Middle managers’ experience of policy implementation and mediation in the context of the Scottish quality enhancement framework

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This is the Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in

Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 40(1), pp. 135-150, published online on

6 March 2014, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2014.892056

Middle managers' experience of policy implementation and mediation in the

context of the Scottish Quality Enhancement Framework

Murray Saunders, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University & Cristina Sin, Centre

for Research in Higher Education Policies, Portugal

This paper analyses how middle managers perform and experience their role in enacting policy in

Scottish higher education institutions. The policy focus is the Quality Enhancement Framework

(QEF) for learning and teaching in higher education which was launched in 2003. The dataset was

collected between 2008 and 2010 during the evaluation of the QEF by means of focus groups with

middle managers at nine Scottish institutions. The metaphor of a policy implementation staircase helps

to situate middle managers’ position in enactment and analyse their experience of the role. Despite the

values of collegiality and ownership upheld by the QEF, middle managers’ accounts of their practices

reveal that their position at the interface between university management and core academic activities

continues to be a delicate one, marked by contradictory allegiances to institutional strategies and the

concerns of academic colleagues. While emphasising middle managers’ pivotal role in the

implementation of the QEF policy, the data paradoxically suggests that the systemic positioning of

middle managers is more influential in shaping their role of mediation than the values of collegiality

and ownership promoted by this enhancement approach to quality specific to Scotland.

Keywords: middle managers; Quality Enhancement Framework; quality assessment;

evaluation; policy implementation.

Introduction: the distinctiveness of the QEF

The focus for this paper is drawn from middle managers’1 experience of policy mediation

within the Quality Enhancement Framework (QEF), a policy aimed at enhancing learning,

teaching and assessment in the Scottish university sector. The emphasis lies on the middle

managers’ experience and strategies as they broker policy messages at this ‘street level’. The

data, collected with the primary aim of evaluating this group’s experience of policy, also

enables a depiction of the tensions and challenges of middle manager practices as they

mediate the imperatives derived from external pressures while, at the same time, remain a

member of a collegiate group of disciplinary practice. The added interest in this depiction is 1 We use this term as a catch-all for the departmental head layer of managerial responsibility although it was not used by those who formed the focus of this research. While the role of head of department was known, there were other designations such as courses director or head of school, which on examination, approximated this layer (a mediating layer between university administration and management and disciplinary colleagues)

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that the central policy messages of ownership and collegiality promoted by the QEF are lost in

the struggle to mediate imperatives which continue to be experienced, at departmental level,

as external and distant from the ‘front-line’.

These broad findings suggest a contradiction between the stubbornly hierarchic nature of

policy implementation processes and the policy messages themselves. The QEF was

conceived as a policy with some unique characteristics, rooted in an emerging HE sector

identity, intentionally nurtured and encouraged as part of a devolved educational and social

policy culture. From its inception in 2003, the QEF, coordinated by the Scottish Funding

Council (SFC) with the participation of the Scottish universities themselves, emphasised

'enhancement' rather than 'assurance' in its approach to the quality of university teaching and

learning, further to awareness by national stakeholders of disgruntlement with quality

assurance processes, which was quite common in the UK (Saunders et al. 2006, 5). Scotland

had the advantage that its self-governing system comprised just twenty higher education

institutions and that control of higher education was located with the Scottish Assembly (now

the Scottish Government). This made it possible to assemble a distinctively Scottish

alternative to current quality assurance practices, an alternative that attempted to set itself

apart from an overly managerial approach to quality management and development and to

build on a strong sense of appropriateness, pragmatism and collegiality (Saunders et al.

2006). This approach was welcomed by the sector as an improvement on the previous,

assurance-based engagement between the Scottish universities and their national sponsors.

Most importantly, unlike many policies or programmes, the QEF in Scotland had a built-in

implementation reality that set it apart from its international neighbours. The evaluations of

policy enactment (see Saunders et al. 2006, 2009) suggested that what emerged was ‘home-

grown’ but not ‘home-spun’. Scottish, certainly, but based on the pooling of expertise and

knowledge of literatures on teaching, learning, change and quality from a wide range of

sources, all shot through with a commitment to enhancing students’ experiences as learners.

The evaluations termed the theory of change which emerged as one of ‘consensual

development’. However, this paper suggests that the experience of ‘consensual development’

did not reach the ‘front-line’ and that the mediating role of middle managers continue to focus

on systemic tensions.

