Coordinating Change Through Effective Communication at England’s Newest University

Abstract

The management of change is a fashionable yet elusive concept, used to describe initiatives ranging from the momentous to the banal, from the corporate to the small scale.

Innumerable strategies have professed to be the panacea for effecting smooth transition. Following a review of management literature, and its bewildering array of ease studies, a reader may be forgiven for concluding that effective change strategies owe as much to luck as judgement. Identifying common themes or shared philosophies appears, at first, illusory. However, once the theories and their respective terminologies are deciphered, a unifying theme of communication emerges. This paper will begin by demonstrating that communication is fundamental to any process of restructuring. The paper will explore the tendency of strategic management approaches to focus on primarily statistical ‘outputs’. For example, staff/student ratios or the number of student withdrawals as a method for measuring institutional performance. As an alternative, a behavioural methodology will be considered. Within the context of communication, a case study involving the University of Luton (England’s newest university) will be discussed. The study illustrates a strategy successfully used to manage the transition from a College of Higher Education to a University in 7 years. The focus for the study is the effective communication of change. A behavioural perspective has been used to interpret the policies applied.