The purpose of this paper is to identify common patterns in central authorities' steering of universities and the institutional power in neo-liberal higher education regimes. The paper examines the regulatory mechanisms of England and Japan through Foucault's idea of "governmentality" and utilises the concept of autonomy to identify the…

The author analyzes the growth and nature of internal evaluation from the 1960s to the present and suggests that internal evaluation has been on the increase because of its perceived importance. Although the 1960s were characterized by a rich intellectual development of evaluation theory and practice, the fiscal conservatism of the 1980s ushered…

Managing by performance indicators (PIs) is an important and controversial issue for many stakeholders concerned with higher education in the university systems all over the world. This study analyzes the voluntary disclosures of PIs by Canadian universities. The sample consisted of the 44 universities used by Maclean's Canadian Universities…

The auditing culture and its concomitant, "performativity", have been at the core of the on-going public sector reforms of the last twenty-five years or so. The advantages and limitations of performance indicators as a managerial technique of control have long been known. Considered from an organisational, social and political…

Over the last decade, many groups of professionals in the public sector have been reoriented as individual managers. In British higher education, individual department heads have been pressured to develop private-sector-manager-like identities and relations with their colleagues. This case study revealed considerable resistance to managerialism in…

Modernizing and developing effective leadership is a prime aim in the UK Government's reform agenda. Most recently, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has stated that the goal for effective leadership is to "combine the ability to manage people and money with the creativity, imagination and inspiration to lead…