Overall, in combining a more developmental approach to institutional review, greater student

involvement, a focus on teaching and learning themes and responsiveness to feedback and

experience, the QEF promised a step-change in the way quality processes were understood

and practised within the sector. However, this paper suggests that the significance of the step-

change is likely to differ according to the stake-holding group. Specifically, here we aim to

depict the experience of middle managers as enactors of the QEF policy, as rendered by their

own perceptions and discourses about what their role entails. We are particularly interested in

whether their experience of the role reflects the values of collegiality and ownership promoted

by the QEF. The next section depicts the middle manager role in general terms and the

tensions and the dilemmas inherent to it. The situated nature of their experience of policy as

one distinct stakeholder group, as broker and interface between top institutional management

and ground floor academics, will be captured through the implementation staircase metaphor.

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Next, the data set and data collection and analysis methods will be presented. This will be

followed by a presentation and discussion of the findings. Finally, the paper will conclude

with the insights gained into Scottish middle managers’ experience of their position and the

extent to which it is attuned to the QEF principles.

The ‘middle manager’ context

The choice of middle managers as object of analysis is justified by the strategic role they play

in policy enactment further to the introduction of managerialism and private management

models in higher education institutions (Meek et al. 2010; Knight and Trowler 2001; Preston

and Price 2012; Dearlove 1998; Clegg and Auley 2005). Knight and Trowler (2001) describe

the head of department as placed firmly at the centre of university management procedures,

predating Bryman (2007) for whom the university department represents a ‘critical unit of

analysis’. Preston and Price (2012) suggest that academic managers are the group best-

positioned to steer policy-induced change, given their familiarity with both higher education

policies and teaching and research issues.

Meek et al. (2010) argue that middle managers are the group of actors who have felt most

acutely the impact of the managerial push in the transformation of university governance and

management. Drawing on an international comparative perspective, the authors note that the

increased pressures for performance management and accountability have determined the

professionalisation and expansion of the middle managers’ role to include definition of

missions, objectives and strategies; financial and human resources management; and strong

leadership as opposed to traditional academic negotiation:

…the deanship and headship have changed from short-term elected positions to

appointed positions with clear job specifications to provide strong academic and

administrative leadership. Enhanced expectations and greater role definition of the

middle-level academic manager are in clear contrast to earlier times when the position

was perhaps considered a ‘good citizen’ chore’ (Meek et al. 2010, 2)

The UK context of middle managers’ practices and concerns, exemplified in this paper, has

been summarised in the work of Henkel (2007, 91) and Trowler et al. (2012). According to

these analyses, the state has assumed increased responsibility for quality and the attribution of

value to higher education practice. Reliance on independent institutions or individual

professionals to ensure their own quality and standards has been replaced by national

standardization. Academics are faced with severe pressure to comply in the face of national

and international league tables which use such standardised measures. This signals the

breakdown of the ‘social contract’ between academics and society which enabled them to

‘police’ themselves. There has been a process since the 1980s, well exemplified in the UK, of

externalizing functions that ‘lie at the heart of academic autonomy, namely peer review and

self-evaluation, so that they become 'instruments of external oversight' (Neave 1988, 46,

quoted in Henkel 2007). As research funding is increasingly tied to the achievement of

internationally recognised outputs, we might argue that a consequence has been to restrict

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severely individual academic freedom in some universities to continue to research in specific

scientific areas and to shape the choices of universities as to their research agendas (Henkel

2007, 91). These commentaries argue that academic freedom has become conditional and

negotiated with government agencies through the funding councils and research bodies. As

government policies change, they use these agencies to assess how far higher education

institutions are implementing them (the policies). They provide a framework by which

academics measure legitimate action and decide on priorities.

The QEF, however, as a policy text appears to be relatively disconnected from such

approaches. It aims to re-locate the locus of responsibility for teaching and learning quality

from external state agencies back to institutions themselves, as indicated by the policy

framework’s emphasis on collegiality, sector ownership and quality enhancement rather than

quality assurance. Against this particular policy context, the paper aims to analyse the middle

managers’ experience in Scottish HEIs. Given the policy messages, we might expect front-

line academics to enjoy greater room for manoeuvre than research in general suggests, with

middle managers playing a facilitative and enabling role.

