Spicer likens this whole process to the fashion industry. He claims that particular fashions in business/management ideas sweep across the sector, initiated and driven by consultants and management gurus whose aim is to push their product (the new fad in management) to as many organisations as possible, make as much money as possible in doing so, then initiate a change in fashion which enables them to go around the circuit again making more money from the new fashion.

The more quickly a fad is replaced by another, the better the earning capacity of these "management fashion merchants" who benefit from each fashion cycle.

As recipients of these fads, few mangers actually think deeply about the appropriateness of the fit for their organisation of each new fad, and particularly so in the higher education sector given its attempt to ape the business way of doing things.

Rather the language of the new fashion is enthusiastically adopted, organisations are changed on the basis of new ideas, and the fashion merchants move on to the next eager client. Management embrace the new fad with vigour believing that this time they will see gains in productivity.

However research suggests that firms which adopt new fads rarely perform better, though amongst management peer groups they might be perceived as "doing the right thing" and therefore achieve some level of temporary status.

Workers in the organisation are left to wonder what exactly they gained for the expensive outlay, generally continuing as they always have, with perhaps growing feelings of outrage at the lack of positive impact on their core work for what they perceive as a significant outlay of funds.

When these outlays are then accompanied by the 'we-have-a-budget-problem' rhetoric, the outrage often escalates into downright cynicism, exacerbating distrust in management.

I am reminded of the wonderful quote from Animal Farm: "Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No-one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where would we be?"

What we see when these decisions are made away from the day-to-day realities of the workplace (even when advocated for by fashion merchants who claim expertise in the higher education sector) is, as Spicer argues, a "mismatch between working practices and grand ideas. New concepts, which are supposed to make things better, often make them worse."

Managers, who are left to implement these new ideas by the fashion merchants, end up blaming workers who are supposed to make the ideas work. Workers become positioned as lazy, oppositional and poor performers.

Blaming workers (and figuring out ways to make them perform better) enables managers to avoid thinking about the new concepts sold to them, even when it becomes absolutely clear that the new idea does not work.

Instead, attention is focused on what is needed to force workers into complying (for example to reshape the way teaching is delivered to students, to identify workers who have lower research outputs than others and reclassify them as teaching-intensive so that they do more teaching) rather than identifying the underlying realities (for example that workloads are so high that it is impossible to meet expectations without working after hours and weekends, and that such workloads are only possible as long as workers have the good will to continue to donate their time).

If the higher education sector is to survive we need to work together to jointly understand the realities of both management and worker worlds and we need to strive to bring those worlds together. We need to identify what we want to be, and what purpose the sector serves.

We need to be clear about our goals. This work needs to be done together and it needs to be done now.