Introduction

Strategic planning has become an increasingly key concern for universities around the world as they have become more centrally and directly managed organisations. The strategic plans or strategy documents which follow from this process are highly performative texts often largely intended for an external audience—but as part of the process of planning, institutional targets and priorities are set, or at least rhetorically enacted. Strategic plans fulfil many functions within organisations, such as ‘highlighting management visions, operationalising and implementing them and making them measurable’ (Brandtner et al., 2016, p. 1079). The strategy-as-practice approach (Jarzabkowski & Whittington, 2008) considers the activities connected to strategic planning not in terms of success in formulation and implementation, but rather what they reveal about organisations (Cornut et al., 2012).

This paper will explore the practices of strategy-making—and in particular, the discursive features of the resultant strategic plans—in contemporary English universities, with a focus on the representation of academic staff. As Winstone observes, ‘the messages conveyed by these [strategy] documents, either explicitly or implicitly, can significantly shape the enactment of practice “on the ground”’ (Winstone, 2022, p. 1108). Representations of staff within institutional strategic plans do not of course have a straightforward correspondence with the actual conditions or experiences of the institution’s staff, but these texts do have discursive power (Brandtner et al., 2016; Hellström, 2007; Vaara et al., 2010) and the representations they contain matter, as we will set out later in this paper. Previous analyses of how the academic workforce is represented in university strategy (Clegg & Smith, 2010; Smith, 2008; both focusing on universities’ learning and teaching strategies) have suggested that staff are typically absent from or passive in such documents.

The representation of staff within these texts is of salience due to the enormous changes that institutions in England have undergone over the past several decades, a period which has seen large shifts in the number, deployment, and working conditions of academic staff. Research has highlighted how the lines between academic and non-academic roles have become blurred (Macfarlane, 2011; Whitchurch, 2008), and role types have become increasingly diverse (Wolf & Jenkins, 2020). At the same time, academics report increased pressure and shrinking capacity (Erickson et al., 2021; Graham, 2015) with deterioration of contractual conditions and ‘casualisation’ of the profession a growing concern (Courtney, 2013; Read & Leathwood, 2020).

Our research question, then, is how the academic workforce in English universities is conceptualised and represented in institutional strategic planning, specifically in the genre of text referred to as a strategic plan or strategy document. ‘Academic workforce’ is itself a contested term, indicative of a human resources perspective towards the staff working in higher education institutions and whose growing usage, it has been argued, coincides with greater emphasis on institutional management and control of academics’ working lives (Brennan et al., 2017). It will be used here with this caveat and with a view to further interrogation of how language is used to represent and position higher education professionals. This paper is intended as an exploratory study of how strategic planning is done in contemporary institutions and with what effects, following a strategy-as-practice approach, and beyond the immediate research question, it is also intended to generate further avenues for future research.

We will note at this point that education systems in the UK are devolved to the constituent nations, and this analysis will focus on the English system—with reference to wider UK and international studies where relevant—for simplicity and to avoid drawing comparisons between institutions facing different external landscapes.

Universities’ strategic plans and planning

Universities’ strategic plans are typically glossy and highly stylised documents, carefully designed to present the institution in a positive light to external readers, and with much borrowing in format and language from corporate plans, such as mission and value statements. While the external-facing nature of these plans can make them appear entirely divorced from the day-to-day working experience of university staff, academic and professional services departments are generally expected to have regard to institutional-level strategy in their own planning, and there is a body of literature exploring how analysis of strategy documents can tell us something about organisations (both universities and other public bodies) and the working lives within them.

The deployment of strategic plans by English higher education institutions began to attract regulatory attention in the 1990s, with the government-sponsored MacFarlane report in 1992 and the Dearing report in 1997 recommending that institutions drew up and employed detailed teaching and learning strategies (Gibbs et al., 2000). The Higher Education Funding Council for England began to use funding and other incentives to encourage their use (ibid). This in turn led to a period of relatively intensive academic study of how learning and teaching strategies were being used (e.g. Clegg and Smith, 2010; Fanghanel, 2007; Newton, 2003; Smith, 2008), exploring the efficacy of implementation of these strategies, the assumptions and biases of strategy documents, and the experiences of teaching staff in responding to learning and teaching strategies. Since then, the analysis of university strategy documents in the academic literature has tended to focus on specific angles or concerns—either looking at how institution-wide strategic plans deal with a certain topic, such as technology (Matthews, 2021), or else, as the use of strategy documents in distinct areas of university activity has grown, considering particular strategic plans such as internationalisation strategies (Buckner et al., 2021; Lomer et al., 2023) or digital strategies (Czerniewicz & Rother, 2018; Flavin & Quintero, 2018).

