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Journal of
Educational The new managerialism in
Administration
40,6
education management:
corporatization or
534
organizational learning?
Heinz-Dieter Meyer
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York, USA
Keywords Mangement, Education, Organizational learning
Abstract During the 1990s, many schools and universities had begun to phase out traditional
forms of educational governance and adopted forms and practices used in private and corporate
management. Yet, the meaning (and implementation) of these changes is contested. Proponents
of the new managerialism in education argue that managerial methods are necessary to respond
to the demands of a changed environment with dramatically increased degrees of uncertainty in a
knowledge-dependent society. Opponents view the new managerialism in the context of capitalist
corporatism penetrating heretofore sacrosanct boundaries of non-market institutions. In this
paper, I argue that the ongoing changes in education management are better understood as
instances of organizational learning in response to the limits of bureaucratic organization in
turbulent environments.

Journal of Educational
Administration,
Vol. 40 No. 6, 2002, pp. 534-551.
# MCB UP Limited, 0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/09578230210446027
Introduction
The corporate values that academic institutions are being urged to adopt ± frequently by
trustees who come by them quite naturally ± often fit uncomfortably into the university
environment. The traditions of the academy strongly favor individuality, creativity, even
heterodoxy. Freedom of action is highly valued. Accountability is viewed as much less
important than independence. The introduction of norms that emphasize hierarchy, team
loyalty, and discipline is difficult, not because they are not worthwhile values, but because
these values are not those deemed especially important for scholarship or teaching. They
create a dissonant kind of bewilderment, if not outright hostility . . . (Kennedy, 2000, p. 284).
A perennial complaint about academic organizations is their near-inability to
change. In the k12 arena, critics like Tyack and Cuban (1995), Sarason (1990),
Tye (2000) and others have shown how even thoughtful innovations have been
defeated over and over again. Higher education's approach to change is aptly
described by Cornford's (1923, p. 32) quip that in universities ``nothing is ever
supposed to happen for the first time''. Universities have been likened to large
freight vessels trying to maneuver in a system of mountain lakes. Kerr's (1972,
p. 102) 1960s finding that change in education is resisted, and, when it happens,
is imposed from outside, still seems like an apt description 30 years later. But
with educational organizations moving closer to the center of knowledge-
dependent societies, many administrators and policy makers find that this
reactive, foot-dragging approach to change is no longer viable. They point out
that to control their fate more directly, schools and colleges must become
entrepreneurial (Clark, 1998) and move beyond bureaucratic organizational
structures to utilize their members' creativity and knowledge more Managerialism
productively. in education
Yet, attempts to move schools or universities towards a more pro-active management
approach to change, meet with resistance. The statement quoted at the head of
this paper by a former president of Stanford University and a thoughtful
observer of the changes in academia, expresses the sentiment shared by many
academics who are skeptical of what they perceive as increasing 535
``corporatization'' of the university. Some even believe that this trend may
ultimately lead to the ruin of the university as a cultural institution organized
around the traditional humanistic disciplines as their core (Readings, 1996, p. 3;
Soley, 1995). As the discord between a managerially-oriented top management
and an academically-oriented faculty is becoming more intense (Freed and
Klugman, 1997; Marginson and Considine, 2001), the divisive potential of the
current changes can easily lead to unproductive stalemates and worse (Julius et
al., 2000). I argue here that the reorientation of universities and schools towards
change can be better understood in the context of wider changes in the world of
organizations. Viewed in this context, it becomes clear that, like all other
complex organizations, schools and universities must rapidly improve their
ability to position themselves pro-actively in more differentiated and turbulent
environments. To do so, they must adopt new organizational structures and
practices and overcome one-sided mental models of an earlier period.

The maturing of organizational discourse in education: from ``loose''

versus ``tight'' coupling to network and hierarchy
Weick and Westley (1996) point out in an interesting recent review of
organizational learning that language is a key medium of learning in
organizations. As the language used by organizational members increases in
variety and specificity, their ability to label, distinguish, and identify increases,
along with their versatility of framing. A group with six words for conflict is
likely to find it easier to manage internal tension than a group with only one
word. But as framing and labeling power increase, we may also lose the sense
of connectedness that a lower degree of linguistic differentiation may have
carried:
Paradoxically we lose some awareness as we increase variety and specificity but such loss is
necessary as we carry on the portioning and labeling that we conceive of as rational or logical
thinking (Weick and Westley, 1996, p. 447).