Middle manager role tensions

Winter (2009) argues that external catalysts have created an ‘identity schism’ in which

managerialism has led to heightened ‘differences between “academic manager” (values

congruent with the managerial discourse) and “managed academic” (values incongruent with

the managerial discourse and based on forms of collegial practice and self-regulation’

(Winter 2009, 121). Sotirakou (2004) indicates the apocryphal nature of these shifts when she

points to the ‘role conflict’ in the contemporary environment of the middle manager. She

notes, in an overview of HOD job specifications, the way in which ‘mediating practices’

emerge as critical:

…we argue that heads must serve as buffers between the various conflicting forces

stemming from the different internal operation modes and running through the

system of the institution: the academic, the state and the market. In other words,

managing these three forces effectively equals to handling the role conflicts and

stresses associated with the headship position. (Sotirakou 2004, 350)

In addition to these ‘buffering’ or mediating practices, Whitchurch (2008) noted the

emergence of what she calls third space practice: ‘not only are individuals interpreting their

given roles more actively, but they are also moving laterally across boundaries, creating new

institutional spaces, knowledge, and relationships, particularly in a “third space” between

professional and academic domains’ (2008, 8).

The tensions inherent in an expanded middle manager role are well documented in literature

(Meek et al. 2010; Smith 2002; Bolden et al. 2008; Floyd and Dimmock 2011; Gallos 2002;

Preston and Price 2012). Floyd and Dimmock (2011), for instance, refer to the various

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identities which heads of department develop and the conflicts which may arise between the

academic and manager identities. In case of disagreement with organisational values, one

coping strategy they indicate is tolerance with regards to procedures rather than agreement

with these. They develop a three-fold typology of department heads – jugglers, copers and

strugglers – as a way of depicting their ability to balance often conflicting identities. Similar

to Sotirakou’s argument (2004), Bolden et al. (2008) refer to the difficulties experienced in

striking a ‘balance between top-down, bottom-up and lateral processes of communication and

influence’ and the ‘dynamic tension between the need for collegiality and managerialism,

individual autonomy and collective engagement, leadership of the discipline and the

institution, academic versus administrative authority, informality and formality, inclusivity

and professionalisation, and stability and change’ (364).

This paper intends to explore how these tensions play out in the Scottish policy context

generated by the QEF. Arguably, the values of collegiality, ownership and enhancement

upheld by this new policy framework would alleviate the conflicts noted above. As strategic

actors in the enactment of the QEF one would expect these values to filter down to middle

managers and to infuse their experience of the role, while managerialism would become a

less pronounced feature. How middle managers’ role and their experience of mediation have

been transformed by the QEF is the paper’s overarching concern. Does the enhancement

orientation of the framework and the fact that institutions are entrusted to take care of quality

soften these tensions? In the context of the QEF, does middle managers’ role continue to

reflect the systemic conflicts documented in the literature?

The implementation staircase: a metaphor to situate the middle managers’ experience

We have referred above to the mediation implicit in the middle managers’ role. The

implementation staircase provides an illustration of the systemic positions held by particular

‘layers’ within higher education systems (see Reynolds and Saunders 1987; Saunders 2006),

bringing a useful perspective on middle managers’ strategic location. The implementation

staircase metaphor suggests the importance of constructing the experience of policy from the

points of view of the main stake-holders within a policy environment. Further, it suggests

these points of view may well differ significantly and it is the task of analysis to ‘construct’

these differences. Another dimension to this metaphor is the way in which each group acts as

both a receiver and an agent of policy messages and, through this process, the message will

undergo adaptation and be understood very differently according to the unique and situated

experience of each stake-holding group. The stake-holder narratives identifiable on the

implementation staircase for the QEF policy are illustrated in Figure 1. This paper focuses in

particular on middle managers’ experience of their role in policy within the systemic space

they occupy on the implementation staircase. The idea that experience and thus adaptive

responses to policy are ‘situated’ is more than a metaphorical point. It is based on the way in

which individuals and collectivities make sense of their professional worlds. The important

relational practices, mainly associated with ‘mediation’ are denoted in red as middle managers

broker policy messages up and down the staircase.

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Figure 1. Middle managers on the implementation staircase

Middle managers’ position, as illustrated by the staircase, lies at the interface between top

institutional management and their academic colleagues. They embody the tension between

the managerialism inherent in running a higher education institution and the traditional values

of collegiality and academic freedom (reinforced by the QEF). The metaphors proposed by

Bleiklie and Kogan (2007) to describe universities - republic of scholars and stakeholder

organization – are telling. In the former, leadership and decision-making take place

collegially among independent scholars, whereas in the latter decision-making occurs within

hierarchical structures which grant leaders the authority to make and enforce strategic

decisions within the organization to satisfy other stakeholders.

