(Un)conditional surrender?: why do professionals willingly comply with managerialism?

This chapter addresses the issue of how academics, more specifically business school academics, have responded to the rise of managerialism. It argues that all four faces of power – coercive, agenda setting, ideological and discursive – seem to be at work in driving academics to comply with the current managerial regime. The chapter discusses how business schools downplay the objective of offering good education and intellectual qualifications and instead focus on other purposes, like helping students to fake their abilities to employers, that is, fake their 'employability'. During recent decades there have been marked structural changes occurred in the higher education sector. A central aspect of this has been marketization. Marketization and the demand to comply with an ever expanding range of institutional myths have driven a rapid expansion of administration in universities. The growth of administration has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing power of managers. A large managerial infrastructure has developed to control the expanding numbers of administrative staff