Managerialism and Myth: The Legitimacy of Management in Higher Education and the Consequences of its Decline

Abstract

Using a Habermasian framework initially, the article discusses changes in the working lifeworld of academics as a result of colonisation by system imperatives, understood in the sense of a growing instrumentalism to control teaching, learning, assessment and course design. At the same time, ‘crisis tendencies' affecting legitimation can also be detected. Substantive issues include the role of mythical accounts of organisations, both official managerial ones expressed in Change Academy documents, for example, and unofficial ones expressed surreptitiously by academic staff. These include stories about instrumental coping with quality regimes, scathing commentaries on various aspects of managerialism, and a tendency to ‘teach to the test’ (matching student instrumentalism) in order to square the circle of widening intakes without extra resources while maintaining ‘standards’.