Data set and methodology

Focus groups with middle managers were conducted in nine Scottish HEIs (out of nineteen)

between October 2008 and December 2010: three ancients (pre 20th century), two pre-1992

universities, three post-1992 universities, and a specialised college. Table 1 shows the

institutions represented in the study against the total in Scotland.

Institution type Total in Scotland Represented in investigation

Ancient 4 3

Pre-1992 4 2

Post-1992 7 3

Specialised 4 1

Total 19 9

Table 1: Institutions in the study against the total of Scottish institutions, by type

Scottish Funding Council

and policy ‘architects’

Institutional

leaders

Middle

managers

Lecturers

Students

Receiving, adapting, contextualising and developing ideas/ messages/meaning

Mediation

Communicating

adapted ideas to

others in the staircase

Mediating

Practices

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As noted above, the term ‘middle managers’ was understood flexibly to comprise academics

with a middle management function. This included: heads of departments (or equivalent),

heads of schools, heads of division (within a school), directors of teaching and learning, and

programme/course leaders (or equivalent). The focus group participants were selected

randomly using the names and contact details available on institutional websites and were

approached through institutional contacts of the research team. In total, twenty focus groups

were conducted with up to six participants in each. These ranged from 1 to 3 in each HEI,

depending on the size of the institution, grouping academics from related disciplinary areas

(e.g. in one institution the focus groups were with academics from Health and Life Sciences;

Computing and Engineering; and Law and Social Sciences). Overall, just over 100 middle

managers, mainly with academic rather than administrative background, belonging to a wide

range of disciplines, participated in the focus groups.

Focus groups lasted around an hour. They were all approached and conducted in an identical

way, irrespective of the disciplines represented. A set of prompts in the form of quotes, the

same ones in every focus group and presented in the same order, were given to participants to

stimulate the discussion. The quotes referred to institutional structures and cultures, taken

from publications such as the Times Higher or previous evaluation reports of the Scottish

government’s policy for quality in higher education (see Appendix 1). The quotes were

chosen to reflect a range of (sometimes contentious) views and institutional contexts. By way

of example, two of these were: ‘The new managerialism of higher education shares many of

the pitfalls and dysfunctions that blighted the Soviet state... However apparently rational,

orderly and comprehensive the plan looked at the top of the hierarchy, in its implementation

the different levels of the system often pulled in different directions’ and ‘I've worked in

three other universities but here it seems that there is more time for teaching and for thinking

about teaching. We are teaching-focused but not in a 'that's all we do' kind of way – we also

get on with our research’. Using such quotes as a starting point for discussion, three areas

were addressed: the extent to which statements reflected the participants’ experience; how

they viewed their own role as a manager; factors which helped or hindered their ability to

fulfil their role as they saw it. The discussions centred on issues relating to teaching and

learning – the QEF was very rarely referred to directly. The aim was to analyse responses in

terms of the extent to which respondents’ experiences aligned with a culture of enhancement

and with the aims of the QEF. A key feature of the QEF, as highlighted previously, is its

ownership by stakeholders in the Scottish HE sector. This ownership is intended to facilitate

a culture shift within the sector away from a primary emphasis on quality assurance towards a

focus on quality enhancement. Therefore, in not referring to the QEF directly, the aim was to

explore whether such a culture shift had materialised in the case of the middle managers,

manifest in changes in their experiences of and ways of thinking about quality. Thus, bearing

in mind that practices and ways of thinking embodied in the QEF may not be attributed by

stakeholders to the strategy itself, an ‘inferential’ approach was adopted where evidence of

new ways of doing and thinking was sought rather than a simplistic notion of attribution. This

approach put a premium on what was happening, rather than on ‘cast iron attribution’.

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The focus group discussions were fully transcribed. Content analysis of the transcriptions was

performed with the help of the qualitative analysis software Max QDA. Themes and

categories were identified which informed the depiction, outlined below, of middle managers’

experiences in the enactment of institutional quality policies driven by the QEF. Three types

of tensions – outlined and enlivened by illustrative quotes – emerged: academic versus

management divide; leadership versus management practice; and empowerment and

preparedness. These suggest that the values promoted by the QEF have yet to become a

feature of the middle managers’ experience of policy mediation. We have adopted the view

that the descriptions of the policy experience within the dynamic of focus group discussions

provide authentic depictions of middle managers’ work. The status of the data is that it

constitutes a narrative account from groups of informants as they ‘sense make’ (Weick 1995)

and construct collective accounts of their experience.