Of particular relevance for our research question are the existing studies which consider how different members of a university community are represented in strategy texts. Clegg and Smith propose that such documents ‘present staff as recipients of policy, positioned as actors implementing policy but not as full actors identified with its voicing’ (Clegg & Smith, 2010, p. 125). Winstone (2022) analyses 134 strategy documents and corresponding submissions to the 2017 Teaching Excellence Framework, finding rather that it is typically students who are represented as passive recipients (of feedback, specifically), with teaching staff active in ‘transmitting’ knowledge rather than working dialogically with students. These findings are not necessarily in contradiction, of course, as Clegg and Smith are concerned with who has authority in setting, rather than implementing, strategy; a related earlier study by one of the authors found that staff were typically absent from strategy documents (Smith, 2008), with students treated as objects of actions. These three works all specifically consider learning and teaching, rather than institution-wide, strategies.

Concurrently with the somewhat heterogeneous interest in strategy documents shown in the higher education literature (which certainly in the English context was most marked in the first decade of the twenty-first century), the rise of strategy-as-practice approaches (Jarzabkowski & Whittington, 2008; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007) in the wider social sciences saw increased attention to more ‘mundane’ forms of institutional strategy-making, ‘asking questions about how these activities are accomplished, who is involved in accomplishing them and with what effects’ (Cornut et al., 2012, p. 22), as well as examination of ‘the broader institutionalized forms or “practices” on which they draw’ (ibid)—such as strategic plans. Cornut et al. sought to understand such documents as belonging to a particular textual genre, with shared rhetorical features and structures—with a specific focus on strategic plans from public and third sector organisations, given that businesses’ strategic planning is often of a different form and frequently unavailable for academic study (ibid, p. 26). Their study compares plans from institutions such as hospitals, universities, local government, and cultural organisations, performing a large-scale linguistic analysis to identify 16 ‘prototypical moves’ of public bodies’ strategic plans, the most common being goal-setting, mission, and implementation. While each organisation’s plan is context-specific, Cornut et al. argue that there are shared institutional understandings of structure, content, and purpose which characterise these texts (p. 22) and identify typical genre features such as optimistic tone, low prevalence of ambivalent language, and frequent recourse to phrases about cooperation and collectives (much more than in other textual genres).

Examples of studies considering the strategic plans of public institutions other than universities include work on arts organisations (Daigle & Rouleau, 2010), hospitals and NHS trusts (Fage-Butler, 2015; Ramsey et al., 2022), and city or local government strategic plans (Brandtner et al., 2016; Vaara et al., 2010), the latter being a particularly rich field and of relevance to this paper. Vaara et al. identify five key discursive features of the strategy texts they analyse and argue that they can be generalised, with caution, to the wider ‘genre’ of strategic plans. These features include the use of specific terminology—‘terms such as SWOT, change factors, scenarios, vision, strategic goals and critical success factors became central concepts structuring the conversations’ (p. 691)—the evocation of consensus towards the plan’s objectives, and ‘self-authorisation’, wherein the strategy communicates its own importance, and the rationale for certain decisions or actions is circularly presented as being in order to achieve the strategy (p. 690). This influential paper seeks to establish the ‘force potential’ of strategy texts, which for the authors serve several purposes:

They communicate socially negotiated meanings, legitimate ways of thinking and action and de-legitimate others, produce consent but may also trigger resistance, and have all kinds of political and ideological effects, some more apparent than others (p. 686).

The observation that strategy texts have a wide variety of implications for organisations and those within them can be found in many previous studies in the higher education literature and other related contexts. Brandtner et al. refer to strategy texts as ‘powerful discursive governance devices deployed by organisations to plan, plot and project their futures’ which ‘frame issues, highlight causes, identify effects, distribute agency and propose courses of action’ (2016, p. 1079); Czerniewicz and Rother see them as reflecting, amplifying, and shaping the values and experiences of those within an organisation (2018, p. 43). They are said to have an ‘educating and legitimating function’ (Cornut et al., 2012, p. 41), through which those under the strategy’s scope receive guidance on how to act as well as why they should wish to. It is suggested that strategic plans depict power as residing within the strategy itself, or the university as an abstract concept (Fanghanel, 2007; Smith, 2008), or in ‘senior institutional strategic players’ (Clegg & Smith, 2010, p. 128) or management more generally (Ramsey et al., 2022, p. 5). Fanghanel characterises the strategic plan as ‘a regulatory text in which “agency” has been suppressed’ (Fanghanel, 2007, p. 192). Our later analysis will assess the extent to which this is the case in contemporary university strategies.

