At the heart of change for most lecturers is the issue of whether it is practical. Judging changes by their practicality seems to
amount to measuring abstract theories against the tough test of harsh reality. In recent years, there have been serious attempts to establish closer congruence between the devices and desires of change.
The involvement of lecturers in educational change is vital to its success, especially if the change is complex and is to affect many settings over long periods of time. If this involvement is to be meaningful and productive, it means more than lecturers acquiring new knowledge of curriculum content or new techniques of lecturing. If lecturers' own desires for change and for conservation are understood, along with the conditions that strengthen or weaken such desires, it is possible to get valuable insights from the grassroots of the profession about how change can be made most effectively, as well as what should be changed and what should be preserved.
Parts of the lecturer's work that extend beyond the classroom have become more complex, numerous and significant. For many lecturers, work with colleagues now means much more than structured staff meetings or casual conversations. It may also involve collaborative planning, being a mentor to a new lecturer, participating in shared staff development or sitting on review committees. Meetings with parents and employers now frequently extend beyond perfunctory parents' nights to more regular consultations, telephone calls and extended reports.
Collaboration is now widely proposed as an organisational solution, just as it is proposed as a flexible solution to rapid change and the need for greater responsiveness and productivity. C o l l a b o r a t i o n d e c i s i o n - m a k i n g and p r o b l e m - s o l v i n g is a corner-stone of many organisations.
One of the key issues is that FE appears to be resistant to change and although it has responded, it has not necessarily embraced it. FE seems reluctant to make sweeping changes and instead appears to be taking fairly low-key action, spread over a long time scale. Many commercial organisations face far greater changes than FE and have grasped opportunities with enthusiasm. FLEXIBILITY AND PLANNING
Flexibility implies the ability to respond rapidly to changing circumstances while the notion of planning suggests the formulation of a design which will lead to a sequence of specific changes over time. Flexibility is to be gained from incremental planning. Modifications to existing plans may be made rapidly as circumstances evolve without having to replan from scratch, alongside attempts to anticipate likely changes and to consider contingency plans without going into great detail. However, loss of coherence may result from short-term plans which are not connected to long-term aims. Day-to-day crisis management alone, while very flexible, is unlikely to prove cost-effective.
The emergent characteristics of postmodern organisations have been described in many ways by theorists of management and change. Kanter (8) states that the tidal wave model is becoming a universal model for organisations, especially large ones, and observes 'this model describes more flexible organisations, adaptable to change, with relatively few levels of formal hierarchy and loose boundaries among functions and units, sensitive and responsive to the environment; concerned with stakeholders of all sorts - employees, communities, customers, suppliers and shareholders. These organisations empower people to take action and be entrepreneurial, reward them for their contribution and help them gain in skill and employability.' The postmodern organisation is characterised by networks, alliances, tasks and projects, rather than by relatively stable roles and responsibilities which are assigned by function and department, and regulated through hierarchical supervision.
Through the working lives of a new and maturing white-collar generation, the emergence can be seen of new organisational structures in a new society. Created by economic crisis on the one hand, and demographic and cultural change on the other, these fluid, flexible and dynamic organisations hold their employees' loyalty only as long as is warranted by the fulfilment of the work, the rewards that it brings and the life-style that it offers. Toffler (9) uses the metaphor of the moving mosaic to describe these patterns. He outlines the movement of large
corporations 'from monolithic internal structures to mosaics made of scores of independently accounted units.'
Lecturers' suspicions that organisational flexibility and the loosening of their roles and responsibilities may be used against them, are not without foundation. Moving targets are hard to hit and the moving mosaic is no exception. While analysts of postmodern organisations see the emergence of flatter, less hierarchical structures and more collaborative work environments within each unit of the overall enterprise, critics have pointed to important limits which surround such collaboration and the forms it can take. For instance, 'collaboration often includes middle-level workers but excludes those below them, creating collaboration for some but subordination for the rest' according to Menzies (10).
Other aspects include one of the main issues of how to define core competencies of FE. It may be argued that it is that of course design and assessment of outcomes, not necessarily that of delivery. There is also an issue of whether the pressures for change will demand/lead to changes at the managerial level, or for more fundamental change.
The Labour Market & Skill Trends Report (11) states that 'education and training provision must be planned to meet future skill needs, as well as current demands.' Plans need to be firmly
based on long term trends. But some trends may change and not all future developments can be predicted, so it is important to aim for flexibility.