MANAGEMENT FADS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

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MANAGEMENT FADS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

• Where They Come From, What They Do, Why They Fail
• By Robert Birnbaum

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Opening Statement

• Institutions of higher education are always
  under pressure to become more efficient and
  effective. In response, many have attempted
  (either voluntary or under mandate) to adopt new
  management systems and processes originally
  designed to meet the needs of business or
  government presumed to be more efficient.

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The Gut Wrenching Truth About Fads

• In higher education, fads have been described as
  management innovations borrowed from other
  settings, applied without full consideration of
  their limitations, presented either as complex or
  deceptively simple, relying on jargon, and
  emphasizing rational decision making.
• They usually follow the cycle of early
  enthusiasm, widespread dissemination, subsequent
  disappointment, and eventual decline.

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The Perfect Institutional Management System
Would..

• Have mechanisms to ensure that institutions were
  operating legally, efficiently, and effectively

• Would satisfy the interests of managers, those to
  whom the managers were responsible, and those who
  were subject to the system itself, 29

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Reason Why There is No Perfect System

• According to Birnbaum, no system can meet all of
  these criteria because of the demands of
  legality, efficiency, and effectiveness my be
  mutually inconsistent.
• The interests of the various groups
  participating in institutional management are
  often in conflict.
• Different systems serve different purposes and
  deciding on a specific one is both a political
  and technical judgement.

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Seven Historical Major Management Systems

• Planning Programming Budgeting System(1960-1974)
• Zero-Base Budgeting(1970-1985)
• Management By Objectives(1965-1980)
• Strategic Planning(1972-1974)
• Benchmarking(1979-)
• Total Quality Management/Continuous Quality
  Improvement(1985-1996)
• Business Process Reengineering(1990-1996)

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Whatever Happened To.?

• PPBS was expensive, programs were unclear, and
  assessing alternatives too easily turned into
  management game playing.
• MBO failed due to defects in design and
  implementation rather than flaws in the basic
  idea itself.
• ZZB often failed for lack of support from the
  top, trying to do too much in tool little time,
  and the lack of a clear decision-making
  structure.

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Continued

• Strategy was particularly problematic in
  colleges and universities because most of them
  were too complex to explicate the implicitthe
  most important strategic variables for most
  organizations-price,location,and program-were not
  under institutional control in much of higher
  education.
• Top four reasons as to why benchmarking failed
  was poor planning, no top management support, no
  process-owner involved, and insufficient
  benchmarking skills.

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Continued..

• When bringing TQM to campus, one brings a
  language developed in the realm of commodity
  production into the community of specialized
  academia discourse..it is not useful to compare
  the acquisition of knowledge in a college
  classroom with purchasing chicken nuggets at a
  fast-food restaurant
• BPR was more unsuited for higher education than
  for the business corporations it was originally
  prescribed for. Its focus was on redesigning a
  fundamental business process, not on departments
  or other organization units. But the work that
  universities did was their departments.

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Five Stage Progression of Management Fads

• First Stage-Identification of a crisis that
  overthrows existing operating assumptions
• Second Stage-Premature reports of success become
  widespread and organizations feel pressure to
  adopt
• Third Stage-Time between widespread distribution
  of the fad and widespread knowledge of user
  reaction and independent analysis
• Fourth Stage-Momentum swings to
  counter-narratives and claims of the fads
  effectiveness begin to be undermined
• Fifth Stage-Death of the fad. Widespread
  rationalization of the fads failure is what
  signals its demise.

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6 Reasons Managers Adopt Fads

• Role Bias
• Cognitive Bias
• Placebo Bias
• Normative Bias
• Self-efficacy Bias
• Commitment Bias

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Fads Pros

• Academic Managers are pressured to recognize
  importance of decision making
• Create opportunities for institutions to evolve
  by adopting new practices that better fit the
  environment, reinforce managers commitment to
  engage and actively shape their environment, and
  trigger intra-institutional interaction.

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Fads Cons

• Overemphasis within and outside the academy on
  numbers that may reshape priorities towards the
  quantifiable or pressure institutions to alter
  their performance to get prettier numbers
• Fads may undermine the narrative on which higher
  education was built. Modeling institutions after
  businesses subjects it to the market and
  reorders governance to mirror that of the
  private sector.

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Using Fads Constructively

• Consider With Skeptical Interest
• Invest In Knowledge
• Avoid the Bandwagon
• Anticipate Resistance
• Start Small
• Do Not Overpromise
• Culturally Customize
• Adopt Experimentally
• Do Not Relax Commitment or Support
• Build in Assessment

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In Conclusion..

• Good academic management is not the same as good
  business management, and uncritical acceptance of
  management innovations and fads invented to meet
  the needs of government, business, or the
  military is more likely to harm than benefit
  colleges and universities.
• Hmmm I wonder what he thinks of private, for
  profit universities?