Hellström concurs that strategy has implications for staff and students, and both constrains and enables universities as organisations (2007, p. 481) but emphasises that this is only true within certain limits. Clegg and Smith make a similar point, describing a ‘loose coupling’ between the initiatives within higher education strategy-setting and the outcomes ‘at a local level’ (Clegg & Smith, 2010, p. 118), and explore how strategic plans become part of the ‘micropolitics of institutional life’ (p.129), with staff often able to deploy the texts in their own interests in ways unintended by the authors. It is important to note here that our consideration of how strategy texts represent the academic workforce is intended neither to judge how accurately they reflect the work, status, and conditions of staff in universities (that is, how they describe academic work is not how academic work is), nor how they subsequently affect the work that happens in these institutions (that is, what they purport to make happen is unlikely to be what happens in practice). Rather, we are concerned with how these discursively powerful documents frame universities as organisations, and in particular, how they represent the academic staff working within them. In the following section, we will outline our methodological approach to achieving this.

Methodology

One possible approach to the analysis of university strategic plans is to assemble a large corpus of such documents spanning the breadth of the sector, to the extent which this is available (e.g. Matthews, 2021; Winstone, 2022), and then use computer-assisted methods to identify and classify the presence of specific concepts. Alternatively, following on from the above discussion of the shared linguistic, discursive, and rhetorical features of strategic plans (Cornut et al., 2012) and the observation that such texts enact ‘discursive governance’ (Brandtner et al., 2016) or have ‘force potential’ (Vaara et al., 2010), many studies have taken the route of detailed discourse analysis of strategic plans, exploring with some care the way language is used in a sustained way throughout the document(s). Ramsey et al. justify the use of this approach as rooted in the idea that strategy documents are authored by those with power and that discourse analysis ‘lends itself to the analysis of ideological power structures’ (2022, p. 5). A good number of the strategic plan analyses referred to in the previous section make use of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fanghanel, 2007; Vaara et al., 2010) or Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (Fage-Butler, 2015; Ramsey et al., 2022). Yet these works are in many cases single case studies or comparative studies, with less intention of broader coverage of the relevant sector as is our intention here. For this reason, a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, for example, has not been chosen.

For our purposes, qualitative content analysis (Krippendorff, 2013) has been selected as a means of giving due attention to the textual features of university strategic plans while allowing for consideration of a suitable variety of institutions to be covered in an efficient way—this follows the approach seen in Hellström (2007) and Brandtner et al. (2016) in these studies’ analysis of strategic plans. Flavin and Quintero (2018) also take a qualitative content analysis approach to university strategic plans, but in a much more ‘directed’ way (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), following a pre-established coding scheme based on their theoretical framework. Our analysis will rather avoid using preconceived categories, instead allowing these to ‘flow from the data’ (ibid, p. 1279), and derive codes by close reading of strategic plans for words and phrases that capture key thoughts or concepts related to academic staff or the university workforce more broadly. These will then be clustered into broader themes and categories (Hellström, 2007) based on how they are related and linked (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005)—to achieve this, a two-stage process of open coding followed by axial coding will be used: first reading the text reflectively to identify initial themes, which are then ‘refined, developed and related or interconnected’ (Gibbs, 2007, p. 49). NVivo will be used to facilitate the coding, but automatic coding features of the software will not be employed.

For our analysis, eight strategy documents were chosen from universities in England. As previously stated, we are interested in exploring the dynamics in the English national system specifically; it can also be noted that comparison between different countries’ strategic plans runs into the obstacle that there are different genre traditions and conventions that makes direct contrasts problematic (see, for example, Ozoliņš et al. (2018) for an example of this). The sampling process and rationale were as follows: the object of interest was selected to be overall university strategic plans, rather than for example education strategies, as the overall plan was assumed to give the clearest representation of the institution as a whole. The purpose here is not to draw comparisons between institution types or mission groups (for example, through comparing a sample of strategy documents from the most ancient and prestigious universities with a sample of former polytechnics—this would exclude large parts of the sector) but rather to ensure broad coverage of the major part of the sector, in keeping with the exploratory nature of this study.

