Well, after many lengthy discussions with my supervisors I’ve finally nailed down some researchable questions.  (I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been writing first drafts – and I do mean drafts. My approach is to knock out quite a lot of text with a view to getting feedback on it, and then I can do a much tighter second draft.) So much for doing the research in early May. Hah!  Anyway that’s done now, so back to the research questions 

Firstly, I’ve become quite interested in the various models of the University – there are the obvious functional models (Research oriented, teaching oriented) and I think we can add an instrumental model to this. Government demands that Universities deliver certain things (not always on any identifiably rational grounds in my view, but there you go) and universities have to deliver them.  An example might be the push for Personal Development Planning a few years ago. Now PDP is not a bad thing, and there’s a good case for students doing it, but frankly, it was never going to be a high priority for most academics, or for that matter for students. Attempts to make it compulsory were never realistic in my view.  (Sorry, hobby horse there.) Back to models of the university. The point about the functional models is that they are influential because they are held by external agencies. Most parents expect the university to give little Johnny and Jane a good education in order to get a good job for example – and that leads to certain expectations of academic staff. (YOu’ll have to wait for my thesis for a fuller account!)

There’s a bunch of structural models too, perhaps the most famous being that of McNay which identifies four different ways of managing a university – Enterprise, Corporate, Bureaucratic and Collegial. There are others, with slightly different perspectives and these models seem to me to be more about the internal operations of a university – but they’re influential because agencies within the university have to identify the dominant models – if the senior management for examples holds to a bureaucratic model, then educational developers will have to too if they are to survive.

There is also a third group, which I am very doubtful about, and these are what I’m calling behavioural models. It owes something to the work of Ray Land who wrote an interesting article about the orientations of academic developers to academic development. Land argues, I think rightly, that these are responses to a situation in which developers find themselves rather than fixed personal attributes, so in fact they aren’t so much models as responses generated by the functional and structural models. On the other hand, people do have personal attributes, and they do have quite a strong influence on the way they work. I suppose we could say that organisations sometimes behave in particular ways – the most obvious behavioural model for an organisation might be labelled “political” – in the sense that it is competing with other resources for funds, or that it is trying to make changes to wider issues. (An example here might be a university that makes a case that all its research should be published under some form of creative commons license)  Another might be “pragmatic” where an organisation decides that it will do none of those things, but cut its coat according to its cloth (I’m told I can’t use metaphor and colloquialism in academic writing, but I can here. So there.) I do think the behavioural models are a bit speculative though.

Anyway, what I am trying to find out is where the EDU sits in this complex web of conceptualisations. What conceptualisations do the staff of EDU’s hold and do they match those above? I think I may well find that EDU staff are focussed on a particular model of the university, which may, after the end of the TQEF funding present it with some challenges, not least relating to its own survival.