Re-engineering higher education: Reconciling profitability with the common good Tony Bryant Professor of Informatics School of Information Management Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

The informational society and some paradoxes for education

Now I am aware that that the conference addresses educational issues across the full range of education - from pre-school to postgraduate: But I shall restrict myself to higher education, or more inclusively post-compulsory or tertiary education. My knowledge of primary and secondary education is limited to my own experience of it - rather more years ago than I care to recall - and my present vicarious experience via my children.

Everyone agrees that education is important; it is one of those indisputably 'good things', like motherhood and apple pie. Recently, however, this evaluation has been enhanced as education has (again?) come to be regarded as a critical social factor: A force for cohesion, and transformation. Slogans such as 'the learning society', 'the knowledge society', and the like abound in academic and political parlance. There are schemes for lifelong learning, competence and so on. The (New) Labour party in the UK fought the 1997 general election using, among many others, the phrase 'Education; Education; Education' - one of those initially appealing, but ultimately trite slogans. (Not that they need have worried about slogans or electioneering; they simply had to be something other than the Tories.) This one I assume mimics the estate agents' maxim that the price of a property is dependent on three things - location, location, location. In effect Blair's New Labour are intimating that education is to be elevated to a/the position of prime importance in British society as it enters the information age.

Beneath all this rhetoric there is the view that we are currently seeing the emergence of a new form of society, one where knowledge is the dominating force, the determinant of value and authority. These ideas can be exemplified by a brief consideration of the work of Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells.

Bell's work is perhaps the prime example of the argument that we are moving into a fundamentally new form of society. Many aspects of his position are now incorporated into political statements and social comment focusing on the emergence of the information society. At this point let me stress that I believe Bell's position to be ill-founded and fallacious. On the other hand there are strands of his work that have fuelled the development of a great deal of insightful analysis of emerging social forces. One remarkable feature of Bell's work is that he produced some of the key arguments regarding the information society several years before the introduction of the IBM PC. (His initial term was post-industrial society.)

In his work, Bell argues that the labour-theory of value has been superseded by the knowledge-theory of value. 'The axial principle of the post-industrial society ... is the centrality of theoretical knowledge and its new role, when codified, as the director of social change' (p501). Knowledge and its applications replace labour as the source of value.

Bell's position has been amplified and extended since the late 1970s, both by himself and many others (see Webster, 1995). Moreover the central concepts sustain many aspects of current political platforms. The European Union has produced the Bangemann Report (1994), and The Dearing Report on higher education is premised on ideas similar to Bell's. I am sure there are similar references that could be supplied for Australia, Asia and elsewhere. So we are not simply dealing with an exchange of ideas, lacking in wider implications.

Castells' work is far too complex and multi-faceted to summarise in any meaningful way. Over the years he has written extensively about what he terms 'informationalism' - a form of capitalism where 'the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself (is) the main source of productivity' (Castells, 1996, p17). '[I]nformationalism is oriented towards economic growth, that is toward maximising output; informationalism is oriented towards technological development, that is toward the accumulation of knowledge and towards higher levels of complexity in information processing.' (p17). In the last two years his three volume analysis of this social phenomenon has appeared, and is destined to become a key text for all those interested in virtually any aspect of the social transformations currently being experienced.

In most countries there is a general consensus that a new social formation is developing, with overwhelming social and economic ramifications. The European Union (EU) have gone as far as establishing an Information Society Project Office, and most individual member states have set up national project offices to co-ordinate their own activities and contributions.

One of the most succinct and widely published policy statements on the information society is the Bangemann Report, produced for the European Council by its 'high-level group on the information society'. The report entitled Europe and the Global Information Society, was published in 1994 as a basis for discussion relating to 'specific measures to be taken into consideration by the Community and the Member States for the infrastructures in the sphere of information' (Bangemann, 1994). The report itself starts from the premise that the 'information revolution' is occurring - 'a revolution based on information, itself the expression of human knowledge'.

