Al Mahameed, M., Yates, D. orcid.org/0000-0002-4285-5520 and Gebreiter, F. (2024) Management as ideology: ‘new’ managerialism and the corporate university in the period of COVID-19. Financial Accountability and Management, 40 (1). pp. 34-57. ISSN 0267-4424
Abstract
In this paper, we examine how Covid-19 was utilized by the management of a university as a catalyst for ideological change, with the objective of transforming the ethos of a university management school and the role(s) of the academics employed within. Through new modes of working that maintained corporeal distance between university staff, market-based ideology was mobilized to institute radical and lasting change within the roles of academics and operations of the institution. We focus on a singular case study: “Blue Management School” (BMS, pseudonym), based within an English mid-tier research university which has historically embraced corporatization more readily than most of its peers. We conducted a qualitative analysis of management email communications and from interviews with nine academics (both current and former employees) who were working at BMS during the time concerned (March 2020 onward). We observe that Covid-19 posed significant challenges to corporatized universities, and that university managers at BMS sought to address these challenges by undertaking further steps toward corporatization and mobilizing organizational change legitimized by the need to manage the Covid-19 situation. This included hierarchical forms of accountability, with academics answering for module content to teaching convenors and the management team (“manager academics”). We draw attention to how management communications carried profound effects for the mobilization of ideological change within the institution, during this period. In addition, academic identity was affected, moving away from traditional research and teaching scholars toward revenue-generating customer service workers, facilitating a power shift away from academics and further toward managers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. Financial Accountability & Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
Keywords: | Academic Identity; Covid-19; Higher Education; New Managerialism; Sociology of the Professions |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 15 Feb 2023 14:11 |
Last Modified: | 27 Sep 2024 15:05 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/faam.12359 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:196275 |