Introduction and Background
The paper builds on themes arising out of an international conference on Trends in the
Management of Human Resources in Higher Education organised through the OECD programme for
International Management in Higher Education (IMHE) in Paris in August 2005. Despite systemic
differences across nations, it was apparent at this meeting that workforce development had become a
critical issue in enabling universities to deliver multiple agendas in complex environments. While
national context exerts significant influence, institutions can, and do, in the fine detail, sometimes of
marked inter-institutional variance, respond distinctively to common macro-forces. These local
behaviours reflect an admixture of institution mission, tradition and meso-culture and are, in turn, the
outcome of managerial and collegial preferences and mores. However, whatever the national
circumstances, it was evident that the management of human resources involved a combination of
“hard” issues such as recruitment and retention, rewards and incentives, and “softer” issues such as
motivation, work-life balance, and career development. Bringing together these two sets of issues at
both institutional and local levels was a challenge, especially in devolved organisational structures
with distributed management and leadership.
Historic, systemic differences in relation to human resource management continue to exercise
significant, although arguably changing, influence. A simplified dichotomy remains between
institutions that have power and responsibility as employers of staff, and institutions where this
authority rests with the government. In the former instance, the institution can appoint, grade and, at
least to a degree, determine the reward of staff, aspects of their conditions of employment, their
development, and the building of capacity. In the latter situation, human resources operations in
institutions are constrained in scope, and many key areas (such as recruitment, reward and promotion)
require external approval and authorisation. In reality, the picture is even more complex, and change is
taking place as governments seek to encourage transformation, but the simple model outlined above
captures the broad parameters of different perspectives on the issues and challenges faced by
institutions.
As one UK Director of Personnel, who was consulted as part of this study, observed, institutions
in the United Kingdom see discussions of human resources as increasingly central to the organisation,
and as a partnership for capacity building. For example, increasingly clear views are held about the
linkage between institutional performance and the ability to attract, retain, reward and develop staff to
perform the multifarious roles required of a contemporary university, and to do so in a responsive,
expert and flexible manner. That vision resonates with Clark’s (1998) concept of the entrepreneurial
university, and with his subsequent work on sustaining change (2004). The first study used several
European examples, all institutions with a considerable degree of autonomy, but the latter work ranged
more widely, geographically and systemically.
Care should be taken over conflating a tradition of the administration of the higher education
institution operating in a “civil service” mode, with senior academics as the equivalent of the
government ministers in setting policy and administrators serving their needs and policies, and
structures where staff are formally employed by government with the terms and conditions of civil
servants. Of course, such arrangements can change, as happened in Japan (Oba, 2005) where in April
2004 the national universities became incorporated as autonomous bodies rather than as a service of
the Ministry of Education. Oba noted that:
“This policy was obliged to make personnel management more flexible, enabling teachers to
engage in a variety of activities and making it possible to recruit qualified academic and non-
academic staff, including foreigners” (Oba, 2005, p. 108).