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The aim of this study is to assess the managerial practices in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) higher education sector through the lens of “new managerialism”.

An extensive review of new managerialism literature in higher education was conducted to develop a structured survey questionnaire. Using 176 useable responses obtained from the country-wide survey of academic staff, the underlying factor structure of new managerialism was first established using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and then ANOVA was carried out to check whether there existed any difference in the six factors as well as for the individual items within each factor across the three types of Universities in the UAE, namely public universities, private-local owned universities and private-foreign owned universities.

The study unearthed a six-factor framework (monitoring and evaluation, transparency, bureaucracy, stakeholder engagement, research productivity and academic freedom and flexibility) of new managerialism comprising of 20 managerial practices. Of the six factors, significant difference was found for bureaucracy, stakeholder engagement and academic freedom and flexibility across different types of universities.

In terms of novelty, the study is the first attempt to explore new managerialism in higher education in the Middle Eastern context.

During the last 20 years, there has been an explosion in the production and dissemination of a number of highly popular managerial concepts. These initiatives, such as TQM and BPR, highlight a number of themes. Refers to these new movements as “new managerialism”, supported by new institutional frameworks which all act as sources and bearers of management knowledge upon which, in part, professional managers draw for practical guidance. Uses Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods to argue that new managerialism is a discourse on a grand scale as well as emerging and dispersing locally, occurring in everyday talk and text, or “discourse”. According to Foucault, one of the effects of grand scale new managerialism is that it exerts a disciplinary gaze over managers who are immersed in its knowledges, and who seek to follow its guidelines to achieve “best practice”. As leaders, this best practice relies on the utilisation of “charisma”. Using interpretive repertoires, a method that is sympathetic to this approach, analyses the talk of two everyday managers who describe their roles as leaders, as well as a group of employees, or “followers”, and notes the importance of “charisma” in their accounts. Shows how the projection of a charismatic identity is central both accounts, and suggests that the individuals studied are subject to a charismatic gaze.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

There have been profound changes in the Portuguese national health system (NHS), instigated under the influence of managerialism and the new public management (NPM) “philosophy”. These changes have been in line with what has happened in other developed countries. At the beginning of the new century, important reforms that emphasised the efficient use of scarce resources were implemented. The objective of this study is to understand how nurses are adapting to a more managerial environment, one in which economic rationalism and market‐driven initiatives are the key principles behind the health reforms.

A qualitative study was developed, based on semi‐structured interviews with 83 nurses with managerial duties in ten hospitals in Portugal. All interviews were tape‐recorded and each interviewee's discourses were subjected to content analysis.

Data analysis led to the conclusion that under the new logic of the market and managerialism, these professionals have tried to (re)define their professionalisation route by emphasising the importance of care but also by trying to incorporate management as their dominant role in the social division of work. In reconfiguring their notion of professionalism, nurses were incorporating new practices in their day‐to‐day activities. This empirical study confirms that professionalism can also be conceptualised as a technology of self‐control being able to discipline professionals at the micro level.

This research is an empirical study based on the effects of managerialism on nurses with managerial duties in Portugal. This study contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of the professionalisation of nurses in a context of institutional change.

There has been a global phenomenon in public sector management which advocates a paradigm shift from administrative to managerial values. Governments have been able to put an ideological gloss on managerial strategies to suit local political agendas. The spread of this policy, where public servants have their roles transformed to managers and the public to customers, serves to strengthen demonstration of the diminishing role of government and the increasing reliance on the market. Through our research on managerialism in local government in Victoria, we show that there has been a repackaging of the senior council manager into an idealised private sector version. However, we identify a paradox between the rhetoric of the empowered, entrepreneurial “new public manager” and the reality of intensified government control and scrutiny over municipal activities and conclude that “new public management” in Victorian local government is illusory or, at best, incomplete.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the reasons and circumstances why strategic change initiatives based on new public management and managerialism go wrong. In particular, how such change initiatives are being justified, communicated, perceived, and implemented within organisational discourses and politics. It reveals personal and group interests behind ideologies, and what change management of this type is really about.

A strategic change initiative at a large Western‐European university (“International University” – IU) had been investigated between 2004 and 2005 based on qualitative empirical research. Data were gained primarily through semi‐structured in‐depths interviews with IU's senior managers. The findings were triangulated by referring to internal documents and academic literature.

The case study reveals a whole set of typical characteristics of managerialistic change management approach and how it is communicated. The paper provides insights into the narratives, organisational politics and ideology of change management processes. It draws the attention to the downsides of top‐down change management approaches, to ideologies and interests behind such initiatives as well as intended and unintended consequences.

Academics and practitioners might be motivated to concentrate (more) on the values, ideologies, and interests which are behind “rational” management recipes, to see management and organisational behaviour more differentiated and from a critical perspective.

Organisational change management is usually described on the basis of traditional strategy approaches and concentrates on “technical issues”. By drawing the attention to senior managers' perceptions and interests, and how they pursuit change management objectives on the basis of ideologies, it becomes clearer that allegedly “rational” and “objective” strategic solutions are contested terrain and objects of organisational politics.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of new managerialism on junior academic‐managers (defined as those having informal leadership or management roles below the level of head of department). It aims to discover: whether junior academic‐managers experience the same tensions as Heads of Department; whether distributed leadership is possible and/or desirable in Higher Education; and what types of support junior academic‐managers might welcome.

The paper draws upon previous literature and a small case study of one university department in a mid‐ranking UK university.

Junior academic‐managers experience similar kinds of tensions to heads of department. Although distributed leadership is considered a necessity in higher education, in practice, devolved leadership is more common than genuinely distributed leadership. Junior academic‐managers would benefit from the same types of support as heads of department, but increased administrative assistance would be particularly helpful. Some, though not all, of the tensions felt by both groups could be alleviated if higher education institutions (HEIs) adopted a modified form of workforce remodelling, similar to that being implemented in English and Welsh schools.

The empirical data come from within one department of one university. It is debatable how far the findings of this study are generalizable to other contexts.

There are relatively few studies looking at academic heads of department, and virtually none looking at junior academic‐managers. The argument that school workforce remodelling might be adapted for the HE sector is not made elsewhere.

This paper aims to explore the themes of professionalism and managerialism in how academics in England talk about their work in universities today. The aim is to examine how academics represent their work and to identify what kind of identifications they make in the process. In doing so, it is hoped to shed some light on how academics can position themselves in relation to managerialism in the English academy, while also exploring the value of a particular methodological approach to doing so.

The paper employs Fairclough's approach to textual analysis in analysing extracts from interview data as part of a critical discourse analysis of the work of academics in universities in England at a particular time.

The paper suggests that individual academics in middle ranking positions do not identify in a straightforward way either with managerialism or professionalism. Instead they perform ambiguous, ambivalent, complex and fluid positionings of the self in relation to the themes of managerialism and professionalism.

The paper demonstrates that the use of Fairclough's approach to textual analysis can provide a rich picture of individual social positionings from relatively short extracts of interview data.

This book was written across a period of intense turmoil and change in higher education in Australia and England. We are deeply unsettled by these changes and wish to open up the discussion about what it means to be an academic and engage in academic work in the 21st century. Accordingly, each of the authors has nominated a theme or lens through which to examine the changes, tensions and uncertainties that have erupted in higher education. Thus, we offer this book as a constellation of ideas that traverse a number of aspects of our work and identities as academics. The overlap between these ideas is deliberate so that the multiple and complex challenges that underpin the higher education landscape can be examined.