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
20
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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
Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education
21
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:
N
N
N
N
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:
Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education
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23
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
Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education
25
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.
Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education
27
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-Mörling, 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
Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education
29
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
Conceptualising Middle Management in Higher Education
31
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.
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