Throughout the world, information and communications technologies are generating a new industrial revolution (chapter 1)

I prefer Castells' term 'informationalism' to 'the information society'; but whichever one we use foreshadows a series of far-reaching social transformations. Whether we see this new social form as an advanced form of capitalism, or as a fundamentally distinct one; education is seen as having a critical and enhanced role. Afterall education is the prime source of developing and transmitting knowledge; and knowledge - we are told - is the key to wealth and the engine of social change. Thus access to wealth, wealth creation, the professions, and jobs in general, is to be determined by education rather than privilege, birth or some other - presumably more arbitrary and thus less just - characteristic. Education - and training - will be the social glue that incorporates people into the uncertain, but potentially exciting new form of society. Education will provide the basis for people to participate and feel included in this transformational society. By the same reasoning, social problems - particularly crime, poverty, and drugs - are seen in terms of 'social exclusion'; and so can be solved through education that will enhance participation and so break down the barriers that result in this exclusion. On both a personal and social level, education will provide the route to prosperity and fulfilment.

This argument is then extended to the international level: Countries can only prosper if they have well-educated, flexible work-forces since globalisation - or some similar term - amounts to the erosion of space and distance as obstacles in determining centres of production and employment. Each country - each region - has to compete with all others since it is immaterial where a factory, service centre, or processing department is actually located. Education is thus held out as the path to survival and prosperity both individually - which it always was - and collectively - which is perhaps novel in its 1990s form.

Two quotes from recent UK sources illustrate these points. A recent UK forum on 'Education for Transformation: Widening Participation for Black and Ethnic Minority Students' (note the title!) lead with the quote from the Chairman (sic!) of the Commission for Racial Equality.

Those people who lead the Higher Education sector can make a real difference to the life chances of ethnic minorities by making sure that universities offer equal opportunities to study and work, thereby contributing to the development of a more inclusive society. (Sir Herman Ouseley, CVC Seminar, February 1998)

So, to be a successful nation in a competitive world, and to maintain a cohesive society and a rich culture, we must invest in education to develop our greatest resource, our people. (p7)

Education is indeed hailed as the great hub around which informational society revolves. It is the unquestioned 'good', the unprejudiced lever towards social justice: But it is also portrayed as a business; something that has to open itself to a calculus of profit and loss, efficiency and effectiveness. We have the paradox that education is a 'common good', and education is also an enterprise.

A further paradox emanates from the role of technology in education. There is little doubt that all forms of education benefit from technology; but it is becoming all too apparent that they can also suffer from the excesses of technology. I believe that current research is indicating that the money and other resources that have been spent on equipping primary and secondary schools with PCs would have been better spent on more teachers, more training of teachers, and more books. In higher education, or more generally tertiary education, there is a similar debate, with an increasing concern that many courses are simply training students in the use of specific - and quickly outdated - technologies, rather than offering a wider and deeper understanding of the issues and principles underlying the technologies. There is also the growing concern at the emergence of what David Noble has termed 'Digital Diploma Mills' (see below).

A final paradox is one that has been pointed out by various authors for many years; and is becoming all too obvious in the1990s.

Twenty years ago, Ronald Dore accurately described the paradox of the diploma disease, whereby "the worse the educated unemployment situation gets and the more useless educational certificates become, the stronger grows the pressure for an expansion of educational facilities" (quoted in Coffield and Williamson, p13)

All of these paradoxes impact on all forms of education, although in different ways and combinations for each. I can really only begin to consider their impact on higher education.

The higher education business

The older universities are, however, moving to mimic this; both formally and informally. Gradually the terminology of higher education is becoming indistinct from that of general management and business. A recent text on higher education offers a succinct example of this.

Rapid changes both in the information technology industry and in business generally mean that enterprises, such as higher education institutions, must engage in continuous realignment of their business and technical systems. (Ford et al, p3)

• generation and transmission of ideology
• selection and formation of the dominant elites
• production and application of knowledge
• training of the skilled labour force

... after centuries of using universities mainly as ideological apparatuses and/or elite selecting devices, there is a rush of policy makers and private firms towards the university as a productive force in the informational economy ... The technocratic vision of a "clean", "purely professional" university, is just that, an historical vision sentenced to be constantly betrayed by historical reality. (p30)

Again an indicative statement can be found in Ford et al (p2)

The Learning Environment Architecture provides a method for developing and managing learning environments to support the current and changing role of higher education in the United Kingdom. It does this by providing a method for creating a framework within which strategies, business processes and supporting information systems can be developed and changed to meet the objectives of an institution with maximum overall effectiveness.

