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Have the lecturers lost their voice? Involvement and participation in the devolved Further Education sector

One of the key principles underpinning Further Education (FE) college ‘incorporation’ was the notion that good management resides only in the private sector. Hence, if decision-making responsibility were decentralized to local levels, FE managers would have the freedom to experiment with practices borrowed from the private sector such as TQM and HRM. Examining the validity of this assertion, this paper explores: the extent to which participative management approaches (central to TQM and HRM) have been adopted in FE; the antecedents that explain the approach taken; and consequences of the emergent approach. In the event we found no evidence of participation beyond the perceptions of some members of the Senior Management Team (SMT). While obstacles to a more participative approach included the stringent funding regime, work intensification, proletarianization, casualization, remoteness of the SMT and general management competence, role-overload at middle management level was found to be particularly influential. A non-participative management style was also seen as deleterious to the functioning of the college as senior managers were failing to draw on repositories of creativity and expertise lower down the organizational hierarchy.