         1 The Roles and Responsibilities of Middle Management (Chairs and Deans) in Canadian Universities Lydia M. Boyko and Glen A. Jones 1. INTRODUCTION Major shifts have taken place in the relationship between Canada’s universities and the state over the last decade. Interest is growing in policy approaches that stimulate market-like competition within the university sector (Jones & Young, 2004), and substantial changes in research support encourage private sector partnerships, recognize institutional overhead costs, and invest in human resources and research infrastructure. Canadian universities are increasingly subjected to new government accountability requirements, and there are rising public expectations related to the universities’ contributions to regional and national economic development. Given this environment, one may assume that the management of Canadian universities has become more demanding and complex, especially at the level of middle-management. Academic middle- managers face the challenge of functioning at the interface between the university’s central administration and the faculties and departments where the rubber of the new marketized and strategic research environment meets the road of daily academic life. Are the roles of middle- managers in Canadian universities changing? Our objective in this paper is to examine the roles and responsibilities of middle management in Canadian universities, specifically, the department “chair” (also referred to as “head”) and the faculty “dean”, in order to ascertain whether these functions have changed – in rhetoric or in fact – as a function of a “new public management” or “new managerialist” paradigm that seems to be penetrating higher education systems and institutions worldwide. Our objective is to understand how Canadian universities describe and define these positions through an analysis of institutional documents and collective agreements with respect to the appointment process, terms of office, depiction of duties and other conditions of employment. We begin the paper by describing the Canadian university sector, including its institutional governance and administrative structures. We provide a brief retrospective on the development of the position of the chair and the office of the dean and then present the findings of our empirical study of current arrangements.