This PhD thesis is a critical investigation of the formation of managers in the UK further and higher education (FHE) sector. It explores the character and problematics that surround the development of senior FHE post-holders as managers in the first half of the 1990s. The work draws on interviews with more than 70 senior post-holders in four universities and four further education colleges and observation in one university and one college. It analyses the narratives and practices that make up the changing working lives of the respondents. These are discussed in relation to recent social theory, particularly around approaches to 'discourse', 'the body', and 'identity/subjectivity'. This in turn is set against the backdrop of broad political-economic circumstances and conditions. Two key issues are addressed in the thesis: the problematics that surround the development of managers, and the gendered dimensions of this formation. The thesis is in three sections: 'Epistemological Commitments and Ontological Priorities' (this divides into three chapters: 'Managing Discourse and Discoursing Managers', 'Living Bodies and Inscribing Bodies' and 'The Relative Thickness of Human Material, approaching 'Identity' and 'Subjectivity'), 'Speaking Historically, Politically and of literatures' (this divides into three chapters: 'Making Sense of Making Managers, a review of the critical further and higher education management literature', 'From Methodology to Research Methods' and 'Further and Higher Education's Turbulent Years'), and 'Making Managers in Further and Higher Education' (this divides into three chapters: 'Doing the business, constructing the supervisors of production in further and higher education', 'Just how managed is the New Further and Higher Education? 'and 'University and College management; Is it men's work? '). The concluding chapter draws out the key points from the thesis, discusses these in the context of possible futures for further and higher education, and suggests directions for further research work.