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Explores four models of management strategy operating in seven Scottish further-education colleges: strategic control from the center, strategic "fit" emphasizing management of resources in an externally competitive environment, strategic "stretch" addressing organizational infrastructure and internal capabilities, and group-based and network-based managerial activities. Identifies implications for institutional autonomy, competition, collaboration, and change. Contains 37 references. (Author/SAS)

This article outlines the traditional gendered nature of further and higher education and how this has been challenged by long term developments. The focus on managerialism and competition provides a context for a re-invigorated 'agentic' (associated with masculinity) gendering. Non-executive management in further and higher education is deeply unbalanced in gender terms. Senior management in universities is male dominated but significantly more balanced in colleges. Furthermore, in universities, the career dynamic which privileges research and the gendering of this in favour of males, more than outweighs some new career spaces open to women. In colleges, the 1990s evacuation of many male managers created openings for women but in a particularly tough economic and business environment in which some have suggested that women have been used to bolster an 'agentic' male styled approach to management; others that a more adaptive less stereotypical approach is emerging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]