Findings and discussion

Academic - management divide

During the focus group discussions, middle managers pointed to the role tensions

documented in the lliterature. They expressed criticisms of the managerial culture which they

perceived to ‘have taken hold’ of universities to the expense of collegial relationships. One

manifestation of this development was the perception of the remoteness of senior

management representatives from the day-to-day business of the institution and their lack of

understanding of the issues shop-floor academics struggle with, such as large student

numbers in a massified system:

…some of them haven’t been in a class ever…but those that have taught, it’s years

since they taught, they remember seminar groups of ten well qualified full-time

students…I do think the university Principal should be made to come down and teach

or at least sit in.

Therefore, the academics-management divide emerged as a key concern for middle

managers, made more pronounced by their own positioning which one described as ‘between

two wheels, a managerial one and one that at least those of us over 50 feel is a collegial one’.

This created a tension which appeared difficult to reconcile:

... we get all this top-down management until things begin to go pear-shaped and then

the managers all suddenly rediscover the collegiality. So we all go off plan (...)

they’re all a community of scholars until things get back on track and then it’s back to

top-down management. So it’s two wheels turning in different directions and I think

we’re caught in the middle of them.

Internally, the conflict was experienced in contradictory allegiances. Externally, it was

reflected in their attitudes and practices. Prior to becoming heads or directors, the middle

managers’ career used to be a purely academic one, concerned with teaching and research in

their discipline. They therefore identified with an academic community and a disciplinary

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network – their loyalty and belonging to this community appeared undisputed (Becher and

Trowler 2001). However, upon promotion to or take-up (sometimes resentfully) of the new

function, they became a link in the management chain of the institution, thus responsible for

the enactment of its strategies and policies within their own departments. As a head of

department expressed it, ‘as you climb the greasy pole, your allegiances move away from this

and towards the institution itself’. Given the split between their intimate allegiance, primarily

academic and disciplinary, and their official management role, which required loyalty to

institutional interests, they embodied the level where the clash between management and

academics was felt most acutely, where ‘you’ve got to work with the institution, but you’re

also supporting your staff’. Meek et al (2010) captured this split through the uneasy

coexistence of an increasingly professional role whereby ‘the part-time amateur academic

manager is largely a creature of the past’ and prevailing academic values of autonomy and

scientific freedom.

Caught in the middle, academic managers continued to describe their practice as protecting

their academic colleagues from the bureaucracy and formalism generated by top-management

decisions. Their role became ‘a translation job’, making policies meaningful for their fellow

colleagues. The metaphors they used to describe their position were evocative: ‘telephone

exchange’, ‘conduit’, ‘convener’, ‘pivot point’, ‘key lynchpin’, trying to ensure everyone is

‘singing from the same song sheet’, ‘shield’ or an ‘umbrella’, ‘fighting off the slings and

arrows of nonsense’ coming from top management, or ‘keeping the rubbish off the path’:

...one is a kind of umbrella. Very time consuming documents and requirements come

down from the centre – either from the centre of the university, or from government or

funding councils. They have to be this way, that’s all responded to formally (...) The

first I can do, my colleagues in the department are protected from having to engage

with those documents. Then there’s the matter of translating them into how we

practise in the department. Then that involves departmental discussion, setting up

ways of behaviour, ways of teaching, ways of prioritising aspects of teaching. But you

are there as a shield from every bureaucratic manifestation.

The preference for a collegial environment and identification with academic concerns and

practices consistent with their inner allegiance (e.g. departmental discussion) appeared

evident in the above statement. The middle managers seemed to be unwilling participants in a

management game of whose rules they disapproved, reminiscent of the ‘reluctant manager’

(Scase and Goffee 1989) and their tolerance of, rather than agreement with, procedures

(Floyd and Dimmock 2011). From a quality enhancement perspective, their role was a gate-

keeper one, enabling and supporting staff to perform their academic duties by protecting them

from top management demands. These demands, while presented as policies and procedures

meant to improve quality, were in fact experienced and perceived as a hindrance to quality,

since according to one focus group participant ‘what we try and do is make it possible for

these people to go back to the job they came into the business to do’.

