University Presidents and the Question of Organizational Actorhood

Abstract

There are two strong perspectives on organizations at the interface of organizational and higher education research that offer two ways to think about the role of university presidents for universities in the context of competition. The one perspective highlights that universities gradually became organizational actors, influenced by increasing competition between higher education institutions (Bloch 2021). In this perspective university presidents have gained additional power for decision making, turned from a ‘primus inter pares’ to a supervisor whose role is to enforce and implement organizational goals to the inside of the organization (Krücken 2017) and contributed to the transformation of universities into organizational actors by becoming a ‘central location of organizational action’ (Bromley & Meyer 2015: 140). The other perspective argues that universities are loosely coupled systems and while it does not neglect that competition is a highly relevant governance mode and that positioning games take place in between governments and university leaderships (Musselin 2018), it still assumes that university presidents lack the power to make organizational members think and act in the way how the organizational identity they aim to construct requests them to do. In this perspective, university presidents are also highly important, since their limits in terms of power are seen as a key factor why academic institutions cannot become something like organizational actors. In order to contribute to this controversy, our panel aims to critically discuss and analyse the role of university presidents and thereby contribute to research on the question of universities’ organizational actorhood. Bloch, R. (2021): The Actorhood Imperative. On Universities as Organisational Actors. In: European Journal of Higher Education 11 (1), 489–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2021.2004184. Bromley, P., & Meyer, J. W. (2015). Hyper-organization. Global organizational expansion. Oxford University Press. Krücken, G. (2017): Die Transformation von Universitäten in Wettbewerbsakteure. In: Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung, 39 (3/4), 10-29. Musselin, C. (2018): New Forms of Competition in Higher Education. Socio-Economic Review 16 (3): 657–83.

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