To promote greatest coverage while still retaining efficiency, it was decided to look at a pair of strategy documents from each of the four different classifications of university ‘type’ used by Wolf and Jenkins (2020) in their major study of changes in the UK academic workforce: Russell Group, other pre-1992 (i.e. non-Russell Group founded prior to 1992), ex-polytechnic, and other post-1992. The sample then includes documents from research-intensive institutions, other older institutions, institutions which prior to 1992 were vocational ‘polytechnics’ but gained university status with the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, and institutions which have been established since 1992, respectively. Following Wolf and Jenkins, small and specialist institutions and private institutions were excluded from analysis due to their relatively lower prominence in the English higher education landscape.

A web search was conducted to find institutions with suitable, publicly available documents—to facilitate analysis, documents which were web-only as opposed to PDF were excluded, as were documents which were out-of-date or in the process of review. Ensuring regional spread of the chosen universities was also given priority (Czerniewicz & Rother, 2018). All universities chosen taught a broad range of degree programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Table 1 shows the eight documents chosen for further analysis. These ranged in length from around 2500 to over 12,000 words—differences in length were (partly) explained by verbose additional sections such as an introduction by the university’s vice chancellor, or an account of the institution’s history, which not all included. The time period covered by the plans ranged from 4 to 11 years, and in one case, there was no given start date.

Table 1 Sample of strategy documents
Full size table

This process of qualitative content analysis described above identified four themes related to the representation of the academic workforce in the sample of strategy documents, which are detailed in the following section.

Findings

Representation of staff through language

As discussed above, a finding of several previous studies was that the academic workforce was either absent from or passive in strategy texts. The language choices for referring to staff, and the actions associated with staff in strategy, arose as a notable theme from close reading of the texts. Generally, it was not the case that references to staff were missing in the sample—the exception to this was University A, where the word ‘staff’ appeared just four times and ‘researcher’ three times, with no other references to the university’s workforce in the 4392-word strategy. However, in all the plans, there was a marked tendency for staff activities and actions to be elided through textual formulations, for example, use of passive voice or impersonal constructions such as ‘learning environment’:

Ambitious and innovative courses by design and delivery will be developed in priority areas. (University B)

Our teaching and learning environment will be student-centred and enriching, with an emphasis on practice-based learning. (University H)

Building on the existing literature (see above, Fanghanel (2007) and Smith (2008)) which saw power depicted as residing within the strategy itself or in the university as abstract concept, the question of the ‘we’ of strategy texts was of interest. In certain instances in the documents, the use of ‘we’ suggested that the strategy was written from a point of view inclusive of those conducting teaching or research activities (that is, academic staff):

We will deliver a high-quality education based on where and how our students want and need to learn. (University A)

This strategy sets out our aspiration to become a top 50 university for both our teaching and our research. (University H)

We will ensure that our teaching, research and outreach activities deliver greater impact. (University G)

However, it was much more common that the ‘we’ of the document did not coincide with staff members:

We are dedicated to supporting our students and staff. (University D)

We want to offer better careers for our academic and professional service staff members. (University F)

In all eight of the texts considered, there were examples of staff being represented as both subject and object of the actions of the strategy, with the latter much more common. Typically, the word ‘staff’ was used to refer to the university workforce as a whole, often in conjunction with and as a parallel to ‘students’—phrasing of the following sort could be found regularly in all eight documents:

We will be recognised as the leading health promoting university, demonstrating significant health gain for our staff and students. (University B)

Support an excellent staff and student experience. (University C)

We can invest in our staff and students and an environment that enables them to thrive. (University E)

Clegg and Smith’s claim that learning and teaching strategies present staff as ‘recipients’ rather than ‘actors’ was also the case—largely—in these institution-wide documents. This was often through the use of verbs such as ‘support’ or ‘empower’, rather than the strategies explicitly containing directions or instructions to staff:

Empowering our students and staff to demonstrate a creative questioning approach, a ‘can-do’ confidence, and ability to navigate uncertainty. (University B)

Inspire and motivate staff and students to work together in effective ways. (University C)

Help our researchers improve their effectiveness. (University G)

