Marco Seeber

European universities as complete organizations? Understanding identity, hierarchy and rationality in public organizations

Abstract This article investigates the form of European universities to determine the extent to which they resemble the characteristics of complete organizations and whether the forms are associated with modernization policy pressure, national institutional frames and organizational characteristics. An original data set of twenty-six universities from eight countries was used. Specialist universities have a stronger identity, whereas the level of hierarchy and rationality is clearly associated with the intensity of modernization policies. At the same time, evidence suggests limitations for universities to become complete, as mechanisms allowing the development of some dimensions seemingly constrain the capability to develop others.

Convergence and differentiation processes in Swiss higher education: an empirical analysis

The aim of this article is to contribute to the scholarly debate on differentiation processes in higher education, particularly in binary systems. The article builds on recent developments in institutional theory and organizational ecology regarding the nature of organizational forms, as well as on the mechanisms through which these forms impact on characteristics of individual higher education institutions, and highlight the role of isomorphic pressures and competitive differentiation. The approach emphasizes the relevance of segregation and blending processes between types of institution. An application to the relationship between the two main types in Swiss higher education confirms that these forces largely determine the dynamics of the populations, and that a distinction emerges between core features – which make the distinction between populations – and features for which individual strategies and local conditions are more relevant.

Branding of Flemish higher education institutions: a strategic balance perspective

Branding of higher education institutions (HEIs) is an expanding area of research. The existing literature mainly draws on the strategic management perspective that argues that HEIs are pressured to develop brands which differentiate them from their competitors. Past studies, however, do insufficiently take into account that most HEIs are positioned in systems that contain both competitive pressures (to differentiate) and institutional pressures (to meet taken-for-granted expectations), where neither of the pressures is clearly dominant. Our multiple case study of the five Flemish universities finds that branding can simultaneously address competitive and institutional pressures and that the universities studied combine aspects of distinctiveness with elements of similarity.

Decision-Making Power and Institutional Logic in Higher Education Institutions: A Comparative Analysis of European Universities

The aim of this paper is to analyze responses of public universities to the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) as the outcome of balancing between the managerial logics endorsed by NPM and the academic professional logics. Building on the institutional logics approach, we develop a framework concerning how universities will achieve compliance to conflicting claims by strategies like compartmentalization and blending stipulations of both logics. Empirical results based on a large-scale survey of 26 universities in eight European countries display how compatibility is achieved through highly differentiated adoption of logics that depends on the task considered. The results reveal that the strength of NPM pressures strongly affects the adoption of managerial practices within universities yet has no significant effect on the academic characteristics.

Efficacy and limitations of research steering in different disciplines

Higher education reforms informed by the managerial paradigm aim at increasing the capability of the university leadership to steer research activity, with no substantial variation across the disciplines. However, literature points out the limitations of universities to act as strategic actors, as well as the differences between the disciplines that may influence the efficacy of steering. Evidence from the Dutch and Italian systems shows that reforms improve the steering potential. Overall, steering is more effective in new sciences, while other disciplines remain hardly steerable; thus, the discipline mix appears to influence steering strategy and practice.

The international Campus of excellence initiative in Spain

This chapter analyses the Campus de Excelencia Internacional initiative – CEI, International Campus of Excellence – in Spain. The initiative was part of the broader Estrategia Universidad 2015 – EU2015 – (Ministerio de Educacion, 2008, 2009) and was officially launched in July 2009. The CEI initiative was strongly influenced by policy initiatives conceived in Europe in the same period, while at the same time expected to address problems central to the Spanish context. The Spanish higher education system is among the largest in Europe, with 1.9 million students and 150 thousands academic staff (including tenured and junior staff; Oecd, 2013). In recent years, resources invested in higher education grew from 0.96 % of in 2002 up to 1.35 % in 2008, while decreased after the economic crisis down to 1.23 % of GDP in 2012 (Eurostat database). Spanish universities had been regulated by the central authorities at the Ministry of Education until 1983, when the University Reform Act transformed them into autonomous bodies which transferred the direct responsibility over universities to the autonomous regions, although the devolution process was fully completed only in 1997 (Mora et al., 2000).

