Universities: From Organizational Anarchy to Institutional Anarchy?
Universities: From Organizational Anarchy to Institutional Anarchy?
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC20 Comparative Sociology (host committee)
Language: English
The universities of the 21st century can no longer be only institutions (Freitag, 2009), they are now enjoined to turn themselves into organizational actors (Krücken and Meier, 2006), that is to say, into rational rather than anarchical organizations (Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972). This instrumental rationalization movement, well described by the literature on governance and management of universities (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; Ferlie, Musselin and Andresani, 2008; Krücken, 2011), is accompanied by another movement of rationalization, a normative or substantive one, highlighted by the literature on organizational identity applied to the university (Stensaker, 2014; Weertz, Freed and Morphew, 2014). The higher education field is indeed increasingly infused by multiple and competing institutional logics (Thornton and Occasio, 1999) which question the legitimacy and identity of universities (Kodeih and Greenwood, 2014).
This RC20 session aims to think jointly these evolutions in order to study the interdependencies of this twofold rationalization process. To do this, our purpose is to bring together contributors who have examined these questions in different countries and local contexts in order to understand how universities are dealing with these various demands and pressures for change emanating from their institutional environment and how these transnational dynamics are implemented in specific contexts according to the path dependence (North, 1990) traced by the national histories and academic models (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Paradeise et al., 2009).
Session Organizer: