ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how administrators, as players, are played too. To make people point, the authors use examples from schools, colleges, and universities in the US and elsewhere. Teachers' dispositions towards administrators are, quite possibly, vestiges of tribalism and its insular identity. Such attitudes toward the administrative have been fed by the increasing bureaucratisation and corporatisation of the university, within increasingly neoliberal discourses. A more contemporary case of the use of numbers and statistics, especially in setting numerical targets, one which underscores the amorphous nature of maladministration, was brought to light through the investigative journalism of reporters at the Houston Chronicle. Bourdieu's 'logic of circular causality', his discussion of how this leads to academics' shift toward more administrative work, perhaps evidenced early glimpses of what was to become a more hegemonic managerialism in higher education. But, Bourdieu could not have foreseen either the totalising breadth of such managerialism, parasitic upon a global corporativism and neoliberalism.