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In addition, middle managers emerged as a key element in the flow of communication, filters

and translators of policies, so that these made sense for academic colleagues. They described

themselves as mindful of multiple pressures and pragmatic about the extent to which

colleagues were able to respond to university policies. Maintaining confidence that people

actually did what they could, they believed that ‘less blame culture; more praise’ were

necessary to keep things moving forward. Their position of bridging and reconciling

academic and institutional interests was also manifest in their acting as upwards conduits for

the voice of the academics they lead. Nonetheless, there was criticism that bottom-up

opinions tended to be neglected and that concerns on the shop-floor were not given proper

consideration or response. They themselves did not feel fully informed. About a university

restructuring, one middle manager claimed that despite meetings and strategic reviews to

which people could participate:

it doesn’t always translate when people at the bottom level really want to know how

it‘s going to affect them, and trying to make some sense of that, because often those

direct questions are never answered. Again, that’s our role to say ‘Well, I think if we

knew this, we’re going to be in a stronger position to pass on better information’.

Despite the discourse of collegiality and empowerment then, mediating the QEF involved

similar tensions and practices as any other nationally and institutionally implemented policy.

While the hailed QEF values of enhancement, collegiality and pragmatism were evident in

middle managers’ relationship with their academic colleagues, these were hardly present in

the senior management’s relationship to middle managers and front-line academics. Middle

managers‘ discomfort with managerialism in universities, their allegiance to an academic

community and the preference for a collegial culture led to a reinvention of their professional

practices: they were usually reluctant to be called managers and were more concerned to

engage in forms of leadership practice. This is evident in the relational characteristics

depicted next.

Leadership versus management

Research participants described a particular relational approach, synthesised in the following

statement: ‘being nice to people and persuading them to do what they ought to be doing (...) a

form of management, but not necessarily something that goes into the normal management’.

As one head explained, management implied the exercise of power, which clashed with the

belief in collegiality and the horizontal relationships in a disciplinary community.

Participants suggested that they appealed to leadership rather than management practices,

their position implying ‘leading, cajoling, encouraging, inspiring’ colleagues towards shared

priorities discussed and agreed by all involved.

Traditional hierarchical management lines fit oddly in academia. Preston and Price (2012)

discussed the mismatch between high levels of responsibility and lack of authority which

made mediation between top hierarchy and departmental colleagues problematic. They stated

that despite having ‘plenty of responsibility for ensuring that operational processes and

systems were in-situ and that performance management and work-load planning activities

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were undertaken in a timely manner, they had no authority to insist that they were done’

(Preston and Price 2012, 413). In fact, one focus group participant described his job as having

‘a lot of responsibility and absolutely no authority at all’. Contrasting the mind-set of non-

academic personnel, accustomed to line management, with the collegiality characteristic of

academic relationships, participants perceived hierarchical management practices as

inappropriate and ineffective:

...because of the nature of academic staff, I could not possibly go to people and say,

do this, do this, do this by then and expect it. It has to be by means of discussion and

negotiation, general conversation… people will come round....In the administration

side, there is the assumption ‘This has to be done; get your staff to do this’. No, it

doesn’t work.

One middle manager described his role as ‘leadership in a non-directive sense, although of

course, you are actually directing from behind the scenes along the lines that the University

has given’. Therefore, although as a link in the official management chain they had to pursue

university strategies and work towards their enactment, managerial practices felt

inappropriate. Instead, the strategy they referred to consisted of ‘inspiring or incentivising

people enough to invest energy to do something different’ and improve their practice towards

a common purpose, enabling and supporting them to do their job, and then trusting them to be

capable of it. The head of department/school was, thus, in repeated instances, described as

engaging in leadership practices and attributed much wider and more subtle qualities than

those of being a ‘manager’.

Middle managers’ accounts also revealed that ‘dealing with personnel issues and maintain

staff morale’ was essential in the exercise of leadership. Personnel issues appeared as the

most difficult and sensitive ones in their portfolio, as also highlighted by Preston and Price

(2012). A head described his job as ninety-five percent people work: ‘the biggest challenge,

the biggest task in a positive sense, is making a positive contribution to maintaining or

creating better staff morale’. Consequently, there was an emphasis on values such as

openness, communication, solidarity, empathy and group identity.

The middle managers in the study also saw their position as key to the success of quality

policies. Working close to their academic colleagues, it was primarily through intervention

and translation of policy into meaningful objectives for these that the QEF was able to trickle

down and impact on the core academic activities of the institution. Echoing the literature

which places them at the centre of change processes, they saw themselves as the key

facilitators of change, the motivators and the engines that set things in motion, as opposed to

the top management detached from lay academics’ concerns and practices:

I don’t think someone there, at sort of vice principal level to be honest, is going to

have a huge amount of impact on what staff do at the coal face. It’s actually people

much closer to them who are going to influence them. I think that’s where quality

enhancement actually works from.