Business process re-engineering and the business process perspective

The question which asks how to use the computer in the enterprise, is, in short, the wrong question. A better formulation is to ask how the enterprise should be run given that computers exist. The best version of all is the question asking, what, given computers, the enterprise now is. (Stress in original)

Beer's target in stating this was those who saw the advent of IT as simply a way of speeding-up and staffing-down existing practices. This stance of what might be termed 'technological indifference' fails to recognise any potential unleashed by technological change. Technology is simply an additional service for doing what has always been done. To criticise this indifference is not, however, to go to the other extreme and endorse any kind of 'technological determinism'; where the nature of technology determines the surrounding practices and organisational structures. Castells clarifies the position admirably, 'technological determinism is probably a false problem, since technology is society, and society cannot be understood or represented without its technological tools' (1996, p5).

Whatever its origins and originators, BPR as such achieved currency from 1990 through the work of Hammer and Champy, and a host of others following them. Some of these writers used alternative phrases such as Business Process Redesign, Core Process Redesign, Business Process Transformation, and so on; but the meaning and intent are similar to BPR (where the R can stand for Re-engineering or Re-design).

What all these terms share is a view that the advent of IT has afforded organisations the means, motives and opportunities to re-evaluate many of the assumptions governing their overall and everyday operations. Pressures and constraints which had either been unacknowledged or else procedures and pressures which had seemed immutable or inevitable have now to be questioned, challenged and possibly overcome. Strategies, tactics, operations, hierarchies and responsibilities have to be re-appraised and revised.

Although premised upon the developments in IT since the 1980s, BPR essentially is not a technology-oriented concern but an organisational one. This is not to say that some BPR commentators do not appear to adopt a technological determinism of sorts; and nor is it to deny that much of the BPR literature focuses predominantly on IT. The key point about IT, however, is that without the potential afforded by new technology, much re-engineering would not be feasible.

The essence of BPR, however, is in its demand for the clear identification and re-examination by an organisation of its essential and core processes - 'at the heart of re-engineering is the notion of discontinuous thinking - of recognising and breaking away from the outdated rules and fundamental assumptions that underlie operations. Unless we change the rules, we are merely rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic'. (Hammer, 1990)

BPR is usually associated with the book by Hammer and Champy, Re-engineering the Corporation that appeared in 1993. It rapidly became one of the best sellers of all time. Less well known is the work by T H Davenport (Process Innovation; Re-engineering Work through IT) that also appeared in 1993. Davenport's book is more academic in style and measured in tone; which may explain its lack of popular appeal.

Davenport defined BPR as the 'analysis and design of workflows and processes within and between organisations'. A process is 'a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome'. A Business Process will have internal or external customers, and will cut across organisational boundaries. Hence a process-oriented perspective will question and may ultimately undermine the 'traditional' departmental divisions within an organisation.

Davenport distinguished four kinds of business process

• core processes
• support processes
• business network processes
• management processes

Support processes are those that occur within the organisation where the 'customers' are internal. These are often the 'back office processes' that have to be performed to raise orders, pay suppliers and so on. Again there are claims that processes such as dealing with 'accounts payable' can be made 80% more efficient.

Business network processes extend beyond organisational boundaries, and relate to suppliers and customers. These processes are often difficult to identify precisely because they extend outside the organisation. For instance many retail organisations seek to integrate supplier inventory with customer distribution. This lowers the costs for the retailer, but can increase it for the supplier. (The classic example of a retailer that operates in this way is Wal-Mart in the USA.)

Management processes relate to the generic activities such as planning, organisation of resources and the like. Here re-engineering is claimed to assist in identifying aspects of decision making that can be clarified, simplified or even automated.

