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Organization and Governance of Universities

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Abstract

The article analyses how the dominant ideals about the actual organizational patterns of university governance have changed over the past few decades away from the classical notion of the university as a republic of scholars towards the idea of the university as a stakeholder organization. In this article, we first look at some general supranational trends, often assumed to influence developments on a global scale. Then, we present some ideas about change processes in universities and academic organizations and analyse how they may help us understand how change may be promoted or limited by the characteristics of such processes. In the following section, we present some research findings about national variation regarding the extent to which changes have taken place in a comparative cross-national perspective. Finally, we discuss how change and variation may be understood in terms of the concept of higher education regimes.

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Notes

  1. The globalization thesis applied to our topic would imply that we are headed for a global model of higher education. It is often based on an underlying presumption that there are standardizing forces at work, whether they are based on a Weberian notion of the bureaucratization of the world (Weber, 1978), on emergence of world systems of education (Meyer and Ramírez, 2000; Frank and Meyer, 2007; Meyer and Schofer, 2007) or on notions about globalization (Berger and Dore, 1996) and European integration. These theories make an argument that, at face value, seems convincing and important because they deal with some forceful processes that contribute to shaping our world. This may be seen in contrast to an alternative perspective that we find in historically oriented studies of state formation where the focus is on how specific national settings shape political processes (Evans et al., 1985).

  2. For the comparison and the eight country studies included, see Bleiklie (2004), Derlien (2004), Hirose (2004), Huisman and Toonen (2004), Montricher (2004), Peters (2004), Scott (2004a, 2004b), Scott and Hood (2004).

  3. No use is made of unannounced audits or inspections. Most of the uncertainty or ‘contrived randomness’ comes from a system that tends to make it difficult to predict payoffs for good or bad performance in research and teaching (Scott, 2004b).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen, Christiesgate 17, Bergen, N-5007, Norway

    Ivar Bleiklie

  2. Professor Emeritus of Government, Brunel University, UK

    Maurice Kogan

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  1. Ivar Bleiklie
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  2. Maurice Kogan
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Bleiklie, I., Kogan, M. Organization and Governance of Universities. High Educ Policy 20, 477–493 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300167

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