Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage by Clarke John & Bainton Dave

Author:Clarke, John & Bainton, Dave [Clarke, John & Bainton, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9781447313380
Google: iQRpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2015-04-15T10:59:40+00:00

Conclusion: the unstable assemblage of managerial authority

Managerialisation exists in a complex relation to the other trends and tendencies that have remade universities over the last 30 years. It is a process that accompanies, but is not identical to, marketisation, competition and evaluation, consumerism, personalisation, changes in funding regimes, or the drive to widen participation. In that sense, the transformation of universities is ‘overdetermined’ – the effect of multiple forces and processes. Managerialisation is certainly a process that gains momentum from each of these other developments, being represented as the only available means of creating the ‘businesslike’ organisation that can cope with, adapt to and survive these multiple pressures. Partly because of the universalising drive of managerialism in the same period, ‘management’ looks like the obvious and natural answer to these pressures. ‘More and better management’ has been the necessary corollary of the demand for organisations of all sorts to become more businesslike.

The promise of managerialism is that it can contain and reconcile these pressures in the pursuit of organisational survival and success. This is a powerful force in generating consent (even disaffected consent), especially when combined with the absence of compelling alternative promises and possibilities. Nevertheless, this is not an unproblematic or unconditional promise. It is problematic because it makes managerialisation the means by which the larger tendencies are translated into the operating logics of the university – managerialisation domesticates them as the unavoidable conditions of the university’s survival: they are the environment to which it must adapt. Managerialisation, as a result, evokes scepticism both for its own logics and for being the bearer of those external forces that it deploys as the ‘new realism’.

This returns me to our wider interest in translation and assemblage. Management, in its contemporary incarnation, involves a double movement of translation. It is translated into universities from its many elsewheres: the management handbooks, the MBA courses, the agencies of support and advice, the management or leadership training programmes, government policies, and the universalising presumption that ‘more and better management’ is the key to organisational survival and success. In this process of translation, management travels, is (sometimes) enthusiastically adopted and is bent to existing organisational logics and forms of power, even in the process of transforming them by its arrival. The work of translation is ongoing – it requires continuing effort to normalise and naturalise these ways of thinking, being and acting. As I noted at the beginning, the fact that this translation takes place within an apparently common language tends to conceal the practices of translation taking place. However, it certainly involves what managers themselves like to call ‘a change in culture’: the establishment and inculcation of new ways of thinking, calculating, ordering and mapping the internal and external domains and dynamics of the organisation, expressed in new dispositions and modes of conduct. For me, then, the idea of translation is productive as a way of highlighting this process of reworking organisational landscapes. However, it can also draw attention to a second dynamic of translation.

The

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