This book focuses on the effects of globalization's structural change on the gender politics of the university. While gender inequality in academia is fairly well documented, few authors have examined how these changes affect the way we actually work in the universities.

As universities move away from the ethos of traditional western humanism and a male dominated collegial organizational culture, women's participation in the university is occurring in a climate of bureaucratization and commodification increasingly driven by forces outside the universities. Today, as market forces push university management to cut costs, discrimination can flourish and women and other equity-seeking groups are shut out.

The authors of this collection explore the new gender regime and organizational culture of universities in Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. They provide Canadian readers an opportunity to examine gender inequality, not only in the structures and procedures of university management, but also in the everyday practices of teaching and research and within management itself. The authors examine ways to resist from within and explore the problems faced in managing equity and diversity.

Gender and the Restructured University explores the impact of global changes on academic identities. Co-editor Ann Brooks notes "the impact of restructuring and the consequences for identity formation vis-à-vis the academic self" are important aspects of this debate. (p. 16)

In the first section, authors Brooks, Jill Blackmore and Judyth Sachs set out to examine how globalization and commoditization influence the transformation of the university and explain how these processes are shaping knowledge production in academia. In the second section, authors Jeff Hearn, Jan Currie and Bev Thiele explore the nature of gendered work cultures.

The final section entitled "Women Managing Change," moves to more personal accounts of how women managers are managing restructuring, and explores the traps it may create for them. The book ends with an article on the personal reflections of a senior manager.

As an economics-based organization of knowledge grips the university, the authors ask what are the implications of this for gender relations in the university. When knowledge is restructured to suit the globalized corporate agenda, universities, depleted of public funding, reorganize their institutions to best position themselves as marketers of knowledge.

When innovation and training become commodities with which to bargain, how are issues of gender equity addressed? Can women in senior management positions mitigate the damage of corporate restructuring? Whose rules and whose language will shape university culture as it is reorganized?

Academic ideas of knowledge production are being transformed as the only forms of knowledge that continue to have value are ones that have market value. Many of these economic and managerial changes have consequences for the gendered nature of the university.

Contributing author Jeff Hearn has written extensively on the question of masculinity and management. He examines how ongoing male-dominated forms of management within the universities shape the form and content of knowledge formation.

The chapter focuses on interconnections between "men's practices, academic practices and managerial practices." (p. 70) It examines the interconnections between hierarchy, power, masculinity and management in the context of restructuring of universities in the U.K. over the past 30 years. Hearn outlines some of the main features of "technocratic patriarchies in practice in the 1990s," and argues that while some of the older forms of male collegial and technocratic features still prevail, there are also newer features that are undergoing transformation. (p. 79)

He identifies five changes: the way academic hierarchies overlap with managerial hierarchies; the impact of increasing managerialism and intensification of work on everyday structures and ways of working; the undermining of the ideological climate around gender as the gap between gender equity policy and implementation continues to be problematic; generational and gender developments in terms of who the new middle and sometimes senior managers are; and, "a growing technologization and informatization on the one hand, and marketization and privatization, on the other."

He concludes "we now find a different set of relationships between men's practices, academic practices and managerial practices. The taken-for-granted confluence of men, academia and management has been, to an extent, shifted. Universities certainly remain mini-patriarchies but in different and more complex ways; they are much less collegial, less fratriarchal and less fraternal. Women's voices are heard more, and are less easy for men to ignore." (p. 80-83)

But in the spaces created for new women managers, Hearn cautions that in order to be productive managers, women must become aware of everyday practices of masculine bureaucracy and understand how they are being rewritten in the restructured university of the 21st century.

Using the voices of more than 50 women managers in eight universities from 1995-1997, Blackmore and Sachs examine the reorganization of the university in the language of "quality" management and its effects on individuals in the university. They argue that women leaders are positioned in highly contradictory ways as women's representation within universities has broadened. But at the same time, most universities remain places where women are excluded from "much of the power brokering." (p. 63)

The theme of restructuring knowledge for the global economy is taken up by Currie and Thiele. The transformation of knowledge and forms of learning has become a crucial part of the change universities are witnessing. As forms of valued knowledge within the university culture shift to legitimize "marketable knowledge" it strengthens those disciplines that are well placed to capitalize on market forces.

The authors report on results from a study of academic men and women from three U.S. and three Australian universities. Focusing on the question of gender differentiation in the university, they ask participants how they would explain differing treatment of men and women in the university.

Contributors to the final section of the book look at current university-management practices. Carol Bacchi's bold observations from interviews with equal opportunity officers working within increasingly corporate management structures suggest that while many universities are mainstreaming diversity management, this has not resulted in increased equality.

Bacchi notes that "diversity management" has come to mean different things in different contexts. Equity issues are driven by conflicting imperatives - the political goal of equity and access and the drive to cut costs and rationalize. As a result, some universities are shifting the equity agenda from the purview of equal employment offices to human relations departments.

This tendency to mainstream diversity management may have grave consequences for equity-seeking groups within the university. While the change can sometimes be beneficial to equity groups, "they can also be designed to reduce costs at the expense of a commitment to equity, and to shift the focus from equity groups to 'the individual,' a concept central to corporate managerialist and economic rationalist discourses." (p. 123)

Bacchi cautions those managing equity to be aware "the language of diversity can be associated with sharply different agendas." (p. 124)

The book provides readers with a strong analysis of the gender consequences of the neo-liberal agenda in our universities. The impact of the "corporate academy" on management style, university culture, patterns of appointment, differing positions of women and other equity-seeking groups, and on subjectivity and identity need a great deal more analysis.

As academics in Australia, the U.K. and New Zealand, the authors are well placed to offer both hope of resistance and concern for the consequences of unbridled corporatization of our universities.

Mercedes Steedman teaches sociology and labour and trade union studies at Laurentian University and is a member of CAUT's Status of Women Committee.