Blog

There’s something wonderfully postmodern about Edward Peck’s committee hearing ahead of his likely appointment as the next chair of the Office for Students.

While the first chair of the regulator, Michael Barber, arrived with a fully documented quasi-academic theory of delivery – and while the second, James Wharton, brought a certain kind of political cunning – Edward Peck has a fully fledged multi-disciplinary research-informed theory of leadership as performance.

How should we understand leadership as performance?

The idea of performativity – broadly speaking that the descriptive language we use in a given situation has a direct impact on the situation itself – has informed a conceptualisation of leadership as a performance that interrelates both with the wider ideas of what it is to be a leader and the narrower immediate context as a particular leadership “act”. This shifts the focus on leadership from a kind of all-powerful “strongman” (with the consequent cod-psychological popular literature on essential attributes of successful leaders available at an airport near you) to something more subtle around relationships, language, and behavior across multiple settings as shaping experiences of leadership.

Leaders – in other words – are sensemakers, both in terms of explaining (and thus shaping) reality for those around them, and in collaboratively situating activities carried out by an organisation within this negotiated reality. Sometimes these acts can be almost ritualistic (“is” performance) like in representing the university at a graduation ceremony where roles and norms are predetermined.

At other points these are more spontaneous (“as” performance) a narrative (a pre-existing conceptualisation of an experience or situation) enacted to an audience in response to an everyday stimulus – something like a discussion of university finances during a spontaneous conversation with a member of staff on campus).

Not an actual theatre

This isn’t a literal assertion that leadership is theatre – that it is a kind of scripted reality that lacks authenticity – but the idea that the actions of leaders reiterate (and thus endorse) organisational norms and organisational cultures. So when Peck repeatedly qualified his responses to the education committee with reference to what the OfS had learned in eight years of regulatory activity, and in his need to understand the way in which the legal framework in which regulation takes place has been interpreted he is situating himself as a part of an ongoing story rather than attempting to begin telling a new one.

This is likely to be important to those who might think a return to a HEFCE-like situation in which leaders were former vice chancellors and things were, apparently, nicer (they weren’t nicer, but this is the story some like to tell) – Peck is entering the stage in the middle of the play and is clearly looking to be an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary chair.

What he does seem to want to do, in narrative terms, is to use more of the language that institutional leaders themselves use within regulation. In Peck’s performativity theory – these linguistic shifts are important in that they themselves have an impact on the collective understanding of what is going on.

Usually about six

The best example of this was, inevitably, about university finances. To Peck there are “usually about six” things that universities do to balance income with expenditure in times of financial constriction – he didn’t name the six, but the impression he was looking to give is that these are well-known and familiar interventions among those who run universities. With this frame, he was able to put the onus on universities rather than regulators to act (“a lot of institutions are still on this journey”), allowing him the appeal to accepted wisdom in being clear that it was not for the Office for Students to bail out universities, and to go further to suggest that if there was a credible route to sustainable business it would be visible to banks (and, I guess, other lenders) and it should not be for the government to create a “moral hazard” by stepping in.

Committee member Manuela Perteghella pushed him on what he had specifically learned from what Nottingham Trent University had done to stave off financial problems (NTU ran a £9.5m surplus last year, but saw around a 10 per cent reduction in student numbers this year). The first example he reached for can again be traced back to the way he has written about leadership in the past – he made much of the need to “be clear with colleagues” about the problems that the university was facing and do so regularly and openly (there is a quarterly town hall meeting).

As a leader you do have the chance to control the narrative – and this shapes the way problems are understood. Peck noted the problems that other providers had faced in submitting unrealistic income or recruitment projections to the Office for Students – grand (if broad) plans that made any subsequent need for economy harder to sell internally. He was able to sell a 10 per cent reduction in staff numbers at NTU on the basis of needing less staff to teach less students (based on historical precedent) – and being clear about recruitment problems early allowed him to say that all these job losses would be voluntary.

The historical precedent – an appeal to a quantifiable and shared memory within the organisation – also made it easier to make the case for a lower staff headcount maintaining the quality of education. If, after all, we could teach this number of students at an acceptable level a few years back with this number of staff, why can’t it be done in 2025?

Independence day

One of the stories that has become accepted fact about the Office for Students is that it is too close to the government – reverse regulatory capture, if you like. The Behan report (and to a lesser extent the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report) undermined this assumption a little – there are examples of places where OfS pushed back against the department, although the very nature of the beast means that such independence is rarely visible in public.

As chair Peck would clearly need to work with government on the underpinning policy framework – hinting at a “new” policy under development for release in the summer, most likely the much-heralded “HE reform” package – but emphasised that “operational” decisions would be independent, and that his network of contacts across the sector would help OfS build better relationships with institutions.

Again, this isn’t new – or even particularly notable – but it’s another pointer to his explanatory mode of leadership. It suggests that the problem is one of communication, and he even suggests his own ability to communicate as the solution. Virtuoso performance as leadership. When we get to the actual structural changes there’s a sense that OfS has been on the right track recently – revamped student panels, more student surveys. The only novelty is a promised re-engagement with NUS.

Curtain call

There’s a lot of stuff that would remain in a Peck-led OfS: he’s keen on B3 as driving value for money, keen to get stuck in on regulating modular provision, feel like we are in the right place on freedom of speech given recent changes, pleased with TEF and access and participation plan (though he asked a fascinating question around what happens to those who register with UCAS – he is interim chair there, currently – but are not placed by the end of the cycle).

For much of this, regulation is a matter of establishing codes of practice and ensuring that the actions of universities are within these bounds – Peck’s government work on student mental health should have provided the clue there. The codes themselves set the stage, the universities act within those boundaries. You could argue this as legalism, but it makes more sense as freedom within set parameters, something which universities (and indeed academics) will find comfortingly familiar.

In their 2009 book, “Performing Leadership” Peck and Helen Dickinson (now a professor at the University of New South Wales) cite one compelling example (an unpublished conference paper by Druckett from 2007) of the way the performance of a particular style of management has an impact on lived experience of university staff.

the case study… illustrates that the assertion, arguably the over-assertion, of the hierarchical and individualist ways of organising by senior management is generating negative feedback from the academics in the organisation. The consequences of not allowing the isolate and enclave approaches to contribute adequately to the organisational settlement may be having, or have in future, significant detrimental consequences for the university.

The classic postmodernist understanding of the organisation, in contrast, is one of multiple narratives within a common framework. If you feel that OfS has been too deterministic – too rules based rather than risk based – within the first eight years, the way in which Peck (and whoever he chooses as a senior executive team) allows other voices to fill the stage will be fascinating to watch.