordon redding
While institutions have taken steps at a structural level to achieve greater
flexibility, designing a new system or adapting an old one to deal with emergent
needs or problems is only half the story. It is also likely to require a discursive
approach that is responsive to the aspirations and initiatives of individuals and
builds on these. An emphasis on the importance of relationships in developing
positive cultures and constructive attitudes was pervasive. (Whitchurch and
Gordon 2017: 159)
Conclusion
All universities will have their own particular environments, reputations, and histories.
Each will set a strategy on its own terms. Because of that uniqueness, this chapter
could not be about specifics. It has instead looked at Executive work in general, seeing
it as a high craft, with onerous duties, but with well-tried and tested principles
underlying its successful practice.
To conclude I reprise certain basic guidelines for the Executive work of managing
the opaque but powerful influences under discussion.
(1) Read the changing environment sensitively and fully, both internally and
externally.
(2) Ensure that the crafting of a mission takes account of the views of all parties with
an interest, but especially those committed to its being practically discharged and
whose livelihoods depend directly on its success.
(3) Ensure that the purposes when expressed are meaningful to their key academic
interpreters, and unifying as ideals across the body of the university staff.
(4) Ensure that the purposes are in tune with societal expectations of the role of
universities.
(5) Do not rely on measurable criteria for results to the exclusion of non-measurable
interpretations. And do not allow the pragmatic use of numbers to destroy
pluralist cross-fertilization of ideas.
(6) Define the purposes in grounded and well as abstract terms.
(7) Ensure that understanding of the purposes penetrates all corners of the university
and its related external institutions.
(8) Live them out in such a way as to provide example, especially moral.
(9) Report regularly and widely on strategic progress.
(10) Communicate constantly and encourage feedback.
managing a university in turbulent times 17
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