Applying Weick and Westley (1996) to Weick (1976), we may be able to put an
important chapter of organizational learning into perspective. What kind of
learning does the widespread adoption of the ``loose coupling'' metaphor
throughout the 1970s and 1980s to describe educational organizations express?
What does the metaphor emphasize and what does it disguise?
Not surprisingly, the concept earns a lot of points on the credit side. To begin
with, it emphasizes that certain organizational forms, especially in education,
differ from the norm of a scientifically managed, fully controlled hierarchy. It
Journal of highlights the possibility that organizations are held together not so much by
Educational top-down control but by shared beliefs, norms and institutionalized
Administration expectations. Second, ``loose coupling'' points to the counterintuitive fact that
``looseness'' and stability can, in fact, be compatible. Loosely coupled
40,6 organizations can be durable and stable, sometimes more than we would like.
The concept thus draws attention to the power of culture and
536 institutionalization in the production of organizational stability. Third, it draws
attention to the inevitability of ambiguity and chance in organizations ± two
powerful sources of disorder ± and to the counterintuitive fact that order does
not necessarily result from suppressing or eliminating ambiguity and chance,
but rather from artfully and nimbly harnessing or channeling them.
All this is no small feat for a single concept. Yet, precisely because the ``loose
coupling'' metaphor condenses so much learning that is valuable and
counterintuitive, it also disguises a lot. First, ``loose coupling'' derives its
plausibility from its opposition to ``tight coupling'', thereby steering the
managerial and theoretical imagination into dichotomous channels, as if that
was the only, or the most important design choice. It implies (or was, at least,
interpreted to imply) that loose and tight are an either/or choice, and it took
Peters and Waterman (1982) a whole chapter in their much read In Search of
Excellence to drive home the point that well-managed organizations exhibit
simultaneously loose and tight properties.
Second, it directs action to the symbolic, cultural side of organizations,
which is clearly important, but provides little or no direction on how to align
culture with structure. In fact, questions of structure are, if anything, obscured
by the highly abstract term ``coupling'', which is meant to refer to any kind of
linkage between any kind of organizational ``element'', from schedules, routines,
or policies, to attitudes, norms, and preferences. Also, one can read, with some
justification, a certain nonchalance vis-aÁ-vis questions of efficiency and
effectiveness into the ``loose coupling'' literature, as if a loosely coupled
organization somehow would not need to worry about these.
Last but not least, the ``loose/tight'' language invites a static view of an
organization. An organization either is or is not loosely coupled. It does not
focus attention on the need for change, and the steps that can be taken to make
the organization responsive to environmental changes.
So, while it has taught a lesson that is of lasting importance, especially by
enhancing our imagination about what management and order in organizations
are all about, it has also excluded certain options and issues from view and thus
from action. It has enriched our understanding, but it also has impoverished
our language and retarded further analytical progress by giving the semblance
of explanatory clarity.
Perhaps, most importantly, the dominance of the ``loose/tight coupling''
concept has retarded the search for more fine-grained models of managing
organizational change. A key tenet of organization theory is that as
organizations grow larger and more complex, trust and innovation become
hard to maintain. Trust, however, is the cement that binds the component parts
of an organization (Gambetta, 1988; Fukuyama, 1996), and innovation is a Managerialism
prerequisite to prevent organizational ossification. Without trust, in education
organizational communications reduce to commands that get watered down, management
subverted, or ignored. Without innovation an organization may soon find that
it excels at performing yesterday's tasks.
The significance of the problem is thrown into stark relief if we, for a
moment, contrast the relevant view of Max Weber with those held by 537
organization theorists today. Weber (1946), the fountainhead of the theory of
bureaucracy, understood ± more clearly than he is usually given credit for ±
that bureaucratic organizations, while rational and efficient, were also prone to
``iron cage'' rigidity. Yet, given what he saw as the inevitable rationalization of
all social relations, especially in organizations, Weber saw the ``iron cage''
tendency of organizations as something fated. The only countervailing force
that came into his view was the unpredictable emergence of an exceptional,
charismatic leader, who would be able to rouse members from their
bureaucratic slumber and re-infuse the organization with new goals, passions
and beliefs. Yet, as Weber also saw, the charismatic leader would only
temporarily check a bureaucracy's tendency towards ossification. In due course
the charismatic energy would wane, and the new practices would be
``routinized''. In this see-saw of charismatic innovation and bureaucratic
routinization, the net effect of an organization's struggle to survive was a
matter of providence or luck (Mommsen, 1974).
While the arrival of a great, charismatic genius can provide a temporary
remedy against the iron cage tendency of bureaucracies, contemporary
organizations need more reliable and continuous mechanisms of innovation
and rejuvenation than the vague hope to be shaken up from the top. Corporate
executives, as well as presidents of universities or administrators of school
districts cannot afford the luxury of waiting for a charismatic savior whose
arrival is unpredictable. They need to build mechanisms of innovation into the
everyday organizational processes. And they need to rely on all members of the
organization, not just a charismatic genius, to do the job.

