ABSTRACT
To be an effective university leader and manager you must have a keen appreciation of the distinctive features and nuances of your institution – its climate, structure, politics and culture. This chapter considers the institutional context or nature of the internal environment in which individual managers have to operate. It explains how universities have come to be governed and managed as they are today – how governance works and how it can be enhanced; the distinguishing features of a well-led university and the nature of organisational culture peculiar to universities. In doing so, it offers analytical tools which the reader can use as a means of understanding their own individual circumstances and context.
It also examines exemplars of the new models of institutional organisation – the entrepreneurial university; the virtual university – and speculates on the alternative ways in which universities might develop and organise in the future: the university 2035.