Are non-monetary rewards effective in attracting peer reviewers? A natural experiment

Editors of scientific journals meet increasing challenges to find peer reviewers. Rewarding reviewers has been proposed as a solution to incentives peer review, and journals have already started to offer different kinds of rewards, particularly non-monetary ones. However, research so far has mainly explored the efficacy of monetary rewards, while research on non-monetary rewards is barely absent. The goal of this article is to fill this gap by exploring whether and under what conditions a rather common non-monetary reward employed by journals, i.e., to recognize reviewers work by publishing their names on a yearly issue, is effective in increasing the willingness of scientists to become peer reviewers. We test the efficacy of three different reward settings identified in the literature: (1) engagement contingent, (2) task-completion contingent, and (3) performance contingent, through a natural experiment involving 1865 scientists in faculties of business and economics of Romanian universities. We explore whether reward efficacy varies across scientists depending on their gender, academic rank, research productivity, and type of institution to which they are affiliated. The results show that the performance contingency strongly reduces the number of respondents willing to become reviewers (− 60 % compared to a no-reward setting), particularly males and research productive scientists. Scientists affiliated with private universities are strongly discouraged by the reward. In sum, the results suggest that non-monetary rewards are not necessarily effective, as in some cases they may actually discourage the most intrinsically motivated and competent reviewers.

Structural Reform in European Higher Education: An Introduction

This chapter starts with a reflection on what we know about structural reforms in higher education. Subsequently, the nature and types of the structural reforms analysed in this volume is explained. The cases are all European reforms in which governmental agencies played a leading role. The reforms aimed either at horizontal differentiation (e.g. introducing a new sector in higher education), vertical differentiation (e.g. developing initiatives for ‘world-class’ universities) or interrelationships (cooperation between different types of higher education institutions, including mergers). Short summaries of the case studies are presented, followed by an introduction of the conceptual framework, used to analyse the case studies.

Structural higher education reform: design and evaluation: Synthesis report

This study analyses how different types of system-level (or ‘landscape’) structural reforms in higher education have been designed and implemented in selected higher education systems. In the 12 case studies that form the core of the project, the researchers examine reforms aimed at: - Increasing horizontal differentiation between different types of higher education institutions (for example reforms to introduce or modify the role of universities of applied science); - Increasing vertical differentiation through increasing or decreasing positional or status differences between higher education institutions (for example, reforms aimed at concentrating research in a limited number of universities) and; - Changing institutional interrelationships between higher education institutions (for example, through mergers, the formation of associations of institutions). In each case, the researchers set out to understand the origins and objectives of the reforms examined, the why they were designed and implemented, the extent to which they achieved their objectives and the factors affecting success or failure. The overall objective is to provide policy makers at the European, national and institutional levels with policy relevant conclusions concerning the design, implementation and evaluation of structural reforms

Size of web domains and interlinking behavior of higher education institutions in Europe

The aim of this paper is to empirically test whether interlinking patterns between higher education institutions (HEIs) conform to a document model, where links are motivated by webpage content, or a social relationship model, where they are markers of underlying social relationships between HEIs. To this aim, we analyzed a sample of approximately 400 European HEIs, using the number of pages on their web domains and the total number of links sent and received; in addition we test whether these two characteristics are associated with organizational size, reputation, and the volume of teaching and research activities. Our main findings are as follows: first, the number of webpages of HEI websites is strongly associated with their size, and to a lesser extent, with the volume of their educational activities, research orientation, and reputation; differences between European countries are rather limited, supporting the insight that the academic Web has reached a mature stage. Second, the distribution of connectivity (as measured by the total degree of HEI’s) follows a lognormal distribution typical of social networks between organizations, while counts of weblinks can be predicted with good precision from organizational characteristics. HEIs with larger websites tend to send and receive more links, but the effect is rather limited and does not fundamentally modify the resulting network structure. We conclude that aggregated counts of weblinks between pairs of HEIs are not significantly affected by the web policies of HEIs and thus can be considered as reasonably robust measures. Furthermore, interlinking should be considered as proxies of social relationships between HEIs rather than as reputational measures of the content published on their websites.