Engaging and Changing Higher Education Through Brokerage

Norman Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138719804
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351760010
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2003. During the 1990s, UK higher education was transformed through the full panopoly of levers available to government - legislation, funding to encourage expansion and change, regulation and a national review. As we enter the 21st century, new organizational agents acting as brokers are emerging as important facilitators of systemic change. The central argument in this book is that brokering is a process that facilitates change at all levels of the education system and enables UK higher education to be more adaptive and responsive to society and the global marketplace. The educational broker is a facilitator who connects people, networks, organizations and resources to support change. The process is key to creating new innovative capacities involving partnerships that are now required of a socially attuned and continuously adaptive mass system. The educational brokerage role also includes activities that might be associated with the business world - where the broker is an agent, promoter, dealer or trader, or the political world - where the broker is a diplomat, mediator and negotiator. There has been little recognition, description or analysis of brokerage which is essential to the rapid development and utilization of knowledge in a large, complex, diverse, multipurpose and autonomous HE system. These new capacities offer exciting possibilities for advancing UK HE and for gaining competitive advantage. This volume provides, through a series of organizational case studies, important new insights into the ways in which change is being brokered by national bodies like the Learning and Teaching Support Network, University for Industry, the e-university and the Quality Assurance Agency. It also provides an overview of the international scene to show that UK higher education is leading the world in this approach to the development of a higher education system.

PART I

THE IDEA OF BROKERAGE

Chapter 1

Introduction to Brokering in Higher Education

Norman Jackson

Synopsis

This chapter introduces the idea of brokering in UK Higher Education (HE) as a means of promoting and facilitating complex learning and change. In the educational environment organizational brokering is an intentional act in which the broker seeks to work in collaborative and creative ways with people, ideas, knowledge and resources to develop something new or change something. Brokering is an important process for developing and facilitating the use of knowledge in a large, complex, diverse HE system. It is also key to creating new innovative capacities involving partnerships that are required of socially attuned and continuously adaptive mass HE systems.

The case is made that organization-led systemic brokerage is facilitating a more balanced and creative combination of accountability, development and research-led approaches to change agency in UK HE. This offers exciting possibilities for advancing higher education and gaining competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

What is Brokerage?

The central theme of this book is that brokerage and brokering are important and necessary processes that facilitate change in the UK HE system (and as chapter 10 shows in other HE systems also). Perhaps brokering is like religion, its something we have to create to make complex societies work. Many people who promote and support change in HE institutions and departments engage in brokerage, although they may not think about and describe what they do in this way. The main focus of this book is on UK-wide organizations that use, or have used, brokerage to promote learning and change across our higher education system. But the concepts and principles that are developed are relevant to anyone with a change agency role working within an institution or community of practitioners.

Brokerage is a tool for engaging socially complex communities. The idea of engagement extends from drawing someone into conversation encouraging them to think about something, to systematically drawing many people or an entire community into discussion and perhaps action. It is fundamental to change where there are lots of different interests involved and complex negotiations are required in order to share perspectives and advance thinking about what needs to be done.

There is no simple definition of brokerage because perceptions of meaning are context dependent. For example:

□ in business, a broker is an agent, promoter, dealer, fixer, trader, someone who buys and sells;

□ in politics, a broker is a diplomat, mediator, go-between, negotiator;

□ in the information world, a broker is someone who knows how to access or acquire information and who provides a gateway to information resources;

□ in education, a broker is a proactive facilitator who connects people, networks, organizations and resources and establishes the conditions to create something new or add value to something that already exists.

Brokers may also fulfil a regulatory function by setting standards for products, service delivery or processes. All these dimensions of brokerage are relevant to the HE context and this chapter examines these in more detail in order to grow the idea for higher education.

Example of Brokerage

Many of the key features of the brokering process can be illustrated with reference to the creation and production of this book, which conceptually might be thought of as a brokered process to develop new knowledge about brokerage. Acting as the broker I had a vision – to develop new knowledge and understanding about brokerage. I envisaged the process – the steps and interactions necessary to develop the knowledge, and the product – the book that will help diffuse the knowledge so that other people can use it.

To achieve my goal (creating and diffusing new knowledge about brokerage), I had to persuade a publisher that there was a market for this knowledge. Acting as broker I created the conditions (through a book proposal and my first chapter that set out the intellectual case for brokerage) to enable others (the series editor, publisher, peers and potential contributors) to judge the worth of the idea and my ability to deliver it. I identified potential sources of knowledge and expertise effectively creating a knowledge network. I had to persuade each potential contributor to join the project. Each enquiry was personalized to appeal to the interests of each individual and the details of the contribution were subject to negotiation. Having secured the publisher’s backing I tried to facilitate the process of knowledge production by encouraging contributors to think about brokerage through the intellectual framework I had set out in my introductory chapter. Through their writing, participants in the project made their own knowledge explicit and through the process of sharing and discussion our individual and collective knowledge and understanding changed.

So when viewed from the perspective of a brokered process the production of the book involved:

□ a vision – the growth of new knowledge about brokerage;

□ a product – a book to diffuse the knowledge;

□ visualizing a process – what needed to be done to turn the vision into a reality;

□ creating the conditions to enable the vision to be realized;

□ networking – identifying and persuading the people with the necessary knowledge/experience and resources to work together to achieve the objective;

□ facilitating the process of collaborative knowledge production and the validation of knowledge produced;

□ codifying personal knowledge and sharing this between participants;

□ and hopefully adding value as the broker by ensuring that that the whole is more than the sum of the individually created parts.