Organizational theory beyond bureaucracy

If leaders of complex organizations today cannot afford to wait for
unpredictable charismatic rejuvenation, their only alternative is to create built-
in mechanisms of innovation. This will require a balance between structure and
culture, organization and institution, tight and loose coupling. Organizational
innovation depends on the ability to steer and direct, while also unleashing
every individual's creative energies.
The organizational discourse beginning in the 1990s reflects this
appreciation that good organizing means balancing inevitable tensions, finding
viable compromises rather than ultimate solutions. Concepts and ideas like
``organizational learning'', ``the entrepreneurial organization'', or ``the network
organization'' reflect an understanding of the need to balance tight and loose,
creative and conservative aspects of the organization. As Weick and Westley
Journal of (1996, p. 440) point out, organizational learning is, strictly speaking, a
Educational contradiction in terms: ``To learn is to disorganize and increase variety. To
Administration organize is to forget and reduce variety''. The ideas of ``network organization''
and ``entrepreneurial organization'' express similar balance of tension between
40,6 spontaneous and rational forces of an organization.
The turn away from the either/or of tight versus loose coupling was aided
538 significantly by several innovations in organizational theory that emerged in
the 1980s. Transaction cost analysis showed that there is no rigid separation
between the world of organizations and that of markets. Instead, market
mechanisms are operative in organizations, and markets are shot through with
organizational structures (Williamson, 1985). Progress in the sophistication of
network analysis made it even more evident that substantial amounts of
organizational communication and creative interaction are carried out through
informal channels, beyond the direct control of management (Powell, 1990;
Nohria and Eccles, 1992; Heckscher, 1994). Conceptually, networks are
positioned halfway between structure and culture. They are patterned, but held
together not by central formal authority, but by myriad informal social, moral,
and occupational ties. Communities of practice emerge and communicate
through networks. While a bureaucracy is a communication structure that
practices ``one size fits all'', a network organization is a flexible communication
structure that changes with the task and project.
Last not least, the spontaneous order literature (Fukuyama, 1999, pp. 168-
211) shows that people, if left to themselves, will often create order
spontaneously. Thus, not every form of organization is the result of top-down
coordination. This is the basis for the ideas of self-organization and complexity
theory that have risen to prominence in organizational theory.

Summing up
In light of the pros and cons of the ``loose coupling'' terminology, Rowan (1995,
p. 12) was probably right to suggest several years ago that ``a continued
fascination with loose coupling may be outdated''. In his masterful review of
design options in educational organizations, he found evidence that schools
used both mechanistic and organic design options, but concluded that as task
complexity increases, the organic type becomes more adequate.
In what follows, I review organizational developments in (mostly higher)
education that reflect a shift to a more integrated, simultaneously loose and
tightly coupled organizational practice. Among these are stronger central
organizational steerage and a shift to strategic management, an increased use
of cross-cutting organizational units (such as research centers), team forms of
organization, competitive, incentive-based funding, and attempts to empower
the ``customers'' of colleges and universities, especially students. None of these
changes are easy to implement in an environment whose main institutional
pillars are autonomous professor-researchers used to self-directed work and
prone to perceive any external mandate as threats to their independence.
A greater capacity to steer ± the advent of strategic management in Managerialism
higher education in education
As knowledge-intensive products and services represent an increasing share of management
economic growth, a nation's training and education system assumes a central
role in its national innovation system. While higher education must continue to
produce scholarship and learning in the fields of its traditional strengths
(humanities, pure sciences), it is also becoming more immediately ``relevant'' 539
than ever before. Balderston (1990, p. 35) had already suggested in 1990 that
the traditional ``leisurely'' sequence for the creation of new knowledge (``from
basic research to applied research to development to commercial introduction'')
was giving way to a more compressed sequence where distinctions between the
steps was blurred or lost. He also suggested that new research might
increasingly be prompted by practical problems requiring interdisciplinary
cooperation (Balderston, 1990, p. 36). Economists have pointed out that higher
education can create positive externalities that make it an engine of economic
and social growth through its role in software engineering, business research
and education, the development of new legal instruments that provide better
incentives to innovation, and, first and foremost, the forming of minds able to
cooperate in the creation and discovery of new knowledge in all spheres of
society (Stiglitz, 1999).

