Centralising professional staff: is this another instrument of symbolic violence in the managerialised university?

ABSTRACT If centralising university services is regarded as operationally ineffective, why do managerialised universities continue to organise themselves this way? We investigate an occurrence of this paradox at a regional Australian university, where professional staff services were centralised for a period of 7 years. They were separated from academics and their role repurposed to focus on student needs rather than continuing to support academics. As a method of analysis, we use a Bourdieusian lens to illuminate the power dynamics between fields to reveal, what we argue appears to be a symbolically violent view of centralising services. We conclude that universities continue to centralise services to increase management power, yet this strategy undermines managerialism’s own efforts of increasing operational outcomes because it increases conflict between the staff it relies on to be a university.