ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a group of further education (FE) Principals imagine and experience organisational maintenance, change, transformation and, ultimately, survival. It explains some of the themes underlying the range of market-oriented metaphors that emerge in the interviews Institutional size and finance often expressed in terms of sustainability are a continually recurring theme for the college leaders in our sample. In the study of FE and the masculine/managerialist subject, Kerfoot and Whitehead utilise the graphic metaphorical phrase 'Darwinian scramble for survival' to describe FE college ethos. Formerly in England, FE colleges were governed and macro-managed by the local education authority in which they happened to be situated. As a counter-thinker who challenged the prevailing technical-rationalist closed systems approach of his time, Karl Weick stands out as an educationalist contrarian. The intellectual traditions have permeated educational thinking to the extent that particular orthodoxies have become routinely absorbed into contemporary discourse as taken-for-granted assumptions.
