In an initial evaluation of the changes, Oba highlighted a blurring of the boundaries between
public and private sectors of higher education, wider opportunities for recruitment, greater potential
for conflict within institutions between management and staff unions, and the need to professionalise
management and to learn from experience elsewhere. In relation to the final point, Oba likened the
process of incorporation of the national universities in Japan to the contractualisation policy adopted in
France in the 1980s.
Many studies show that the role of faculty is becoming more complex and fragmented (Halsey,
1992; Coaldrake and Steadman, 1998), and more pressured (McInnis, 2000; National Committee of
Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). Likewise, whilst detail differs between and within higher
education systems, many boundaries between categories of staff are becoming more blurred. Thus,
whereas human resource management was once something that was “done” by the most senior
managers and professionals to rank-and-file members of the workforce, the majority of institutional
managers are now likely to have responsibility for staff on a day-to-day basis, across a range of
functions, including teaching, research, business partnership and project work. Furthermore, as
distinctions blur between academic work and the contributory functions required to contextualise that
work in global, mass higher education systems, individuals move increasingly between contiguous
academic, quasi-academic and management domains. As a result, the composition of institutional
workforces is changing, and mixed roles emerging (Whitchurch 2006a; 2006b).
Thus, in the university’s transition from a “community of scholars” to a “community of
professionals” (AUT, 2001), the university is developing new kinds of contracts with its workforce,
both in the formal sense, and in terms of the relationships and networks that constitute the “lived
environment” (Knight, 2005) of day-to-day interactions. However, as noted by McInnis, these
developments have not been well documented, in contrast with, for instance, issues around policy and
governance:
“the impact of shifts in job profiles, values and behaviours at the workface has received less
attention than issues such as governance and senior academic leadership” (McInnis, 1998,
p. 161).
Hereafter, this paper concentrates on the issues and challenges arising, rather than further pursuit
of detailed nuances of systemic implications. Some may view that as introducing undue bias towards a
particular model of governance and management. That is not the intention, nor the philosophy being
espoused. Rather, the stance arises from an intentional focus upon pressures for change and
adjustment, associated responses and human resource implications. While national systems can, and
do, seek to moderate or translate the nature of these pressures, many forces and pressures for change
are viewed in the literature as being pervasive, almost a-spatial.
Institutional Contexts: Pressures for Change
Global markets mean that universities need increasingly to compete globally with other
knowledge providers for highly qualified staff. Whereas, in the past, relatively homogeneous
conditions of employment and linear career structures offered stability and predictability,
contemporary universities are now part of “a very complex knowledge producing game” (Gibbons
et al., 1994, p. 65), which obliges them to seek new and different skills in a volatile environment
(Wood, 2005). There has been a shift, therefore, from an environment that was secure and low
maintenance, to one that is increasingly high maintenance and high risk, albeit the extent and pace of
that shift differs depending upon where institutions sit in their relationships with government, and the
powers devolved to them.