A proliferation of niches
Corresponding to higher education's new relevance is a demand for greater
accountability. Rising costs, public retrenchment, along with the multiplication
of stakeholders, has caused a breakdown of traditional funding schemes
(federal research money plus channeling undergraduate tuition to fund
graduate training in the USA; public taxation in Europe and other parts of the
developed world). Universities are no longer solely accountable to elite power
holders (national governments or elite boards of trustees), but to a diverse
constituency of business, professional, and political interests. As higher
education institutions engage in exchanges with all of these groups, they need
to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness in their use of resources. In
addition, they need to respond flexibly to new ideas and opportunities, and
improve their efficiency in the allocation of resources. Finally, as a stable,
homogeneous environment gives way to a turbulent and heterogeneous one,
the proliferation of specialized higher education niches offers new resources to
new types of educational organizations. Hanna (2001) has written about the
emergence of several new types of universities. In addition to the traditional
university, he anticipates:
. for-profit, adult-centered universities;
. distance-based universities;
. corporate universities;
. university/industry strategic alliances;
Journal of . certification competency-based universities;
Educational . global multinational universities; and, of course,
Administration . any mix of these types.
40,6
Institutions of higher education must make deliberate decisions regarding
which niche(s) to occupy and compete in.
540
A strategic view of the institution
Confronted with a more differentiated and faster changing environment,
institutions of higher education must act more deliberately and purposefully.
Yet, strategic action requires a degree of central steerage and organizational
unity for which the university, with its tradition of weak central governance
and collegial (consensual) form of decision making has typically been ill
equipped. Moreover, the pace of action has quickened:
. . . the kind of change now demanded of academic institutions calls for altering aspects of
identity and image within dramatically shorter time horizons (Goia and Thomas, 1996, p. 398).

Another consequence of the strategic approach to university development is

the notion that not all units of the university are created equal. As one
university president put it:
You can't treat all these departments and programs equally. You begin to make some
judgments about those areas that are strong and ought to continue to be strong, those areas
that are weak and need to be strengthened, those areas that are weak and should be left with
benign neglect, and those areas that are actually going to disappear (Goia and Thomas, 1996,
p. 378).

As management scholars have pointed out, the task of strategic management

arises from the need of boundary setting. As long as educational organizations
operate in stable environments, there is no need to think strategically about
how to define the organization's boundaries. But as educational organizations
begin to operate in volatile and turbulent environments, and as ``higher
education'' comes to take on a rainbow of meanings, university leaders need to
define and redefine what kind of activities should be ``inside'' or ``outside'' the
organization's boundaries. Central administrators whose main task used to be
to negotiate and oversee the budget, now engage in decision making about the
university's aspiration level in terms of selectivity and visibility, its core
competencies (``selective excellence''), its long-term mission, and short-term
goals as they identify key competitors and allies.
To implement strategic goals, post-bureaucratic management uses two key
tools: allocation of resources based on internal competition, plus contracts and
performance reviews. A steadily increasing part of the resources received by
individuals and departments in the university is soft money for which they
have to compete with other units of the university (Marginson and Considine,
2001). This mechanism replaces the traditional bargaining between
departments and central administration in which departments typically used
the double strategy of promises (``we will do X if we receive the money'') and
threats (``we won't be able to keep scholar Y if we don't get the money'') (see Managerialism
James, 1990, pp. 77-107). While the ``threats-and-promises'' bargaining favored in education
the strong departments without giving central administration much control management
over the actual use of funds, the competitive funding mechanism shifts
bargaining power in favor of the central administration, but also opens the door
for smaller departments to attract funds.
A second set of steering mechanisms, which the new managerialism in 541
education has borrowed from its cousin in public administration (where it runs
under ``new public management'') includes tighter relations between central
administration and university departments through negotiated contracts,
performance measures, performance reviews, and contingent budgets (see
Kreysing, this volume, for an example of the use of these strategies in German
higher education). Departments are requested to define strategic targets, which
may be modified in negotiations with the central administration. Eventually
they receive budgetary allocations based on the money needed to achieve the
negotiated targets. Renewed funding, however, is contingent on the degree to
which the department actually ``delivered'' on its targeted performance.
Of course, the use of performance indicators is not as unproblematic as this
description might suggest. First of all, since no contract can spell out all
possible contingencies, there are always ways to rationalize the non-
achievement of previous performance targets. Second, departments might
define their goals very conservatively in an attempt to prevent future funding
cuts. Finally, given the plethora of possible performance indicators, it can be
difficult to settle on meaningful ones. A study by Burke and Serban (1997)
explored the difficulties experienced by states in implementing performance-
based funding initiatives. The three main difficulties cited by policy makers,
administrators, and faculty leaders were:
(1) the selection of indicators;
(2) the selection of ``success'' criteria; and
(3) small amount of funding allocated to the initiative.
Their inherent ambiguities notwithstanding, for any of the above methods to
work well, the university needs much improved methods to analyze the data it
collects, and to collect the data it generates. On both fronts many institutions of
higher education have traditionally practiced ``muddle through''. Data have
been collected and stored in dedicated, non-communicating information
systems so that, for example, budget data cannot readily be related to
enrollment or performance data. On the departmental level, the information
necessary to make informed decisions often exists in scattered paper files and
as tacit knowledge of long-serving administrators. Needless to say that either
form of information management is not only slow and cumbersome, but also
highly vulnerable to personnel turnover and change. To address these
problems, many universities have established the office of ``chief information
Journal of officer (CIO)'', in charge of the universities' information and knowledge
Educational management.
Administration As the above examples suggest, the important part of strategic behavior in
the academy is the process of deliberate planning and reflection, not the
40,6 production of reams of planning documents few people read. Dwight
Eisenhower put it succinctly when he said that plans are bad, but planning is
542 good (quoted in Ringle and Updegrove, 1998).

