Universities are increasingly being seen as commercial enterprises, and are represented as particular types of business entities in manuals provided to university managers. Critical discourse analysis is employed in this paper to construct an analytical framework for the study of managerial advice, which is then used to examine the manual provided to Australian universities for the conduct of institutional audit by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). Institutions are represented as businesses, but contrary to the rhetoric of universities being colonised by "new managerialism", the manual constructs institutions more as localised and constrained businesses than globally networked entities. (Contains 1 table.)