Liudvika Leisyte

On striking the right notes: Shifts in governance and the organisational transformation of universities

During the last decades traditional state-centered governing arrangements have been critiqued and replaced by alternative modes of governance. These shifts have been driven by economic, ideological and pragmatic motives (Pierre and Peters 2000; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000). The introduction of alternative ways of exercising collective control and influencing society has led to a widespread interest in the concept of ‘governance’. Recent overviews — amongst others by Rhodes (2000), Pierre and Peters (2000), Peters (2001), van Kersbergen and van Waarden (2004), Hajer et al. (2004) — discuss the differences and similarities among the various governance approaches as well as the absence of a general agreed-upon definition of the governance concept. At the same time, they leave no doubt that the forms and mechanisms of governance, the location of governance, the governing capabilities and the styles of governance have not only been discussed but have been modified or substantially changed. The consequences of such changes are seldom linear, most of the time unpredictable and contestable. Are they ‘merely a way of wrapping government in a new paper which is more palatable to the public, or does the idea represent something qualitatively new and different?’ (Pierre and Peters 2000: 68) On the basis of governance, new public management and organisational change literature, we discuss changes in the ways of governing and organising universities as professional public sector organisations. We will argue that traditional and alternative ways of governing and organising universities form a hybrid of deeply embedded old and ‘sedimenting’ new structures and processes. Therefore, transformational change in the public sector may remain more limited in scope and depth than has often been argued by the proponents of alternative steering models (for the case of higher education, see also Kogan et al. 2006; Askling and Henkel 2006). We will support our view with empirical data drawn from a number of studies on change and stability in higher education policies and organisational practices in the Netherlands over the last three decades (a.o. Maassen and van Vught 1989; Binsbergen et al. 1991; Goedegebuure et al. 1993; Westerheijden 1997; Rip 1998; de Weert 2000; Jongbloed 2003; de Boer 2003; Huisman and Toonen 2004; Jeliazkova and Westerheijden 2004). In these studies macro-level changes in higher education policy in national and cross-national perspectives as well as processes of organisational change in universities have been investigated

Understanding Academic Work in a Changing Institutional Environment

In this chapter, we explore the shifting nature of academic work at European and US research universities. Our analyses reveal four trends. First, despite significant differences in higher education governance, institutional environments have led to a shift away from the “integrated scholar” model toward structurally differentiated academic roles. Second, the priorities of external funding agencies influence the types of research performed in the United States and Europe, leading faculty to use diverse strategies to preserve their autonomy and address externally-defined research agendas. Third, in Europe, the quantification of research outputs has become a common trend whereas in the United States, publish-or-perish logics define the academic hierarchy of disciplines and institutions. Fourth, faculty identity is increasingly shaped by the institutional context such as the norms of academic capitalism, especially in the United States. The study revealed that research would benefit from employing innovative theoretical frameworks that explain changes in academic work.

University commercialization policies and their implementation in the Netherlands and the United States

The article explores how the US and Dutch governments have attempted to bolster research commercialization in their respective research systems and discusses the institutionalization of linkages between universities and industrial firms. First, the article shows how the institutional framework conditions compare in national systems of innovation (NIS) in the Netherlands and the USA with a special focus on regulatory and funding policy instruments. Second, it examines the influence of institutional framework conditions on the linkages that exist between universities and industrial firms in the two countries. Third, the article investigates how the institutionalization of university-firm linkages compare in the two countries. The findings suggest that path dependencies partly shape the process of research commercialization in terms of the timing and the types of policy instruments forming the institutional framework conditions in the two countries. The creation of university-industrial firm linkages is a challenge for governments irrespective of the type of NIS in question partly due to organizational inertia and informal institutions.

New public management and research productivity- a precarious state of affairs of academic work in the Netherlands

New Public Management reforms have fostered universities to focus on performance and competition which has resulted in different pressures to perform and disruption of strong teaching–research balance at universities. The imbalanced division of teaching research workloads may be gendered and can strengthen the differences in research productivity among male and female academics. This study uses survey data of Dutch academics carried out in 2015 at selected three universities to understand how pressure to perform has influenced the workload balance and what is the relationship between teaching–research balance and research productivity of female and male academics across different disciplines in different organizational contexts. The findings support the Hattie and Marshs Common Wisdom model and show that balanced teaching research workloads improve research productivity across gender groups. Further, we show that the perception of managerialism at a university is an important mediating factor of gender balance in research productivity.