Entrepreneurial department management and new forms of

decision making
While the new managerialism clearly requires greater central steering capacity,
strengthening the institution at the top must be balanced by expanded
discretion and more entrepreneurialism at the level of the operating units:
departments and schools. In other words: the newfound strength at the top
must be matched with a newly-invigorated spirit of entrepreneurial
management at the department level. This raises issues about the viability of
traditional collegial university governance methods that have been the default
method of administration in universities for centuries.
There is little doubt that collegial self-government has served the university
well during times in which it had to defend its autonomy against theocratic
ambition and political overreach. More importantly, collegial governance has
been well adapted to conditions where (research-based) prestige maximization
was the main or sole organizational objective of higher education institutions.
Under those conditions, independent faculty who pursue their prestige
maximizing self-interests contribute much like Adam Smith's market-goers
indirectly but effectively to the overall goal of the institution.
But in an environment in which prestige maximization is no longer the sole
goal of all higher education (at least not in the classical sense of research-based
prestige), where teaching and educational quality, local and regional service,
and direct commercial success come to matter as well, collegial governance
exhibits some key weaknesses. Most notable among these is the fact that it is a
very poor instrument to engage the faculty as a whole in the process of pro-
active change. Collegial bodies are poorly equipped to probe and explore issues
in depth. The assumption of equality and the assumption of collegial distance
and respect discourage individual initiative and risk taking. At its least
productive, collegial administration consists in voicing views at meetings.
Massy et al. (2000, p. 32) call this ``hollowed collegiality'', which:
. . . remains thwarted with regard to faculty engagement with issues of curricular structure,
pedagogical alternatives, and student assessment.

From the vantage point of an innovation- and learning-oriented organization,

collegial decision making exhibits several characteristic shortcomings:
(1) Collegial management is ``management by committee''. Committees act
much like courts of law. They do not become active unless prompted by
outside events. They are good at adjudicating issues that are brought to
 them, but have a hard time looking into the future, and pursuing a self- Managerialism
defined agenda pro-actively. in education
(2) The operating unit under collegial administration is the individual management
faculty member, not the department.
(3) The collegial decision mode aims at finding the ``smallest common
denominator'' among quasi-autonomous individuals, rather than fully 543
reviewing and responding to the challenges of the situation.
(4) The norm of collegial decision making is ``debate to consensus''. Since
consensus is an extremely demanding decision-making standard,
committees and departments are known to employ decision-making
shortcuts such as:
. turf (``you got your course, I got mine'');
. reciprocal ``grace and favor'' (``I back your candidate, if you back
mine''); and
. one man, one veto (``one `no' unseats a thousand `yeses''').
In sharp contrast to its avowed purpose, collegial self-government in the
academy vastly underutilizes the knowledge and expertise of the faculty as a
whole. Under such a system the whole is less than the sum of its parts, as the
parts (= individual professors) jealously watch to ensure that ``the whole'' will
not interfere with their autonomy.
These shortcomings of traditional decision making have prompted some
departments and universities to complement collegial department
administration with team-based collaboration. In contrast to committees, teams
are formed around specific goals and projects, and membership is typically
voluntary. Whereas committees behave like courts of law, teams behave like
platoons. The goal is not to curtail faculty's autonomy, but to increase their
ability to engage in collective problem solving and cooperation. Collegial
administration provides no incentives and many disincentives for a faculty to
move beyond a loose aggregation of self-sufficient professor-barons and to pro-
actively map out the direction and steps of their adaptation and renewal. To
move in that direction, some universities have begun to complement collegial
decision making with forms of managerial or executive decision making. As
part of this change, departments try to make teaching, research, and service the
subject of collective dialog, inquiry, and practice, and reward departments as
teams (Hecht et al., 1999, pp. 120, 123). Some have also purposefully redefined
committee work:
We have what is called the uncommittee. This group is a reading group like a literary circle.
. . . There are over 300 people involved in the uncommittee. It becomes a way of exchanging
ideas (Hecht et al., 1999, p. 56).

