Discourses of control, managing the boundaries

This paper, which was presented as the Distinguished Academic Plenary Lecture at the British Accounting Association Annual Conference in 2010, considers the role of the manager-academic or hybrid manager in the context of higher education (HE) in England. It pays particular attention to ‘achieving the organisation’ in the context of the need to balance economic and academic demands in times of resource constraint. Accepting the importance of discourse, it argues we also need to accept the importance of structure in understanding organisational change. It uses a model of steering and a middle range approach to argue that the manager-academic has to manage the boundaries of a variety of stakeholders, including steering media with positional power. It also argues for the importance of expertise, in this case that of the academic, in engaging with the management of universities.