Representation of the academic workforce in English university strategy-making: an exploratory study

Abstract

Analysis of strategic planning practices can offer insight into how universities operate and are structured as organisations, both in terms of where importance is placed and what is elided, and through discursive consideration of how strategy texts legitimate certain ways of thinking and acting and seek to produce consent around managerial decisions. This paper applies a strategy-as-practice approach (Jarzabkowski and Whittington in Journal of Management Inquiry, 17, 282-286, 2008) to explore how the academic workforce in English universities is conceptualised and represented in institutional strategic planning, specifically in the genre of text referred to as a strategic plan or strategy document. Through qualitative content analysis of a sample of eight university strategic plans (following Brandtner et al., in Urban Studies, 54, 1075-1091, 2016; Hellström in Policy Futures in Education, 5, 478-490, 2007), we find the academic workforce occupying an uncertain position in the documents, especially in the case of staff with teaching responsibilities, whose position is particularly ambiguous.