The key to a shift to a team-based department, however, is the redefinition of

the role of department chair.
Journal of New demands on departmental leadership
Educational Consider the requirements of departmental management from the vantage
Administration point of a post-bureaucratic, knowledge-driven organization. As Hecht et al.
1999, p. 3) point out in their study of the department chair as an ``academic
40,6 leader'', the academic department is rapidly changing from higher education's
quiet backwater to a central locus of change. This requires, among other things,
544 that departments change the way they approach some of their traditional tasks,
as well as assume some new ones. Changes among traditional tasks include:
. Curriculum and teaching. Content, method, and delivery format of a
department's teaching are redefined as a department faculty's ``collective
responsibility''. In light of the pace of knowledge creation and the
growing diversity of learners, including adult, distance, and part-time
students, traditional assumptions about curriculum reviews once every
decade or so are giving way to a system of continuous (institutionalized)
reviews and renewal. ``Departments must . . . keep their curricula under
review'' and ``think together about issues of pedagogy, consciously
building the skills of each faculty member . . . '' (Hecht et al., 1999, p. 152).
Kennedy (2000, p. 286) believes that departments and schools need to
``give up the idea that [they] have only minimum collective responsibility
for the outcome'' of their teaching and service.
. Data-based decision making. Using the resources of the new information
systems, departments can provide all members with instant access to all
relevant administrative data. Whereas access to such data has
previously been limited to a few superiors, information can now be
widely shared and continuously updated.
. Recruitment/admissions. The recruitment of new faculty as well as the
selection of new graduate students are two of the most powerful tools a
department can use to manage its agenda and culture. The recruitment
of doctoral students is hardly less significant than the recruitment of
new faculty, as good graduate students can affect the department's
culture as much as new assistant professors. Their ``time-to-evaluation''
is not much shorter. This suggests that both recruitment categories be
approached strategically and pro-actively.
The entrepreneurial department also confronts a host of new tasks, including
managing discretionary funds, planning, and public relations:
. Discretionary resources. To increase a department's autonomy and to
expand its scope of strategic options, many universities are increasing
departments' discretionary funds to be used as performance incentives,
for increased leverage in recruitment efforts, to purchase expert and
consulting services, professional development, marketing, and physical
equipment.
. Long-term planning. Departments must determine how to generate
needed resources, how to allocate the scarce resources they have,
 whether to move into new, emerging markets, and a host of other Managerialism
questions. in education
. External relations. Most academic departments are engaged with a large management
number of constituents: alumni, business, educational, and legal
communities, foundations, sponsors, media, local, state, and federal
government. The relations with these constituents must be carefully
crafted and nourished, requiring a degree of activism and 545
entrepreneurship that goes well beyond the reach of old-style
collegiality.

