I’ve more than once encountered the sentiment that there’s something naval-gazing about researching the ‘reform’ of higher education in a politicised way: writing a paper as a substitute for collective action etc. But as Simon Head points out in The New Ruthless Economy, loc 1703, the medical profession has sought to do precisely this, with some degree of success:
In its fight to escape such professional demotion, the medical profession fession has a powerful weapon of its own: the credibility and rigor of its own research. This can just as easily be used to investigate the scientific claims of managerial medicine as it can to investigate cancer, strokes, and heart disease. Managerial medicine provides a long agenda for investigation: vestigation: the validity of its version of automated medicine; the reliability bility of the databases upon which this automated medicine so heavily depends; the degree of variation in the medical decision making of different ferent managed care companies; and finally, at the level of “process,” the record of medical reengineering in making the health care industry more productive and efficient.
Mark Carrigan 