Introduction

In this chapter, I explore some of the conditions that make this vignette possible. How does academic time come to be calculable and manageable in these ways? How do heads of department come to be imagined as line managers? How do such management technologies and practices engender dismay and cynicism? In order to do this, I need to consider management as a travelling idea and assemblage that is translated into different spaces and settings. This places the chapter in a distinctive relationship to our collective interest in translation, as established in Chapters One and Two: the processes of translation explored here all take place within English, rather than involving translation between languages. Nevertheless, the analysis is rooted in the idea that there is more than one English. Management is articulated as a distinctive way of thinking, calculating and ordering the world that has complicated relations with other ways of thinking, calculating and ordering. Thus, what are at stake are practices of translation, even if the apparently common language conceals the extent to which translation is in play. The chapter also explores the ways in which power is a central coordinate of the work of assemblage; indeed, it suggests that in the process of translation, the forms and sites of power and authority are reassembled. In this way, the chapter fills out one key aspect of our efforts to use the concept of assemblage. However, the opening vignette is not just about management in general, nor even the more specific form sometimes called the New Public Management (NPM); it also requires attention to higher education (HE) as a sector and the university as an organisational formation in which management has come to be embedded.