Management as Ideology: ‘new’ managerialism and the corporate university in the period of COVID-19

In this paper we examine how Covid-19 was utilised by the management of a university as a catalyst for ideological change, with the objective of transforming the ethos of a university management school and the role(s) of the academics employed within. Through new modes of working that maintained corporeal distance between university staff, market-based ideology was mobilised to institute radical and lasting change within the roles of academics and operations of the institution.

We focus on a singular case study: ‘Blue Management School’ (BMS, pseudonym), based within an English mid-tier research university which has historically embraced corporatisation more readily than most of its peers. We conducted a qualitative analysis of management email communications and from interviews with nine academics (both current and former employees) who were working at BMS during the time concerned (March 2020 onwards).

We observe that Covid-19 posed significant challenges to corporatised universities, and that university managers at BMS sought to address these challenges by undertaking further steps towards corporatisation and mobilising organisational change legitimised by the need to manage the Covid-19 situation. This included hierarchical forms of accountability, with academics answering for module content to teaching convenors and the management team (‘manager academics’). We draw attention to how management communications carried profound effects for the mobilisation of ideological change within the institution, during this period. In addition, academic identity was affected, moving away from traditional research and teaching scholars towards revenue-generating customer service workers, facilitating a power shift away from academics and further towards managers.