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Middle managers saw themselves primarily as leaders rather than managers for another

practical reason: their lack of power with regards to budgetary control and a perception of

limited input in decision-making.

Empowerment and preparedness

Despite their crucial position at the department-management interface, with a responsibility

for enacting university policy in their departments, middle managers felt little empowered to

carry out their management duties. During the discussions they identified a three-part tension,

suggesting that the empowerment and ownership upheld by the QEF were missing from their

experience. First, they criticised the absence of actual power and voice. Second, they

resented the lack of financial control. Third, some complained about not receiving essential

training associated with the duties of the new position.

The lack of power seemed to be experienced more acutely in the non-ancient universities;

however, it was not reserved exclusively to them. Generally, middle managers saw

themselves at the receiving end of management, low down in the ‘food chain’. In addition, a

perception emerged that their decision-making autonomy had diminished, with their input in

decision-making increasingly restricted, while the level of responsibility had been

maintained. According to one middle manager, he was the ‘academic leader’ of the school,

‘which means that I’m responsible for everything, but not necessarily in control of it’. Middle

managers saw their power limited to ‘tactical adjustments’ in their own department, whereas

others felts they no longer could make the decisions which were once a departmental

prerogative. One complained that middle managers were not involved in open discussion and

decision-making in his university and were not treated as equals. This corroborated Meek et

al.’s assertion (2010) that some of the trends in the managerialist push were the avoidance of

conflict, which slows down decision-making, by concentrating power at the top of the

administrative hierarchy, alongside the pursuit of organisational efficiency to the detriment of

traditional forms of professional cooperative interests. In our participants’ case, contentious

issues triggered a ‘defensive response’ from senior management rather than constructive

discussions. The lack of voice is a recurring issue:

In all the years I’ve been here I’ve never felt that my opinion counts for so little, ever.

I used to feel, and it wasn’t just when I was on university level committees, in my role

as a programme leader, people listened.

In one university participants complained about not being given the opportunity to feed into a

new strategic review, although this was supposed to be a bottom-up process. In the same

university, they also complained of a lack of representation on committees with a remit for

learning and teaching issues, which were above all an area of academic expertise:

...we don’t have any direct representation on the university learning and teaching

committee. We have a representative on the college committee, and the college

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representative is on the university committee. So we have no way of inputting into

learning and teaching directly at all.

Some middle managers expressed the view that their decision-making was constrained by

university policies and procedures, for instance related to the appointment of new staff.

However, this could also apply to academic matters such as academic rigour, with ‘the

academic secretary coming back to you and saying (...) I’m worrying about complaints by

students and legal problems’. Decision-making often emerged as a senior management

prerogative and some accounts even suggested micro-management practices:

...we’re not getting any freedom to decide (...) Why should I be told that I’ve got to do

this and I’ve got to do that? Why can’t myself and my staff all discuss how we’re

going to operationalise things, why have I got to be beaten over the head?

Lack of budgetary control was another reason why middle managers did not feel empowered

to exercise their function. It was usually the next level up, e.g. deans or equivalent, which

held the purse strings:

Put us down as Red and White Rose... probably reflected in many people’s experience

that the dividing line is between Head of Department and Deans of Faculties in the

funding structure.

This division acted as a constraint because proceeding with an initiative required approval

from a higher level. The centralisation of financial management at senior levels, claimed to

have occurred in recent years, was resented. Funds allocated to the departments were

inaccessible to middle managers, these having ‘virtually no power in that area’, while

‘departments have significant reserve funds which they are not allowed to touch’. In spite of

this, heads were requested to take actions, which, in theory, required financial control: ‘I’m

being asked to market my programme but I don’t have the resources to do it’.

Lack of training, too, sometimes emerged as an impediment to middle managers fulfilling the

duties of their new position. They spoke of a common misperception that, upon promotion, a

senior academic with a good track record in teaching and research should be fully prepared to

exercise the management practices required by the post:

you do well with teaching or research, and then you go for a promoted post, but at

what stage do the others stop and say, ‘Well, actually, your role has changed

completely, you’re managing people now’, and when do we bring that into the

process? I think that’s fairly a common problem in education.

The absence of training is recurrent in literature (Meek et al. 2010; Bryman 2007; Preston and

Price 2012). Preston and Price (2012) identified the need for both formal and informal

support systems which would consider the pragmatic issues of managerial skills and

competences, but also moral and social support to help academic managers to deal with often

14

difficult and ambiguous situations. Another finding was that the training provided felt

inaccurate because it failed to acknowledge the tensions inherent in the role and the

‘emotionality’ of the job.