Analysing the Transformation of Higher Education Governance in Bulgaria and Lithuania

Drawing on sociological neo-institutional theory and models of higher education governance, we examine current developments in Bulgaria and Lithuania and explore to what extent those developments were shaped by the Bologna reform. We analyse to what extent the state has moved away from a model of state-centred policy design and control to a model of governance based on the ‘evaluative state’ Neave (1998), in which the state ensures ‘product control’ and promotes competition and quality. To do so, we look, in particular, at funding policy and the emergence of a system of quality assurance. To conclude, we examine whether the governance patterns of both countries have converged and identify the factors accounting for potential variations.

Stakeholders and Quality Assurance in Higher Education

The various changes in post-bureaucratic organising, which are moving towards network approaches, coupled with the managerial agenda of corporate governance, have redefined the roles of various internal and external stakeholders in the governance of higher education institutions (Leisyte and Dee, 2012).

Re-contextualization of the Bologna process in Lithuania

The paper explores the implementation of selected Bologna action lines in Lithuanian higher education institutions (HEIs). The study is carried out from an organizational perspective on national re-contextualization, drawing upon sociological institutionalism. The Bologna process is likely to be normatively accepted by institutions in the context of high uncertainty and change, but due to the local legal framework and organizational decoupling national re-contextualization takes place. We observe that the type of HEIs and the competitive horizons of disciplines found in these institutions may be strong mediating factors for the implementation of the Bologna action lines by HEIs.

Changing academic identities in the context of a managerial university – bridging the duality between professions and organizations evidence from the U.S. and Europe

Reforms focusing on privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks have increasingly drawn professional services into organizational settings. In the higher education sector these reforms have been pronounced since the 1990s. They have centralized university management and sought efficiencies in work processes by performance monitoring and competition. Occupations are seen as threatened by the organizational management under the new managerial regimes. Scholars of the relations between occupations and organizations note the duality between the two. They argue that maintaining the duality between occupations versus organizations needs to be bridged and one needs to find typologies which incorporate the two in a productive way. This paper provides an example of such a duality by focusing on academic profession and university organizational context. It aims to answer the question how the duality between occupations and organizations can be bridged in this particular sector? It does so though studying the changing work roles and identities of academics as they are ultimately the carriers of professional values and norms. Thereby two sub-questions are posed: What kind of dynamics threatens the holistic academic identity? Do organizational managerialism and academic capitalism replace disciplines as the source of identity for academics? Based on the evidence from the most recent studies on changing academic roles and identities on both sides of the Atlantic a typology of the dynamics of change in values in the organizational context is developed. The duality of occupations and organizations in the case of academic profession and universities can be bridged when professionals experience enriching or replacing value dynamics and thereby acquire hybrid identities.

Knowledge sharing and organizational change in higher education

Purpose Organizational learning in higher education institutions depends upon the ability of managers and academics to maintain a flow of knowledge across the structural boundaries of the university. This paper aims to understand the boundary conditions that foster or impede the flow of knowledge during organizational change at a large public university. Design/methodology/approach Interview data were collected from 51 academics and 40 managers at the selected university. The analysis focused on two initiatives that managers sought to implement to improve organizational performance. Findings For one of these initiatives, managers engaged in knowledge transformation that enabled managers and academics to learn and collaborate across group boundaries. For the other initiative, managers relied on knowledge transfer practices, which failed to establish productive cross-boundary interactions to support organizational learning. Practical/implications When seeking to implement new initiatives to enhance institutional performance, university managers and academics can view organizational change as a learning process that involves creating and moving knowledge across organizational boundaries. Under conditions of change, the creation and movement of knowledge may require the development of new structures and the use of communications that have a high level of media richness. Originality/value This study provides one of the first empirical investigations of knowledge sharing dynamics during organizational change in a higher education setting.

Organizational learning in higher education institutions: theories, frameworks, and a potential research agenda

Organizational learning is a conceptually rich construct that can inform understandings of a wide range of organizational phenomena. The field of higher education, however, lacks a sufficient body of empirical research on organizational learning in colleges and universities. Moreover, the limited set of organizational learning publications in higher education is weighted heavily toward the functionalist paradigm. This lack of paradigm diversity can be problematic in terms of how the organizational learning construct is applied to practice. In the context of the corporatization of higher education, where the authority of central management has been strengthened, functionalist approaches to organizational learning can reinforce top-down power dynamics and exacerbate tensions between faculty and administrators. This chapter calls for higher education researchers not only to conduct more studies of organizational learning, but to do so from the vantage point of multiple research paradigms.