Having reached a frenzied peak of popularity and interest in the mid-1990s, BPR has begun to decline in recent years; partly in the face of a sustained critical onslaught, and partly because of its own proponents' claims that at best it is only 20% successful. (See Bryant and Chan; and Vanhoenacker et al) But it would be wrong to dismiss BPR entirely. The principle of discontinuous thinking is an important one and, harnessed to the process perspective, can provide an important conceptual basis for coping with precisely the context within which tertiary education has to operate in the 1990s.

BPR can get things moving in a useful direction; forcing people to ask a range of questions that seek to elicit discussions at a fundamental level is (sometimes) useful and necessary. On the other hand, the BPR approach of many such as the aptly named Mike Hammer, is far often associated with machismo and a power rhetoric, offering little in terms of understanding. Various episodes in the UK - and I am sure elsewhere - indicate that there is a temptation on the part of some (usually male) senior managers in higher education - and elsewhere - to impose precisely this vision of an organisation. Some of the associated terminology - down-sizing, right-sizing, re-engineering - is indicative of this mechanistic and inappropriate orientation.

Managing in turbulent times

• placid
• clustered
• reactive
• turbulent

This has always been recognised, and the principles of change management predate those of BPR; but what makes the 1990s different is that new forms of technology exist that can provide the basis for re-orientation to cope with turbulence. The introduction of IT - and associated technologies - should be used as a prelude to re-examination of an organisation, rather than as a different way of achieving the same ends.

We can salvage the strengths of BPR, and use them to reconceptualise higher education. We can

• focus on the process aspects of higher education
• look to the possibilities of IT-enabled change
• identify and discuss possible routes of transformation
• question the current practices of higher education

Educational institutions should be using IT to rethink the process of education itself. Unfortunately many people fail to grasp this, and there is still the common misconception that the information system is merely an operational service; something simply to be revised to respond to other organisational functions. Increasingly the IT/IS system is critically integrated into the overall context, and cannot be considered as merely a mechanical appendage.

Re-engineering higher education?

1. How can we apply this sort of reasoning to education?
2. Can higher education be re-engineered?
3. What is an education process?

Davenport's distinction between four types of process can get us started. He distinguished between core processes; support processes; business network processes; management processes.

Core processes are those that are central to business functioning and relate to external customers. With regard to higher education the customers include the students; but they will also include others who purchase the educational services on offer - e.g. government agencies that fund the institution, employers, commercial sponsors, and so on. This is a contentious issue in some countries since many of those employed in higher education - the academics - find it hard to orient themselves to such obligations and accountabilities. This is not to say that we must all acquiesce in the demands of all our 'customers'. This may not even be possible, and it is certainly not desirable. But we must at least be conscious of the full range of demands and expectations that are made of higher education. Perhaps the four functions identified by Castells provide a useful starting point in identifying the 'core processes' and external pressures.

As an example of how process-oriented thinking might be introduced, consider the process by which we impart the material in the curriculum to our students. Currently we probably use a mixture of lectures, tutorials, handouts and so on. This is often a fairly haphazard arrangement, and might benefit from a much more insightful analysis of how best to use available resources and materials - particularly with a consideration of emerging technology. (We shall move on to consider the technology specifically below.) This might also begin to throw light on the other types of process upon which the core processes have to rely.

A more controversial example might be to look at the content and evolution of the curriculum. Using BPR-type practices, the curriculum should be seen to respond to the demands and needs of customers: But these are usually contradictory, and often short-term. Process analysis cannot resolve these issues, but can bring then to light and offer a starting point for discussion.

Support processes are those that occur within the organisation where the 'customers' are internal. Here we can consider a whole host of activities that are highly contentious within higher education. I know that in many UK institutions the academic staff find themselves increasingly burdened by precisely these sort of 'back office processes'. Many higher education institutions have undergone the usual range of re-organisations that afflict us all - centralisation, decentralisation; faculties, departments, schools and so on. Whatever the sequence, the administrative and paper-work burden seems to increase each time. The result is that the support processes do not support anyone; they simply consume time and effort. Simplification of these processes would prove highly effective and popular.

