ABSTRACT
I begin with a self-portrait. Typically referred to as a ‘manager’ in higher education, my job title is Assistant Principal, a label which defies simple interpretation. I am a member of my University’s senior management executive; and I am seen by others to have traversed an interesting route through the groves of academe to a position of some significant managerial authority. So why does this set of descriptors seem inappropriate or inadequate? Somehow it fails to convey the tone and texture of my scenic journey through personal and professional commitments to an exciting place, where I am astonished to find myself apparently peering through my own personal glass ceiling but still struggling, enthusiastically, after all these years, and conscious of the many happy ‘accidents’ that helped me to construct my career as a manager. Strangely, I have often been ill-equipped for this challenging journey. There is little evidence of skill in forward planning, yet my social obligations and a sense of political connectedness have given me a clear direction, together with a passionate desire to make things happen for the better in the world around me. So I choose as my title the ‘accidental manager’…for it is my thesis that woman-asmanager is the maker of her own history (and maybe that of others)—but in a rich melée of circumstances, not necessarily of her own choosing. Inevitably, the
accidents of a particular historical moment can have a major effect. So, too, the inheritance from forbears and from community. And so to my formative years… I was a first child; a working class girl, born in the dying moments of World War Two. As such, it was predictable that I would enter the world with a very particular inheritance: I was the daughter of a war-time bride and working mum; raised in those first few months in a household where the men were still conspicuous by their absence on war duty; and nurtured by a capable and coping mother who would soon be defying tradition and voting in the first Labour government, as an act of faith and commitment to a better world. So, I entered a society newly-fired with ambition and promise. And I grew up supported by a set of social structures which had been designed to ensure that my life chances and those of my generation were predicated on ability and endeavour-not on social position. How different from the experiences of my mother, a bright but frustrated grammar-school girl, who was obliged to enter the workplace at age 14 as the main family breadwinner. Accordingly, my brilliant mum made sure that we seized every opportunity created within the post-war welfare state (and my dad helped a bit too!). I lived in a newly-built council house in rural Herefordshire. As an accident-prone youngster I enjoyed access to this new creature, the general practitioner. And as a child who was passionate about learning, I graduated to grammar school, albeit undergoing a sad social dislocation, since in my village only a handful of working class children outshone the myriad prep-school products of the surrounding market towns; and none of my class friends made it to grammar school. Perhaps this was an early example of my latent skills in ‘self-managing’ the learning process!