Especially middle managers in ancient universities (but not exclusively) did refer to recent

university initiatives (i.e. training courses) to equip them to be academic leaders. Perceptions

about their usefulness were mixed: some believed that one cannot learn to be a manager in a

course, while others had appreciative comments. There was a consensus that learning occurs

on the job through recurrent practices.

Conclusions

This paper has explored the middle managers’ experience within the new policy context

generated by the Quality Enhancement Framework in Scotland through the perspective of

their position on the ‘implementation staircase’ between university leaders and lay

academics. Their accounts were, indeed, illustrative of this mediating position between

institutional interests and academic concerns, a position which translated into a unique

experience of policy and adaptive strategies in implementing policy messages. They

experienced their role as challenging and shifting, appearing to embody a culture clash

between managerialism and collegiality, in a perceived environment which exerted increasing

pressure and constraints on collegial relationships and decision-making in higher education

institutions. The fact that they portrayed their role in terms of gate-keepers and translators is

telling, as this foregrounds the distinctively different experiences of policy between upper

management layers and lay academics. The former occupy a position on the implementation

staircase which inevitably emphasises ‘outward-facing’ concerns in response to external

stakeholders’ expectations of institutional performance and accountability. In turn, this

fosters more managerialist cultures and central rather than horizontal decision-making. In

contrast, middle managers’ preoccupation appears to be ‘inward-facing’ characterised by a

responsibility for the well-being of their disciplinary colleagues and towards the creation of

working conditions which allow them to deliver quality.

What is striking is that the institutional leaders who have been involved in the design of the

framework have subscribed to the QEF values of collegiality, empowerment and ownership

and have coalesced around these values in the context of institutional autonomy in relation to

national external control of quality and standards. The analysis offered in this paper looked

beyond, into how this discourse of empowerment was effectively matched at the heart of

institutions through their systemic practices. The inclusive and participative values,

embedded in the QEF discourse, seem to diminish in importance in internal management and

governance, between the top management and middle management levels, with top

institutional policies and procedures being perceived by the middle managers in our research

as more impositional than consensual. However, in ‘horizontal’ relations between middle

managers and academic colleagues, collegiality surfaces once again. The contradiction

between espoused values (of collegiality and ownership) and the centralist practices

experienced by middle managers and associated with senior managers are perceived as more

15

attuned to an assurance rather than an enhancement culture. This could be a reflection of a

limited confidence in institutional and academic quality by senior managers. This sense of

vulnerability, prompting centralist control practices could be a twofold consequence of, first,

senior institutional leaders’ outward-facing orientation and, second, their remoteness and

detachment from the core everyday practices of teaching and research undertaken at shop-

floor level. In parallel, an opposite perception was noted among middle managers, with an

inward-facing orientation, who witnessed closely the ebb and flow of their colleagues’ daily

work practices. They affirmed their confidence in the professionalism of academic colleagues

and their belief that these strove towards quality, perceiving top management centralist

measures as potential obstacles to quality and their job as mitigating these obstacles.

Middle managers’ experience appears, therefore, to problematize the values of the QEF, as a

policy built on ‘consensual development’, collegiality and ownership within the sector, as

described at the beginning of this paper. In practice, this straightforward rhetoric,

promulgated by policy makers and institutional leaders, is enacted through situated

‘mediation’ and ‘translation’ nearer the ‘ground,’ which involves a more fractured experience

of power and decision-making. The three sets of tensions highlighted above – between

allegiances to academic colleagues and institutional managers, between leadership and

management strategies and between empowerment and preparedness – call attention to the

difficulties and shortcomings encountered in the everyday exercise of middle managers’ role.

They also suggest possible ways of reinforcing their capacity. In the context of the QEF

policy, which aims to promote collegiality and ownership, their inward-facing concerns

which focus on the disciplinary driven desire to enhance research, teaching and learning

should receive due attention. Given the distance between top management preoccupations

and core academic activities, we quote Clegg and Auley (2005) who reinforce middle

managers’ strategic position:

Middle managers have often been central to ensuring that organisational change has

brought benefits to various constituencies, 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.

If more inclusive decision-making practices were promoted, middle managers would be in a

position to narrow this gap. Enabling them to act genuinely as strategic informants upwards,

not merely as information conduits downwards, would align more explicitly with the broadly

acclaimed values of the Scottish Quality Enhancement Framework.

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