Management processes relate to the generic activities such as planning, organisation of resources and the like. In many higher education institutions in the UK - and probably elsewhere - there is the common misconception that management is something that can only be done by 'managers'; and that these people can only operate in the newest, best-equipped buildings, remote from everyone else, engaged in endless meetings. All those who condemn the introduction of 'the business model' into higher education ought to recognise that introduction of some of the precepts of BPR could - and should - augur the extinction of the bureaucratic hierarchy that afflicts far too many higher education institutions. (Hierarchical management structures are a prime example of what I previously pointed to as the danger of borrowing outdated ideas from another domain.) The re-engineering of management processes should perhaps be one of the first objectives in higher education, and might do much to overcome the understandable suspicion with which such undertakings are viewed.

Davenport's fourth type of process are those he terms 'business network processes'. These extend beyond organisational boundaries, and are usually thought of as relating to suppliers and customers. In the context of higher education, however, this type of process could be enhanced to include those processes that are critical in the establishment and maintenance of professional networks between academics, researchers and students (understood in the widest possible sense). Here the emergence of a technology that collapses time and space is critical to the new role of higher education in the context of informationalism. Indeed it impacts on some of the core processes of higher education itself; witness the expansion in distance learning, computer-based training, and the emerging use of multi-media technology in projects such as those oriented around the virtual classroom.

A note on technology

Clearly IT has already - and will continue to have - a significant impact on education. With regard to primary and secondary education, Microsoft would have us believe that putting instruction on-line is the ultimate blessing. Others would doubt this - even to the extent of arguing that the money spent on PCs in schools has almost entirely been wasted, and would have been far better spent on more teachers, more books, more training and support and so on.

In higher education the impact has been more diverse, but also perhaps more immediate. Because we are not in the business of developing primary skills, the role of IT is mediated by the curriculum of the specific courses or modules that are being studied. In addition the technology acts as a key resource that can be used by all students in completing their work. The first year student is as reliant - I hope - on the word processor, as the most senior researcher: Similarly the use of the internet by all 'researchers' from final year project students to PhD candidates, and beyond.

As well as the benefits, IT introduces its own problems. Plagiarism and other forms of 'borrowing' other people's work has always been a sensitive issue. It is now rapidly becoming a major concern in many courses. (There is also the problem of applicants for academic posts listing publications that are substantially other people's work.) The 'obvious' - if partial - solution is to request all students to submit at least one hand-written piece of work for each module or unit; but this seems so archaic that it is unlikely to be implemented. The other possibility is to take a random sample of students and examine them with some form of oral examination - again not likely to be a popular option with students, staff or resource managers. Those responsible for 'quality' and 'standards' on the other hand might see this sort of option as essential - yet another source of tension between the quality assessors and everyone else.

The role of IT in the core processes of education itself is more problematic. Recent work by David F Noble indicates some of the dangers inherent in the uncontrolled and ill-considered introduction of IT into higher education. Noble's work has been circulated electronically, although Noble himself is avowedly non-digital, eschewing even a word processor. He is currently working on a book entitled 'Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education'. The extracts report the ways in which certain North American universities have signed agreements with corporate communications companies eager to supply 'on-line learning'. This has usually been accomplished by the university management without consultation with the academic faculty. Issues such as intellectual property, control of the curriculum, subject delivery and academic integrity have been ignored; resulting in a 'degraded cyber education' creeping in insidiously.

Noble quotes from Robert Reid's 'classic 1959 study of diploma mills for the American Council of Education', where Reid describes the typical diploma mill as having; 'no classrooms'; 'faculties are often untrained or non-existent'; 'the officers are unethical self-seekers whose qualifications are no better than their offerings' (Noble, 1997).