These examples often suggested that staff were currently deficient in some area of their work and that the strategy would support them to improve. This was often accompanied by reference to changes in attitude (e.g. ‘every member of staff will be proud of their role in transforming futures’, University B). However, a few of the strategies contained language which framed staff with greater agency:

Provide our researchers with creative and inspiring spaces and facilities to enable them to deliver high-quality research. (University A)

Free up time for staff to use their skills and expertise where they have the most impact. (University E)

We aim to employ the very best people and set them free to pursue their research interests in a cooperative and well supported working environment. (University F)

It should be noted that, with the exception of University E (an outlier in a number of ways, as will be discussed below), language of this sort about allowing staff to make choices, or to be free to act, was primarily applied to researchers. The difference in how academic staff were represented in terms of teaching or research roles will be discussed in the next section.

Reference to staff by role type

The term ‘academics’ (as a noun, referring to a person or persons) only appeared seven times in total across the eight plans—once in the plans of Universities C and H and five times in University F’s. However, there was specific mention of ‘researchers’ in all but one of the documents analysed, with several of the strategies mentioning researchers (and equivalent phrases such as ‘research staff’) on multiple occasions.

In contrast, we also find that the term ‘teacher’ only appeared on seven discrete occasions across the eight strategies (Universities A, B, and H did not use the term at all), and a range of other words which might be used to describe staff engaging in teaching activity—‘lecturer’, ‘tutor’, and ‘educator’—were entirely absent from all documents.

Organisational structure

Another theme that emerged from analysis was how the strategy documents presented the structure of the organisations they pertained to. The strategy documents in our sample fell into two camps in terms of depicting the academic organisation of their universities. The majority (Universities A, B, C, D, and G) included no mention at all of the role of schools, departments, and/or faculties in realising the strategy’s ambitions. The other three strategies, however, represented academic departments/schools/faculties as the site of teaching and research and (particularly in the case of Universities E and H) recognised limits to the institutional strategy’s reach:

The strength of an institution such as [University E] has been, and will always remain, the excellence of the education, research, and innovation that goes on in our departments and faculties.

Our core commitment remains empowering departments and faculties to pursue excellence in their education and research. (University E)

Our four Schools […] are the engine room of our University. (University H)

University H is particularly interesting in this respect, referring to the institution’s schools as quasi-external entities, speaking of ‘their expert and industry-informed insight’ and ‘their researchers’ (emphasis added).

Staff experience

‘Improving staff experience’ was a regular refrain in the eight strategy documents, though this was generally presented in broad terms without details of what this would involve, or linked explicitly to inclusion and staff diversity; University A’s commitment to ‘improve the experience of our people, embracing equality, diversity and inclusion to enable them to contribute to our success’ was emblematic of this tendency. Improving health and/or wellbeing was also regularly mentioned across the plans. Mentioned far less was action to address the causes of poor health and wellbeing, which were generally not specified. With one exception, none of the strategic plans mentioned the workload of university staff, or other factors that might be expected to contribute to poor wellbeing such as stress or poor workplace relations.

The exception to this, University E, stood in marked contrast to the other plans, both in its frequent reference to workload and working conditions and in describing the process through which it was created (the other plans did not do so; University A’s mentioned a ‘consultative and iterative approach’, but no details were given). University E’s plan, in contrast, regularly foregrounded the ‘discussion, debate and feedback through [the] consultation process’ which informed the plan, over the course of a year and ‘more than 470 feedback submissions’. Allied to this, the strategy included examples of staff feedback (‘significant numbers of staff report excessive workloads’; ‘the impacts of [growth and underinvestment] have been clearly described in feedback to the consultation’) as a starting point for its actions:

This undertaking will also address existing, ultimately unsustainable, levels of administrative and organisational complexity that create huge frustration and challenging workloads for those teaching.

The pace of change will be managed to ensure it is not placing undue burden on staff.

Overall, we find that the strategy documents overwhelmingly did not address workload (or other aspects of working conditions which are a central concern in staff perceptions), but University E is a clear counter-example.

Discussion

The eight strategic plans in our sample largely do not position themselves as internal documents—there are examples within the texts of sections addressed to local residents of the university, to prospective students’ parents, to alumni, and for the benefit of regulatory bodies—and as previously discussed the genre features of these documents borrow much from corporate plans. They are performative documents, through which the authors seek to ‘plan, plot and project’ the future of the university as an organisation (Brandtner et al., 2016), as well as to make truth-claims about how they currently are.

