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> >We are therefore asking for narrative accounts of counter-productive > >systems that people have encountered as a preliminary source > of data. We > >are sure there are plenty in universities. Two examples may help to > >illustrate what can happen ..... There is one example that will shortly affect all members of the list - and other mailbase lists. Members will have to change the address from mailbase to something called jisc-mail - or something like that. Only a minor inconvenience. But if we ask why this has happened we find that it is a quite irrational example of the operation of what Jay's message calls 'internal quasi-markets' in academia. The mailbase system was established at the University of Newcastle and has been run from there for about a decade with funding from the Higher Education Funding Council. HEFC decided that they might be paying Newcastle too much, so put out the running of the system to tender. The suprising winner of the tendering system was the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC). Suprising because CLRC gets most of its money from the Engineering and Science Research Councils, and the CLRC mission statement is wholly concerned with promoting science and technology and Britain's competitiveness. See <http://www.clrc.ac.uk/Home/> The HEFC decided that because the CLRC tender was lower than than of Newcastle that ' the management of the University of Newcastle ... did not want to have the contract as much as CCLRC did'. Why did CLRC want this contract - given its mission statement of promoting science and technology? Is it that CLRC is treated more generously by public funding than the University of Newcastle and were overstaffed? So there is disruption, if not more serious consequences, for the mailbase staff in Newcastle. Employment is moved from the starved north to the overcrowded South. Everyone will suffer from the inconvenience of switching from mailbase to jisc-mail. All the references that members of this and other lists have given to discussions or files on the mailbase system will shortly have to be changed. Everyone will have to learn what JISC stands for (Joint Infrastructure Standing Committee) and may have to try to explain this to mystified visitors. Perhaps most important, what we think of as the mailbase system, will be run by an organisation that has no commitment to the social sciences or the humanities. I hope this example gets top academic prize for 'Counter-Productive Procedures in Organisations' because I would not like to think that there have been many procedures in academia that are more inept or more damaging. Ray Thomas, Social Sciences, Open University Tel: 01908 679081 Fax 01908 550401 Email: [log in to unmask] 35 Passmore, Milton Keynes MK6 3DY %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%