The operational problems mentioned above, and the developments described in Noble's work should not be taken as reasons to resist or impede the introduction of IT into higher education. On the contrary the lesson that has to be learned from BPR is that the potential unleashed by IT changes the fundamentals of the ways in which things have been done. The assumptions underlying many accepted practices can and should be questioned, recognising that one of the misconceptions deriving from 're-engineering' is that existing practices were never engineered in the first place - they probably just evolved in a fairly haphazard fashion. Noble's studies indicate the importance of sincere and full participation in any re-engineering schemes.

All of this illustrates that there is a basis for using the BPR approach in a context of higher education: Although, given the weaknesses in BPR, it would be better to talk of applying Business Process Management (BPM) to higher education (see Vanhoenacker et al). Moreover, recalling the first paradox mentioned above, we can go some way to resolving it by recasting the opposition between 'business' and 'common good' as one between the core processes and those that support and assist in its management.

BPM and GDD

GDD is a goal-oriented approach. It shares with BPR the holistic view of an organisation as an integrated set of functions, including the information system function. Indeed this function, together with other key ones such as Human Resources, forms a constitutive role for any organisation. What GDD also takes from BPR and its precursors is a refusal to accept any facet of organisational existence without at first seeking clarification of core processes and key assumptions.

GDD also recognises that the clarifying and restating of goals is itself a controversial and conflict-ridden activity. It may be advisable to start such a process with an open orientation, aiming for consensus. On the other hand, it will often be the case that unanimity will not be forthcoming, and hence people will feel that their opinions will have been ignored or discarded. Some 'soft systems' and 'critical systems' approaches attempt to deal with this sort of situation, attending specifically to conflict, power, motivation and authority.

GDD extends or enhances BPR and the like, however, in going beyond acceptance of goals as such, and highlighting the problems which arise when discrete and enduring objectives cannot be maintained: A common feature of what Emery and Trist term 'turbulence'. In turbulent contexts there will be a very high degree of change. Prospects will be difficult to calculate. Key decisions will have to be made; and in circumstances involving risk and chance.

GDD is premised upon an acceptance of uncertainty and unpredictability. The only way in which certainty can be imposed upon turbulent contexts is through goal maintenance; whereby a goal can be agreed upon, or imposed. Once this has been achieved, all activities and procedures are effected to reach this goal; but there is always the possibility that alternative processes will be substituted or added to reach the same goal, and if necessary the goal itself can be reformulated or even replaced, with the process starting over.

This is not (quite) a recipe for ad hoc disorder. Instead GDD focuses upon the learning and experiencing aspects of activities; recognising that mindless application of 'feelgood' principles is never particularly useful or sufficient. People may become adept at GDD techniques, but there will always be room for improvement and adaptation. More importantly, GDD skills are only partially transferable and transmittable: There is a large element that is context dependent and context specific. GDD is culturally bound, organisationally bound, although paradoxically there may be benefits from external influences and alternative views; but they must come about as a result of commitment, not simply participation. This is akin to the soft systems idea of problem ownership. (It also severely constrains - or even prohibits - involvement by external consultants.)

GDD is characterised by a post-modern tolerance of chaos and unplannedness. This can best be defined by contrasting it with the planning approach prevalent in almost all the 'management' literature of the post-war period.

... the European navigator begins with a plan - a course - which he has charted according to certain universal principles, and he carries out his voyage by relating his every move to that plan. ... The Trukese navigator begins with an objective rather than a plan. He sets off towards the objective and responds to conditions as they arise in an ad hoc fashion. ... (G Berreman, quoted in Suchman, pvii) and of course many "he's" will be "she's" (AB)

This is directly contrary to the predominant 'command-and-control culture', which is premised on the rational planning described by Berreman. This latter form of 'purposive rational action' all too often uses the ideas of BPR as a cloak for implementing programmes of redundancy, short term profit maximisation, and like. Furthermore it tends to preclude experimentation and engender fear of making mistakes. GDD, on the other hand, embraces a culture which accepts that making (some) mistakes is an inevitable attribute of learning; but that repeatedly making the same mistake is an indication of a failure to learn and understand.