The academic workforce is not represented as entirely absent or passive in these university strategic plans at the institutional level but does at many points occupy a notably uncertain position in these documents, both acting and acted on (as part of the ‘we’ of the university and also as ‘recipient’ of the university’s actions). The question of who the university is was marked by strategic ambiguity, but the overall impression given to the reader is that the ‘we’ of the university is the central management, the voice of the strategy.

This should be unsurprising in light of the well-evidenced organisational changes to universities in recent decades. Wolf and Jenkins’ (2020) large quantitative study of UK universities’ staffing practices observed a dramatic rise in numbers of staff in senior manager and ‘non-academic professional’ roles, which increased by 60% between the academic years 2005–2006 and 2016–2017 (academic positions, for comparison, increased in number by 16%), including a doubling of professional services staff in what are categorised as ‘student experience’ positions. Qualitative research has also provided evidence for a growing sense of disenfranchisement among academic staff; Brennan et al. (2017), drawing on data for English higher education from the Open University’s Changing Academic Profession survey, identify evidence for greater managerialism in universities and the erosion of traditional collegial governance and decision-making, a repeated theme in many studies looking at staff perceptions of change (e.g. Currie and Vidovich (2009)). Another recent literature review of the academic workforce in the UK context (Marini et al., 2019) also highlights tensions between managerialism and collegiality and greater institutional intervention in what can be called human resources management—purposeful direction for how staff are managed within universities. This tendency towards greater managerial control and less academic autonomy is reflected in our sample of strategic plans, where it is the strategy itself (in the voice of the central university authority) which takes decisions.

The general absence of the term ‘academic’ in the plans in favour of the more precise term ‘researcher’, as remarked in the previous section, can also be seen as reflective of the diminishing prominence of ‘all-rounder’ academic roles in English universities. Whitchurch and Gordon’s (2013) work finds the figure of the academic with a balanced load of teaching and research responsibilities coming under increasing pressure, with interviewees ascribing this change partly due to institutional strategic planning and partly from the ‘bottom up’, with individuals not necessarily expecting a linear career, and with aspirations to move in and out of higher education (see also Marini et al., 2019; Whitchurch, 2019; Whitchurch et al., 2019, 2021). Wolf and Jenkins’ other main finding in their study is a ‘remarkable’ rise in teaching-only staff, more than 50% between the academic years 2005–2006 and 2016–2017 to over 45,000 in total (though much of the increase was due to an even more marked rise in research-intensive (‘Russell Group’) institutions, and there is an element of these institutions ‘catching up’ with the staffing models in other newer institutions).

In this context, then, it is notable that in our sample of strategic plans, the language used to refer to academic staff carrying out teaching-related activities was uncertainly defined; Wolf and Jenkins caution that their respondents, senior management interviewees used to supplement and explain qualitative findings, were ‘united in their denial of any strategic or centrally-driven attempts to replace teaching and research academics with teaching-only staff’ (2020, p. 5). We could tentatively draw a connection here between this observation that the phenomenal rise in teaching-only positions at UK universities is one that is not driven by strategic planning, and the fact that university strategies appear to lack a consistent framework for referring to such staff and describing how the institutional strategy relates to them. It is also relevant that all eight plans gave particular prominence to the question of curriculum design. The plans promised changes to curriculum to better achieve the universities’ wider objectives; often the operative word was ‘embed’, whereby certain elements would be added to students’ educational offer (implicitly beyond core subject knowledge and skills). We saw the university at a strategic level active in managing (and making uniform) the process of staff creating and delivering curricula to a great extent in a way that was not the case for research activities and hence asserting the central university’s ‘voice’ as having ownership of what was taught and how.

On the question of organisational structure, our analysis found that most of the sample represented the university as a centrally controlled structure in which departments and faculties did not figure as actors—this can be seen to parallel the common perception among academic staff that power and decision-making are increasingly centralised. However, three of the universities in our sample had the opposite representation, with the university depicted as organised into and driven by distinct sub-units. It was notable here that these three universities comprised two Russell Group institutions (both founded in the nineteenth century) and one of the pre-1992 universities. While our intention was not to analyse patterns across institution type, in this case, a clear trend was visible.