The faculty team

An important part of the new department leadership is the cultivation of
teamwork. Rather than bringing all decisions, big and small, in front of the
body of ultimate authority, managerial department leaders are asking different
working groups (including small groups, ad hoc committees, project teams) to
explore issues, build cases, or develop scenarios, thereby moving a department
from talk to analysis, deliberation, and action. This requires a strengthened
executive for day-to-day decisions, which can and must be offset by new
standards of transparency. Executive leadership means that the collegial
fiction of equal and universal involvement is replaced by a practice of
differential tapping department members' varied expertise. Specialization and
division of labor take place, individual faculty are consulted based on their
expertise, but all are kept ``in the loop'', and all vote on strategic decisions once
they have come to maturity.
As the department's manager/chairperson evolves from figurehead and
placeholder to coach and proactive facilitator of a department's strategic
change, the creation of a culture of trust, cooperation, and transparency become
part of the job description. To the extent that not all faculty are involved in the
exploratory stage of every decision, the need for overall trusting relations
increases. Under collegial administration, relations among faculty and staff are
often arms-length. Under the new conditions, the creation of a cohesive
departmental community becomes part of the organizational agenda, and
cohesion-building events like informal meetings, retreats, and lunches part of
the routine.
As pointed out, all this is predicated on widely increased transparency. The
groups and subgroups, committees, teams, etc., can conduct their work in a
``virtual glasshouse'', making it transparent to all other organizational members
at all stages (a task greatly simplified by e-mail), and welcoming their
unsolicited input. The use of the full collegial body is reserved, like the full
sessions of parliament, to debate issues of strategic direction and to decide on
major policy questions. These practices strengthen the constructive elements of
collegiality and minimize its paralyzing ones. Instead of curtailing the power of
the faculty, managerial governance can enhance and strengthen it.
Last but not least: the strengthened position of the department chair requires
greater support by colleagues and staff than she/he has traditionally been
Journal of given. First, in the new, faster-paced decision environment neither single
Educational department chairs nor the entire faculty are well equipped to explore the
Administration viability of new ideas and new ventures. A better configuration might be a
leadership group, which might consist of the chair and a few additional faculty
40,6 members who can be easily convened for quick consultations and decisions. In
addition to broadening the base for the department's daily management, this
546 group would also serve as administrative training ground of less experienced
members and spread leadership skills around the department more widely.
In a similar vein, the department's leadership requires greater staff support.
To research issues, manage and analyze data, initiate or shepherd grant
proposals, maintain public relations, maintain and increase Web-presence, and
for a host of other activities, the department chair will frequently need a staff
that exceeds the occasional help from a secretary or graduate student. A
competent, permanent or semi-permanent staff seems inescapable.

Less hierarchy, more network in teaching and learning

Above I have discussed how more post-bureaucratic methods of management
is changing behavior of central and departmental administration in higher
education. But what about the classroom? How do post-bureaucratic
organizational practices affect traditional modes of teaching and learning?
To begin with, universities have traditionally been hard-pressed to direct the
development of teaching content and improvement. James (1990, p. 102)
speculates that this may be because teaching is more easily controlled by
regulations, while research is more easily controlled via incentives:
(T)eaching inputs and research outputs are more easily observed than teaching outputs and
research inputs.
In addition, traditional modes of teaching and learning have privileged the
individual teacher over the team of peers and explicit over tacit knowledge.
While many professionals ± surgeons, lawyers, engineers ± carry out their
practice under the watchful eye of their peers or the public, ``professors conduct
their practice as teachers in private'' (Palmer, 2000, p. 27). Palmer argues that
this kind of privatization creates ``institutional incompetence'':
By privatizing teaching we make it next to impossible for the academy to become more adept
at its teaching mission (Palmer, 2000, p. 27).

Shulman (2000, p. 24) concurs: ``We experience isolation not in the stacks, but in
the classroom.'' He proposes to change the status of teaching from private to
``community property'' by connecting it more strongly to the disciplinary
discourse. Shulman also suggests that universities make teaching a matter of
peer review, and that they use teaching portfolios or student exhibits that make
the results of teaching publicly visible.

Cultivating tacit knowledge

Schon (1983) has argued that privileging of explicit (``technical'') over tacit
(intuitive/experiential) knowledge results from a false epistemology that places
the former above the latter. For example, if teachers are trained almost Managerialism
exclusively in the university classroom as opposed to the schoolroom, it in education
conveys the message that anything they might learn in practice is incidental management
and trivial. Yet, a moment's reflection shows that a significant portion of a
teacher's ``working knowledge'' is tacit.
If we categorize teacher knowledge by degree of explicitness (Figure 1), we
can distinguish between: 547
. Subject matter knowledge (math, English, science, etc.), which is highly
explicit.
. Pedagogical knowledge (the ability to present ``content'' in ways that
helps novices understand it) which relies on a mix of explicit and tacit
knowledge.
. Situational knowledge (of students, parents, the community, one's
colleagues, cultural currents, etc.), which is largely tacit (see also Torff,
1999).
A more balanced consideration of explicit and tacit knowledge requires a series
of mental shifts:
. From teaching and learning as individual to teaching and learning as
social processes.
. From teaching as diffusion to teaching as production of knowledge.
Teaching that involves no discovery, and learning that involves no
teaching are not likely to improve the students' competence to discover,
create, and share new knowledge.
. From an exclusive focus on explicit knowledge to a new balance
between explicit and tacit knowledge (learning what and learning how).
. From sporadic/haphazard improvement of teaching to continuous
improvement.
Even though teaching in schools and colleges takes place in large classrooms,
the normative mental model of teaching is still the relation between individual
instructor and student. If there is more than one student in the classroom, it is
to achieve economies of scale, not because teaching and learning are
understood as social, collective processes (Bruner, 1996). Learning, too, is
conceived as an individual activity, taking place inside a student's head. The
assumption is that learning is an activity that results from the interaction
between an individual student's mind and the large inventories of knowledge