Applying GDD and discontinuous thinking

For instance the development of the internet, and related technology is beginning to have a fundamental effect on higher education. There is now the possibility to develop courses where much - if not all - interaction is computer-mediated. This opens up all education, but particularly higher education, to a whole range of people for whom it previously was either inaccessible or unaffordable. This comes at a time when developed countries have been going through what Scott has termed the 'massification of higher education', exemplifying Castells' argument that higher education is now seen as a social need in itself. This has lead some to talk of a 'crisis in higher education', although Scott points out that the word 'crisis' could be replaced by 'conjuncture' - a more positive term.

a new kind of culture seems to be emerging, labelled confusingly as postmodernism in the boutique of ideas, post-industrialism or post-Fordism in the socio-economic arena, the 'end of history' in the domain of ideology. The growth of mass higher education is implicated in this new culture; indeed it is among its most distinctive formations. (Scott, 1997, p17)

The temptation is to believe that either things can continue as they always have done; or that there is some incantation or panacea to resolve difficulties and dilemmas. Unfortunately neither is available; and it is also no good turning to some mechanistic management solution. A recent text exemplifies some of the dangers of this route. The authors go into some detail discussing change in higher education from a specifically BPR-oriented perspective (Ford et al). I have read this book several times, and my response has been different on each occasion: First highly amused and totally sceptical; second, appreciating some of the points made with a little more understanding and acceptance; third, return to mild derision and realisation that ultimately the consensus achieved by the group (educationalists and industrialists) could never be entirely convincing. Ultimately I must admit I find their approach and assumptions inappropriate, although their final report probably does represent an all too real attempt to come to terms with the twin issues of higher education expansion and new models of resourcing and funding.

Answers to these two issues can best be developed by returning to the original paper by Emery and Trist. The entire motivation for their paper was to extend the pioneering work of von Bertalanffy on systems.

... though von Bertalanffy's formulation enables exchange processes between the organism, or organisation, and the elements in its environment to be dealt with in a new perspective, it does not deal at all with those processes in the environment itself which are among the determining conditions of the exchanges. To analyse these an additional concept is needed - the causal texture of the environment (stress in the original)

Together, the four types may be said to form a series in which the degree of causal texturing is increased, in a new and significant way, as each step is taken.

Thus Emery and Trist note that there are three trends contributing to the emergence of 'turbulent fields'. The first one is that organisations are having to adapt to reactive environments, and taken together this produces the perturbations leading to turbulence. (They liken it to soldiers marching in step over a bridge.) Second is the 'deepening interdependence between the economic and the other facets of society'. Last, the increasing reliance on R&D to achieve competitive advantage. Taken together these lead to 'a gross increase in relevant uncertainty'. (Note the ways in which this description of turbulence, dating from the 1960s, foreshadows some of the characteristics of informationalism.)

All three trends have continued and deepened in the three decades since the paper was first published. So an understanding of the stages as historical development may be appropriate. Afterall, the three trends are echoed in some of the now classic statements of BPR; and it might then be thought that Emery and Trist are going to postulate a similarly aggressive and belligerent stance for dealing with uncertainty and complexity. But this would be to ignore the environment in which the paper was developed, and to misunderstand the contrast between the 1960s and the 1990s.

Whereas type 3 environments (i.e. reactive) require one or other form of accommodation between like, but competitive, organisations whose fates are to a degree negatively correlated, turbulent environments require some relationship between dissimilar organisations whose fates are, basically, positively correlated. ... We are inclined to speak of this type of relationship as an organisational matrix (in original)

the default of leadership shows itself in an acute form when organisational achievement or survival is confounded with institutional success ... the executive becomes a statesman as he (sic) makes the transition from administrative management to institutional leadership (stress in original)

The ability to account for the social perspective is crucial if one believes as Emery and Trist do that once organisations have encountered turbulence, they cannot simply revert to clustered or reactive environments. There is no way back. The only way forward is to recognise the inadequacy of an isolated perspective that weighs everything in terms of profit and loss on a short-term, localised basis.

This is the root of the misconception that confounds or identifies profitability with the common good; which usually leads to higher education being treated in idealised (and brutalised) business terms. If we allow this logic to develop unchallenged, then we will be moving towards those dark, satanic diploma mills that Noble describes.

