Patterns of institutional management: democratisation, autonomy and the managerialist canon

Abstract

This chapter examines the most salient changes and reforms introduced in Higher Education Institutions in Portugal between 1974 and 2009. In particular, it attends to those which had impact on, and consequence for, governance and authority structures as well as on the patterns of institutional management. Attention is paid to the institutional responses to these reforms, for such responses entail the recontextualisation of public policies by the various educational organisations involved, not to mention the possible resistance shown by the actors. Following a sociological approach to educational organisations, the analyses are based on the hypothesis that in each of the chronological phases mentioned earlier, higher education institutions in Portugal are better interpreted by referring to different metaphors and images of organisation, to faces or models of educational management. This approach, which is marked by theoretical pluralism, opens the way for using various models of analysis to combine different organisational images and metaphors and for stressing the increasing relevance of the concept of hyper-bureaucracy.