Making Managers Accountable or Making Managers?

One of the central changes which has been taking place across the public sector over the last decade has been the attempt to reorientate groups of professionals as individual managers. For example, in UK higher education individuals in heads of department posts have been under pressure to develop private-sector-manager-like identities and relations between themselves and their colleagues. Resistance to this has been considerable in the pre-1992 universities, but the paper suggests that it can also be found in post-1992 universities. This claim is illustrated with reference to a particular case within such a university.