I am sure that one of the key roles that universities - or whatever such institutions come to be called - must continue to be 'conflictual organisations, open to the debates of society, and thus to the generation and confrontation of ideologies' (Castells, 1994).

We have to recognise that higher education is subject to pressures and obligations that lead in different - and potentially incompatible - directions. Education is meant to contribute to the 'common good'; it is seen as part of the foundation of the 'knowledge society'; it is increasingly subject to the bounded calculus of the balance sheet. As Castells points out, this is not as novel a situation as some might believe. Higher education has always been subject to a range of socio-economic forces: Under informationalism this range is more complex and immediate. We cannot ignore the complexities, so we have to find ways of understanding and discussing them. Applying some of the lessons of re-engineering can get us started. At present we are a little like Edward Bear regarding the necessity for change and transformation.

coming downstairs now bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. (Edward Bear a.k.a. Winnie The Pooh - A. A. Milne)

References

Beer, S. (1981). The Brain of the Firm. 2nd edition. John Wiley.

Bell, D. (1980). The Social Framework of the Information Society. In Tom Forester (ed), The Microelectronics Revolution. Blackwell, Oxford (originally published in 1979).

Bryant, A. and Chan, D. (1996). BPR - to redesign or not to redesign? Business Change and Re-engineering, 3(2), April.

Castells, M. (1994). The University System: Engine of Development in the New World Economy. In J. Salmi and A. Verspoor (eds), Revitalizing Higher Education. Pergamon, Oxford.

Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. (This is the first volume of a 3 volume work collectively entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture).

Coffield, F. and Williamson, B. (1997). Repositioning Higher Education. SRHE, Open University Press, Buckingham

Davenport, T. H. (1993). Process Innovation: Re-engineering Work through Information Technology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts.

Davenport, T. H. and Short, J. E. (1990). The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Re-engineering. Sloan Management Review, Summer 1990, pp.11-27.

Dearing (1997). Higher Education in the Learning Society. Report of the National Committee, HMSO.

Emery, F. E. and Trist, E. L. Various papers collected together in F. E. Emery (ed), Systems Thinking. Penguin, 1969.

Emery, F.E. and Trist, E.L. (1965). The causal texture of organisational environments. Human Relations, 18, pp21-32.

Ford, P. et al (1997). Managing Change in Higher Education. SRHE, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Hammer, M. (1990). Re-engineering work: Don't automate - obliterate. Harvard Business Review, July/August, 104-112.

Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993). Re-engineeering the Corporation. Harper, New York.

Noble, D. (1997). Digital Diploma Mills. Circulated electronically.

Scott, P. (1995). The Meanings of Mass Higher Education. SRHE, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Scott, P. (1997). The Crisis of Knowledge and the Massification of Higher Education. In R. Barnett and A. Griffin (eds), The End of Knowledge in Higher Education. Institute of Education/Cassell, London.

Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions. CUP, Cambridge.

Vanhoenacker, J., Bryant, A. and Dedene, G. (1997). Rethinking BPR methodologies. BPR Europe.

Webster, F. (1995). Theories of The Information Society. Routledge, London.

Author: Dr Tony Bryant is Professor of Informatics, School of Information Management, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He taught social science at Cambridge, Leeds and Durham universities before embarking into computing. He worked with a commercial software developer, where his responsibilities ranged from programming, systems analysis, project management and consultancy. He returned to higher education at Leeds, and in 1988 became British Telecom (BT) Reader in Software Engineering. His research interests initially centred on the use of formal techniques for system specification, and from 1988-92 he ran a major research project. Lately his interests have developed into research into information management, process improvement, and organisational aspects of the use of IT. Please cite as: Bryant, A. (1998). Re-engineering higher education: Reconciling profitability with the common good. In C. McBeath, C. McLoughlin and R. Atkinson (Eds), Planning for Progress, Partnership and Profit. Proceedings EdTech'98. Perth: Australian Society for Educational Technology. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/edtech98/pubs/articles/bryant.html