This is the essence of brokering and we can elaborate these ideas in a working definition that can be evaluated through the examples given in this book. The professional actions included in this definition are elaborated towards the end of the chapter.

Working definition – Brokerage is an intentional act in which the broker seeks to work in collaborative and creative ways with people, ideas, knowledge and resources to develop or change something. The professional actions typically include:

□ envisioning the change(s) to be made;

□ creating the conditions to enable change to be made;

□ engaging people/organizations in debate/consultation/negotiation to help shape the nature of the change and facilitate the process of change;

□ creating the infrastructures and processes to facilitate development and support change;

□ facilitating the development, diffusion and use of knowledge for change;

□ behaving honestly and ethically.

Origins of Organizational Brokerage in UK HE

Histories are important because they demonstrate that ideas are often long lived and what appears to be a new idea is really an old idea wearing new clothes. Common sense would suggest that brokering has been integral to relationships and interactions within higher education for as along as there has been higher education. But much of this will have gone unrecorded and unrecognized as such. I would like to begin this story of organizational brokering in UK HE with the work of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA). Under the theme of Networking and Brokering, Crispin and Weeks (1988) describe a set of activities linked to the strategic use of a Project Development Fund between 1985-1988. The fund (£0.54 million p.a.) was used to support educational development initiatives in polytechnics and colleges that were intended to lead to improvements in the standards of courses. Nearly 600 project proposals were submitted and these were incorporated into a database from which priority themes were identified based on generic development needs and issues. The CNAA then formulated outline project briefs against its organizational priorities and tendered these to institutions. The key feature of the process was the interactive and collaborative way that CNAA officers worked with project teams and committees. With an eventual database of 850 proposals CNAA was well placed to act as a networking agency and also to broker with other bodies to create additional funds for development. For example, a project aimed at promoting the teaching of design in undergraduate business studies courses was jointly funded by CNAA and the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) and brought together seven HE institutions.

Crispin and Weeks recognized that brokerage involved negotiation, entrepreneurship and proactiveness as well as collaboration and networking and the contracting model that was developed ensured a level of participation that was deemed to be in the interests of the project. The results of project work were disseminated through published reports and good practice guidelines. Social dissemination was via workshops, conferences, seminars and support for special interest groups. The CNAA also realized that to effect systemic change the outcomes of project work had to be connected to levers that could drive change more systematically, it is desirable to link projects and their outcomes to the work of the CNAA committees responsible for validation, review and subject development. It is this linkage that holds the greatest promise to introducing and implementing change where necessary. This interesting report concluded with the rather pessimistic words, whether the CNAA system (development funding) will be replicated exactly elsewhere is debatable given the uniqueness of some of its features, in particular the collaborative networking and brokerage functions adopted by CNAA committee members and link officers. It took UK HE another 12 years to invent a brokerage organization that did adopt the networking and brokerage functions of the CNAA!

Brokerage in Contemporary HE

So although the idea of brokerage is not new to UK HE the recent growth in organizations that exploit the idea as a mode of working is. In the period 2000 to 2002 four new organizations have been created, the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN), University for Industry (Ufl), the e-university (eU) and the National Health Service University (NHSU). These organizations provide, or will provide, communication infrastructures and capacities to create new opportunities and support for learning. They have been created to make new things happen and extend the capacity of existing infrastructures for HE learning in a cost-effective way. They are about promoting change and often challenge current thinking and practice in order to open up new possibilities and ways of doing things.

View from the Chalk Face

But of course things might look very different if you are a higher education teacher grappling with new quality assurance procedures, substantial growth in the number and diversity of students and a departmental policy that wants you to put your course into the virtual learning environment. You are more likely to be saying, ‘Well hang on a minute, I’ve got more than enough change to cope with at the moment thank you’. In these circumstances brokering can promote collaborative working across HE institutional communities and facilitate the sharing and exchange of ideas and practices that are relevant to the particular pressures that individual academics are facing.

Similarly, institutional managers grappling with political agendas like widening participation and improving retention, new external requirements for regulation, and the implementation of complex and comprehensive learning and teaching strategies, will be looking for cost-effective ways of changing and minimizing adverse impacts and unforeseen consequences. Brokerage can reduce the costs of searching for the knowledge by facilitating the pooling of know how, expertise, wisdom and creativity of individuals across institutions so that the costs of working out how to change, and the potential risks of making the wrong changes, are minimized.

On the whole we are not too bad at identifying practice that is worthy of wider application i.e. that which works in a particular context. What we are less good at is transferring and embedding such practice in a context that is different to the one in which it was grown. The diffusion of knowledge in a way that influences thinking across a community of practitioners and facilitates wider usage is an important dimension of the brokerage function. It constitutes the major practical and intellectual challenge for brokers and brokering organizations.

Brokerage and the New Public Management

Reshaping and enhancing a large complex and developed higher education system with much history and tradition is not a simple task. It requires sustained political determination and a panoply of actions and interventions over a period of decades. These interventions take many forms, for example in the UK:

□ legislation (e.g. conversion of polytechnics to universities);

□ state funding policies that drive wholesale or targeted expansion;

□ requirements on institutions for explicit missions, strategic plans against such missions and systematic review against goals and targets: a more managerialistic top down approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• PART I THE IDEA OF BROKERAGE
• PART II ORGANIZATIONAL CASE STUDIES
• PART III INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
• Index