ABSTRACT
This author gives the reader considerable insight into the kinds of legacies – both helpful and less so – that those ‘at the top’ of former polytechnics have had to manage in the transition to independence. He gives numerous examples of how political passions and predilections and various forms of passive resistance confounded any attempt at Strategie management in a Local Education Authority environment. Harrison clearly illustrates the values that can also be part of that local authority inheritance. These have proved central to the institution's identity and critical to its success. These values have driven a powerful alternative model of higher education that places access and accessibility, as well as flexibility and choiee, atthe core of its strategy and operations. The author illustrates in some detail the sheer complexity of what has been established at the University of Wolverhampton to support a truly alternative higher education. Increasingly, the new wine does not fit into old bottles, and the interconnectedness of cultural change processes in every corner of a pluralist System must be managed. For example, new relationships and new ways of working between academics and service/support staff become essential. Equally, wholesale imports of industrial practices also are now being subjeeted to a critical rethink, an example being team briefings. This is having an increasingly damaging effect on later stages of cultural change in many institutions, whereas it may have served a purpose at earlier ones.