While ‘improving staff experience’ was a discursive theme in the plans, this was largely in a superficial way, without consideration of the more complex and entrenched issues that other studies have highlighted in contemporary academic working conditions, such as ‘casualisation’ (Courtney, 2013; Read & Leathwood, 2020; Williams, 2022)—academic staff being hired on short fixed-term contracts covering specific projects or teaching sessions—or the poor mental health and work-life balance of many academic staff in UK universities (e.g. Brewster et al. (2022), Fontinha et al. (2019), and Johnson et al. (2019)), linked variously to high workloads, poor institutional culture, mismanagement, or an excess of accountability measures. The fact that the strategic plans in our study did not address these issues is likely in part due to plans’ external-facing nature—there is an extent to which they serve to ‘market’ the university to stakeholders elsewhere—and in part due to Vaara et al.’s observation that plans serve to legitimate certain ways of thinking and acting and to produce consent. Representation of universities as fractious or contested spaces would legitimate staff concerns or grievances, whereas the intention in much of what we have seen in the documents is to represent ‘the university’ (as a central power) caring about and investing in ‘its people’.

As mentioned above, University E’s document stood as a counter-example to the other strategic plans, both in referring to problems with workload faced by staff and in repeatedly foregrounding the participative, non-hierarchical way in which the plan itself was created. This, however, should not be taken to straightforwardly suggest a connection between participative strategy-making process and more faithful depiction of staff concerns within the plan. It might also reflect that better-resourced universities are more able to produce a ‘performance’ of participation, or that this particular institution (due to unhappy labour relations) intended its own staff to be the primary audience of its plan in a way that was not the case in the other examples.

Conclusion

This paper’s analysis of the institutional-level strategic plans of eight English universities offers a twofold contribution: first, it demonstrates the continued relevance of previous work on strategic plans in universities which examine how academic staff are marginalised in universities’ ‘strategic texts’ (Clegg & Smith, 2010; Fanghanel, 2007; Smith, 2008), extending the findings of these to show that not only are academic staff typically positioned as recipients of strategy rather than actors, but that this was markedly more the case for staff in teaching roles or conducting teaching activities, whom the strategic plans we considered strained to find appropriate language to describe, or else omitted reference to their role. The strategic plans also emphasised the role of the central university in managing curricula to a notable extent, and in our findings, we have also observed the importance of considering how strategic plans conceptualise the organisational features of the university (such as departments and faculties) in addition to the positioning of individual staff.

The second contribution of this paper, as intended, is to offer concrete examples of areas for future study through its review of the strategy-as-practice literature and exploratory analysis of how this can be applied to strategic plans in higher education. For example, one theme apparent in the strategic plans analysed was that of improving ‘staff experience’, which we observed is generally framed in broad terms (and where details are included, these were typically related to equality and diversity), lacking reference to many of the concerns raised in the literature over deteriorating working conditions in English universities. Further research into how these rhetorical moves could profitably be conducted through a more in-depth discourse analysis of a smaller sample of plans, or complemented by strategy-as-practice research making use of interview and/or diary methods to examine how strategic plans are experienced by those ‘on the ground’. Equally, another avenue for further consideration is the extent to which changes in academic role types (the teaching vs. research split, for example) are ‘strategically’ intended—we have uncovered evidence to support the idea, also observed in Wolf and Jenkins, that this is not fully the case. The strategy-as-practice approach could further serve to pursue this issue, with qualitative research into the experiences and intentions of those creating university strategic plans, as well as the ‘recipients’ of such plans.

It was also notable in our analysis that for each of our identified themes, there were often clear exceptions. While the majority of the plans described the university organisation in a notably unitary way, several did present academic work as located in and shaped by departments or faculties, and one institution made repeated reference to addressing both academic and professional services staff workload, to the extent that it was a major theme of the strategy. We observed evidence here of a split between newer and older universities (‘post-1992’ compared to ‘Russell Group’, for example), which would stand to benefit from further analysis of how specific themes are distributed across the sector, with contrastive analysis of different institution types and sizes.

Overall, the strategic plans exhibited some diversity, in terms of length, specificity, and scope, and in how universities as organisations—and the role of those who work in them—were framed, as well as indications of variation in how the strategic planning process was conducted and to what extent the wider university was involved in the process. However, it remained the case that academic staff were represented within them in a passive or ambiguous way. Both the broad thematic similarities and the local divergences in important areas would stand to benefit from further strategy-as-practice research.