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In 1998, Deem wrote of a situation in which a financial crisis at Lancaster University resulted in a hardening of managerial practices and a tightening of the loose couplings of the organisation, with the intention of redefining professional roles and boundaries under clear management structures. 25 years later when interviewed for this research, R4 described a similar situation at his institution where financial concerns presented a serious threat to the future of the organisation, requiring a restructure of the academic and professional services, reducing staff numbers and strengthening organisational couplings.

In much the same way as Deem (1998) described a process of partial or superficial adoption of managerialism to survive a period of crisis, R4 also described subsequent events (a and b below) as a partial return to the norms of the institution before the crisis, illustrating that a real cultural shift had not been possible and continued to be resisted:

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a. The decision discussed in extract 38 when academic colleagues refused to enter a group of students despite the organisation having serious financial concerns, placing the academic needs ahead of the organisational.

b. Continued resistance from academic teams to full engagement with institutional compliance requirements despite having experienced the consequences of a failing in UKVI compliance: ‘But in terms of academic engagement in the compliance training that's required for UKVI, and you can write that across Health and Safety, GDPR, bribery and corruption, they're difficult to get to the table, with

one exception - that's the younger ones. The younger ones seem to get it and

when we do open the sessions up, they say 'why haven't we had this before?'. The older ones, particularly those who are more embedded in research, just sort of come forward grudgingly.’

This view of resistance to change reflects the perceived presence of different working cultures within the contemporary university, as shown in the literature review. But R4 also describes a difference in approach from academics who have more recently entered academia, and this can be seen as potentially an example of changing expectations of professionalised roles and a broader acceptance of quantifiable, recorded processes and outcomes, as important to the contemporary institution. The difference in cultures across the university are less evident at the executive where there is a clear sense of shared endeavour (Duncan, 2014), with participants discussing decisions as being made by cabinet style processes. The way in which decisions are made as either predominantly academic or organisational focused, with all members of the senior executive team feeling their role is important, reflects the presence of both loose and tight couplings overlapping according to situations. It is an

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affirmation of Whitchurch’s (2004) model of the university as four intertwined domains - community, services, partnership and reputation - and presents the institutions of the participants as hybrid organisations, with all the contradictions of hybridisation as described by Deem (1998).

Further moves towards a predominantly managerial system would involve a strengthening of the organisation’s hierarchy and with that clearly defining the role of the academic (as was discussed by R2 in extract 37), though none of the participants showed a particular drive to implement such wide-ranging change. Instead they described a process of compromise driven by the constraints of the institution – a method of collegiality that involves a wider range of stakeholders than traditional found in universities. The academic managers describe being able to operate in this space by altering their approach to management and leadership to fit the situation, balancing the two aspects of their role, much in the same way they describe their interactions with professional service colleagues. However, there are clear boundaries to how far an academic manager can take this balance before they compromise their position, which has been shown to be built on academic credentials. Operating on professional manager terms risks superimposing managerial practices across the entire decision- making function of the university, resulting in the academic manager becoming divorced from the everyday academic activities of the institution (Fanghanel, 2012). Though senior academic managers in any university model are bound to end up somewhat removed from their academic colleagues, in the managerial institution the potential for this is further exasperated, hence the need for a mixed management system of loose and tight if the academic manager is to retain their credibility amongst academic peers. Assessing this in relation to the already established moves the executive teams are making to imbed professionalised approaches to management,

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there appears to be an increasingly real, long term threat to the established norms of academic leadership in the organisations of the participants.

The role of the senior executive as described by the participants, can be viewed as both a necessity to respond quickly to the needs of the organisation, and also to an extent a destabilising force in the norms of institutional leadership. Warner and Palfreyman (1996), set out two modes of decision making in higher education: formal, committee driven and academic led, or informal, outside of the structures of the institution and led by management. The boundaries of roles are apparent in the differentiation, and full access to the entire formal committee structure is only really available to academics. Though professional managers may sit as lay members on committees, the limits to their contributions will be constrained by the focus of the committee – i.e. primarily academic or supporting functions. The space of the senior executive sits outside of the committee structure, and though categorised as informal in the university context, the executive utilises and strengthens formal hierarchy across the organisation. By nature of making and enacting decisions through hierarchy there is a clear case for viewing the executive teams as managerial entities, however, the way in which participants described how they operate is clearly collegial; involving debate, consideration for the views of others and a process of agreement through compromise (Bloom, 1997).