The ascent toward corporate managerialism in American and Australian universities

A shift from collegial to managerial forms of university governance has been widely observed as a "global" trend, and the strengths and weaknesses of collegial versus managerial approaches have been debated at some length in more recent literature. Contrasting these styles as binary opposites, however, masks their complexities and ignores the possibility of multiple and often hybrid "models" of decision making. Our primary intention here is to investigate some of the dynamics and tensions inherent in the way different decision-making styles are currently played out in universities. We draw on interviews with academics in six universities in Australia and the United States to identify some of the "messy realities" of university governance, including unintended effects of the predominant "top-down" approaches, as perceived by our respondents