COMPROBACIÓN DE LA HIPÓTESIS

The model an organization adopts to organize work and manage people is informed in part by the goals it pursues (Buchanan & Huczynski 1985). As suggested above, the changed purpose of the university is reflected at the organizational level in the changed model of decision-making. One group of commentators on university change agree that a new public sector management model has entered the university and redesigned the organization away from an organizational model tailored to serve professionals to one that is hierarchic and management-centered tailored to serve non- professionals. This shift is evident in norms of practice characteristic of a

professional organization giving way to norms of practice associated with the hierarchic management system of organization (Drucker 1989;2002; Peeke 1994; Raelin, AJ 1986; Silverman 1994; Slaughter & Leslie 1997; Wilderom & Miner 1991). Wilderom and Miner (1991) define the management-controlled system as a hierarchic system where management exercises authority over all aspects of the organization. Within this system, management sets the operating rules and regulations which limits the individual’s freedom to act; evaluates job results; introduces organizational change; judges individual competence; appoints

organizational leaders; manages employees, allocates resources; and calls for and conducts meetings (Wilderom & Miner 1991).

Managerial intervention in the university is observed in:

“…strict financial management and budgetary control; efficient use of resources and emphasis on productivity; the extensive use of performance indicators; the development of consumerism and the concepts of the market; the manifestation of consumer charters: the creation of a flexible workforce, using

flexible/individualized contracts, appraisal systems and performance-related pay; and the assertion of managers rights to manage”(Shelley 1998, p. 344).

The subsequent operational changes that are the outcomes of the rise of managerialism within the university context are present in the analyses of the organization by observers and commentators, and researchers alike. Most of the responses to university change is critical, some more stridently so than others. The

views of Giroux (2002) and Marginson and Considines (2006; 2000) are amongst the most strident. Giroux (2002) deplores the changes in purpose shift as “dangerous” to democracy itself. Marginson (2006) suggests that the university, whose mission was public-service, lies in ruins swept aside by the market forces.

Some commentators see the increased managerialism within the university as a trend that is referencing an obsolete organizational model. Morris (2005), for instance, views the shift from the professional organizational model as not an advancement but a throw back to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s management model, a model tailored to produce productivity increases in the factory setting. Taylor, Drucker (1989)

explains, developed between 1885 and 1910 the system that aimed to break tasks down into individual, unskilled operations that could be learnt quickly by the large numbers of blue collar workers with little or no education. Flood (1999, p. 30) further explains the efficiency goals of factory work were shaped by perceptions of

organizations as “well-oiled machines” where:

Senior managers are governors, whilst middle managers and supervisors are engineers keeping the machine well oiled (by commanding people) so that it can relentlessly achieve the purpose for which it was assembled.

Drucker (2002) describes the restructure of the university as an act of replacing a system which served the worker with one where the worker serves the system. The emergence of competition-driven academic practice is setting one academic unit against another and is diminishing collegiality and a sense of common purpose (Beiber & Lawrence 1992). Such divisive competitive behavior on the University of Michigan, for instance, prompted its English professor to label the institution as “a sham” going by the title of the university when it was really a corporate entity (Beiber & Lawrence 1992).

The change in discourse defining the university is further indicative of the shift in the organizational model. Many analysts do not welcome the attempt to reconceptualize the university and academic work through a new discourse. Prichard and Willmott (1997, p. 288) liken the shift towards the corporatization of knowledge and academic work discourses as an attempt at “colonization” or “imperialism” by management. Further evidence of the management discourse re-constructing the university is

expressed in terms such as “regulations”, “power”, “clients” and “customer satisfaction”, “academic capitalism”, “academic entrepreneurialism” and “new managerialism” (Deem 2001; McNay 1995, pp. 106, 107).

Such concepts associated with management discourse are also observed within DWU. They are also surfacing in policy documents and newspaper commentary on the universities in PNG generally (Department of National Planning and Rural

Development 2005; Puton 2004). PNG’s OHE, and the national government under Somare in 2007 suggested that going private and adopting entrepreneurialism was the only way for universities in PNG to self-sustain provision (Ogio 2007; Puton 2004). Self-funded provision is being advanced even as the PNG universities’ public service mandate to assist in nation building and development remains. DWU’s discourse defining practices and decision-making structure and performance management processes reflect those observed western within the university context.

The shift away from the collegial university model to the management model contests “the ideal that all academic members are equal members of a scholarly community, or at least the differentiation of status should be determined primarily by academic authority” (Coaldrake, P. & Stedman 1999, p. 12). Hall (cited in Prichard & Willmott 1997, p. 288) views almost as traitors to the cause of collegial university the

colleagues who signed on to the new mission of their organization, a switch

demonstrated in their preference for a discourse he describes as one characterized by a preference of the “metallic” language of entrepreneurialism and submission to a kind of management that is of a “horrendously closed nature”.

Empirical evidence confirms what observers and commentators see as the changing model of university organization. Prichard and Willmott (1997, p. 300), for instance, found that British academics perceived that their organizations were increasingly centralized:

…universities are being reconstituted knowledge factories organized by managers, whose aim is to intensify and commodify the production and distribution of knowledge as skills to whomsoever has the wherewithal to purchase them.

Research conducted in Australia between 1993 and 1998, which explored both academics’ and administrators’ responses to the emergence of managerialism in their institutions highlight tensions resulting from culture conflict between collegial and management culture. Winter and Sarros’ (2002) survey of Australian academics found that academics’ participation in decision-making within their organization was diminished at the institutional policy level, but remained dominant at the individual work performance level. Areas where participation was described as “moderately low” included new university policies, decisions that influenced department policies as well as decisions that were related to the promotion of academic staff and

resources. The area they still exercised high levels of control or autonomy over related to the discharge of job responsibilities including teaching, research.

McInnis (1998) surveyed Australian academics and university administrators

separately to gauge their views on the values and motives that influenced their work, their outlook about their work and university, their views on the purpose of the university and perspectives on higher education system in Australia. The survey of 1281 professional administrators was conducted in 1996 with a response rate of 51%. The survey on academics from lecturer level and up from a representative sample of 18 out of the then 34 universities was conducted between 1993 and 1994. McInnis’ (1998) study also found that, within changed institutions, the relationship of two occupational groups within the university had shifted with the academics feeling more alienated than administrators. Thirty-two per cent of academics, as opposed to 57% of administrators surveyed expressed satisfaction with the intellectual and cultural life of their university and their ability to pursue their own academic interests. The sense of disconnection of academics with their organization was also reflected in only 20% of academics considering collegiality as vigorous in their institutions and 36% saying morale in their department was good as against 39% per cent answering in the

negative. Similar results were found by Beiber and Lawrence (1992) with American academics. They found the preoccupation with meeting externally imposed

conditions led to a competitiveness that worked against collegiality. Dill (1982, p. 301) describes the experience of diminishing collegiality as a “loss of a unifying system of belief, or of a center of personal and collective organizational identity” an experience that Nisbet (cited in Dill 1982, p. 310) terms as the “Degradation of the Academic Dogma”. As institutions confront change, they struggle to reconcile their

“culture, values and aspirations” within revamped institutions (Coaldrake, P. & Stedman 1999, p. 27). Slaughter and Leslie (1997) describe the impact of changing beliefs about the university and by extension the academic profession as

unprecedented. Boyer, Altbach and Whitelaws’ (1994) cross-national survey of the state of the academic profession further shows the profession-wide feeling of estrangement from their organization.

Fako’s (2004) findings on the University of Botswana (UOB), Africa, shows greater levels of marginalization and contestation of the management model. Fako found that following the restructure of their organization, academics went into isolation in local units creating an environment of passive yet aggressive discourse and ambivalence. Fako (2004) also found that the shift encouraged the development of survival groups, boys clubs, and parallel power structures in addition to creating a context of electronic information overload. Similarly in the US, increased management created an

atmosphere of constant tension between autonomy and internal life of the academic profession on the one hand and external demands for accountability on the other (Altbach 1995; Giroux 2002). As for DWU, it adopted at its foundation in 1996, a structural arrangement characteristic of the management model. It subsequently elevated the role of administrators and managers over academics. Observations and views from staff show that academic staff experience marginalization in decision- making processes.

Ironic Trend in University Restructure

However, the trend towards the management model of organizing work within universities including DWU is at the same time an ironic development. The

universities’ move towards less flexible and hierarchical models of organizing work characteristic of market sector organizations and state bureaucracies is happening at a time when market-oriented organizations are adopting flexible organization forms resembling those previously associated with the collegial university to accommodate a knowledgeable workforce (Dill 1982; Morris 2005). Morris (2005, p. 389) notes this ironic trend:

There is an interesting dichotomy taking place in universities. As universities research and teach about changing nature of the organization today, they are in fact watching themselves move in the opposite direction. Despite the fact that many organizations are deserting Tayloristic principles and turning towards more worker-participative procedure, higher education is being forced to desert its collaborative and collegial model and move towards a management structure which bears an unhealthy resemblance to the ideas of Fredrick Winslow Taylor.