Figure 1.
A typology of teacher
knowledge
Journal of placed in front of him by the teacher. In truth, teaching and learning are social
Educational processes, not only in the sense that they take place in a social setting called
Administration school or college, but also in the sense that a learner's mind is a social
construction, and learning a conversation more than a process of sending and
40,6 receiving information.
Learning involves a reorganization of a person's mental models (Lakoff,
548 1980). Good teachers know how to use metaphors and analogies to make
complex things simple. This is very similar to what Bruner (1960), described in
his landmark book ``the process of education'', and what Dewey (1910)
described as ``experimental learning''. Students who have learned how to create
knowledge will, in addition to learning a particular subject matter, become self-
directed learners, skilled in the use of a variety of problem-solving heuristics.

A plurality of learning modes

According to Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), the four possible combinations of
explicit and tacit knowledge produce different types of knowledge conversion.
Applied to teaching, this typology suggests a greater appreciation of the range
and diversity of teaching and learning modes, in addition to the default practice
of lecturing. Rather than privileging the professor, student mode of learning,
teachers may also want to use the master-apprentice or the peer-learning
model.
Types of knowledge conversion and modalities of learning are:
. Explicit ± Explicit: textbook knowledge; lecture, reading, etc.
. Tacit ± Tacit: problem solving heuristics, the ``how to'' of writing, data
collecting; workshop, master-apprentice model.
. Tacit ± Explicit: joint discovery of teacher and students; peer learning,
discussion, the seminar.
. Explicit ± Tacit: internalization/memorization; recitation and rote
learning.
As Sogen Hori (1998) has argued, even the much maligned rote learning may
have a legitimate place among the variety of learning modalities. Good
teaching is largely a result of our ability to manage the full range of knowledge
conversions, a process that does not work well in the hierarchical context of
supervision and control. All the more important that teachers are beginning to
share and develop their skill and knowledge in self-organized ``community of
practice'' networks in which they can process and reflect their experience in
conversations with peer practitioners, rather than suffering colonization at the
hands of explicit-knowledge-focused education researchers.

Conclusion
A strong formal education is becoming a prerequisite for an increasingly large
number of careers and occupations, including some that until recently were
considered vocational. Driven by globalization and new information
technologies, public retrenchment and a dramatic increase in knowledge-rich Managerialism
companies, higher education institutions no longer enjoy the quasi- in education
monopolistic position of the past. The Internet provides students in every management
corner of the world with instant transparency and comparability of their
educational choices. This represents a drastic shift in the power balance
between the university and its clients, to which universities have to respond
with more flexible and more resource-efficient education and training 549
programs. The increased sovereignty of their student-customers means that
colleges and universities no longer benefit from lock-in effects, which left
students little choice but to accept program and degree requirements as defined
by the university. In addition, higher education institutions are now the
primary host for the dramatically expanded group of lifelong learners, in which
role they have to adapt to a fast growing number of ``non-traditional'' students.
For schools and universities to play a leading role in the shift to a
knowledge-based society they need to expand and accelerate their capacity for
organizational learning. This requires, first and foremost, the ability to balance
the conflicting imperatives of stability and change, central strategic leadership
and bottom-up entrepreneurship, individual autonomy, and collective
cooperation. The organizational practices and structures needed to accomplish
this balancing act certainly differ a good deal from the traditional model of a
central administration overseeing an array of small academic workshops. It is
``loosely'' as well as ``tightly'' coupled, steered as well as facilitated. But the
ensuing process is far more complex than the idea of an imitation of ``business
models'' would suggest. It involves the ability to juggle diverse demands,
choose wisely among conflicting imperatives, and resist the temptation for
slogan solutions. While the task is not dissimilar to that of leading a large
corporation through the whitewaters of change, it takes place in a social sphere
with deep-rooted traditions and a distinct culture, which, like any
organizational culture, is a fact to reckon with, rather than a relic to destroy.
Management of higher education, and educational organizations in general,
will have to become as sophisticated and knowledgeable as the best
management in the corporate world. Still, managers of schools and universities
will not succeed if they simply imitate the practices of their peers in business.
To the contrary: to the extent that educational institutions change effectively,
they may end up reversing the flow of innovations and produce genuine
innovations that business organizations will be eager to adopt.

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