Abstract
Higher education in South Africa has been fraught with a number of challenges since the dawn of democracy in 1994. An example of these challenges has been the slow pace of transformation, especially at the historically white universities (HWUs).This has also been the case at those institutions which were merged and at least one of the forming institutions was an HWU. This is despite transformation in higher education having been identified as a key social imperative in 1994. Another set of challenges experienced in South African higher education is associated with the increase in the enrolment of students from previously disadvantaged backgrounds into the universities. This placed a strain on university resources, especially because of the almost concurrent adoption of neoliberal policies by the government which saw a reduction in expenditure on social services in real terms. Due to the long history of alienation from meaningfully participating in the economy, a large number of families in South Africa cannot afford university fees and related costs for their children. The #FeesMustFall protests which erupted in 2015 epitomised the students‟ disenchantment with this state of affairs. All these challenges and others have brought attention to university governance. However, much of this attention has fallen on senior management such as vice-chancellors and their deputies whose culture of management is easily visible, for example, through documented institutional strategic thrusts as well as vision and mission statements. However, a closer look at the realities in these universities, reveals various layers of governance structures. One such layer is that constituted by middle-level academic managers. Despite their role not having received much attention, this layer of managers plays a critical role in university governance mainly because their role situates them at the nexus of the concerns of senior management, on one hand, and academic and support staff members and students, on the other. Using Critical Realism (CR) as the main theoretical lens, this paper reflects on the culture of middle-level academic management at one of the comprehensive South African universities which was the result of a merger of historically disparate institutions. The chapter argues that it is important for the culture of this layer of management to be understood and that this can possibly be achieved through a holistic framing of the culture, that is, one predicated on the interplay of culture, structure and agency. Premised on the architecture of such a framework, the paper recommends the implementation of practices which embed the corporatist concerns of senior level management into those aspects of the culture of middle-level academic management which are a function of the structural contexts in which they operate as well as their collective and...