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Facing intense global competition and pressure from public authorities, several universities in Europe have engaged in merger and concentration processes. Drawing on two in-depth case studies, this paper considers university mergers as an opportunity to explore the processes involved in the creation of a new organizational structure. In line with recent scholarly calls to revisit the notion of organizational design, we combine insights from three different research streams to address the functional, political, and institutional dynamics that shaped the organizational architecture of the merged universities. Two main results are presented and discussed. First, although these mergers were initiated largely in response to the diffusion of new global institutional scripts, these scripts had little influence on organizational design: deeply institutionalized local scripts prevailed over global mimetic pressures. Second, while these institutional scripts provided many of the basic building blocks of the new universities, in both cases their design was also heavily shaped by time pressures and power games. While a few powerful actors used the merger as an opportunity to promote their own reform agenda, some of the key features of the two merged universities stemmed from choices by exclusion, whose primary aim was the avoidance of conflicts.

Close interaction between universities, industries, and governments has given rise to hybrid organizations incorporating economic development alongside scientific research and higher education. We will approach this phenomenon and the related organization-theoretical problems by looking at two cases of discipline making to discuss the potential of the concept of organizational field introduced by the neoinstitutionalist school of organization theory. As this concept presumes the Bourdieusian theory of social fields, we will consider possibilities of reflective contesting of the states of doxa in discipline making in regard to organizational aspects of disciplinary boundaries in the university-centered system of higher education, its demarcation to business and schooling, as well as to the related ideology of professionalism and science policy. We will also comment on the Bourdieusian conceptuality inscribed in the neoinstitutionalist metaphor of organizational field from the perspective of systems theory inspired by Luhmann. This is because we believe that further development of the semantic focus in the problem of disciplinary boundaries would benefit from Luhmannian tools designed to grasp organizations as social systems that facilitate interrelations of differentiated function systems relevant for discipline making in current technoscience.

Collegiality is often discussed and analyzed as a challenged form of governance, a form of working that used to function well in universities prior to the emergence of contemporary and modern forms of governance. This seems to suggest that collegiality used to dominate, while other forms of governance are now taking over. The papers in volume 86 of this special issue support the notion of challenged collegiality, but also show that for the most part, nostalgic notions of “the good old days” are neither true nor helpful if we are to revitalize academic collegiality. After examining whether a golden age of collegiality ever existed, we discuss why collegiality matters. Exploring what are often described as limitations or “dark sides” of collegiality, we address four such “dark sides” related to slow decision-making, conflicts, parochialism, and diversity. This is followed by a discussion of how these limitations may be handled and what measures must be taken to maintain and develop collegiality. With a brief summary of the remaining papers under two headings, “Maintaining collegiality” and “Revitalizing collegiality,” we preview the rest of this volume.

This research paper aims to better understand the network structure of higher education in North America. It draws on a relationally networked dataset of 1,292 degree-granting colleges and universities in North America to develop a modularity class approach to categorizing colleges and universities based on their own self-defined peer networks and assesses the utility of the modularity class approach as well as several measures of network centrality for predicting offerings of new curricular fields. Results show that not all measures of network centrality equally predict organizational change outcomes, with hub/authority position being most important. Additionally, results show that an empirically derived modularity class approach to categorizing organizations has important strengths in relation to more typical approaches based on prestige or perceived organizational characteristics. The approaches detailed in this paper will be useful for future analysts seeking to explain the spread of innovations and behavior across the higher education institutional field, as well as those seeking to understand clustering and organizational divergence.

This chapter develops a theoretical account of higher education policy creation and the relationship between universities and the state. Through this process, it demonstrates the relevance of theories from political science – including policy analysis and parliamentary/legislative studies – to higher education policy analysis. The chapter outlines the enduring relevance of political factors in shaping higher education around the world and the different ways in which political and policy analysis can be positioned within higher education research. A series of theoretical frameworks are introduced including policy networks, neo-institutionalism and principal-agent theory. These theories account for how policy is made, the behaviour of universities and policy makers, and the dynamics within the relationship between universities and the state. The chapter explains how these approaches can be adapted and applied to higher education policy research, and how frameworks from political science can inform and enrich studies of higher education.

This paper examines how young people develop meaningful self-concepts in the postmodern social world. Drawing from an ethnographic investigation of punk subculture, I explore how identity work is performed when young people are saturated with competing self-definitions and encouraged to engage in reflexive self-doubt. Focusing on the ecstatic qualities of concerts, I describe a complex process of identity formation wherein youth emotionally experience their identities through ritual performance rather than constructing them through institutional affiliation or narrative. My analysis draws heavily from Bourdieu’s practice theory and the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing the centrality of embodiment and performativity to postmodern identity. I conclude with a discussion of how postmodern theories of the nonself exaggerate the insecurity of contemporary identity, and I outline a new theoretical framework regarding identity formation that bridges the literatures on subjectivity and embodiment with classical work in symbolic interactionism.

The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate the theory of academic capitalism by focusing on rarely examined forerunners of academic capitalism: namely, business schools.

A research-based essay.

The findings emphasize that there are different forms of academic capitalism. Our example from Dubai context shows how more extreme form of academic capitalism, which we label Acamanic Capitalism, developed as a result of free educational markets.

The chapter provides scholarly value through novel conceptualization. The phenomenon of acamanic capitalism should also be acknowledged in academia and in critical management education.

Chinese began to arrive in Florida at the turn of the 20th century. Currently there are more than fifty thousand Chinese living in Florida. This article provides information resources for scholars and students of Chinese studies, and for people interested in the history of Chinese Americans and Southeast regional studies. It consists of archive papers, books, journal and newspaper articles and Internet resources containing information on Florida and China. The list is arranged by authors’ last names when available.

This is a case study of a Canadian privately‐owned manufacturing organisation having about 200 employees that embarked on its quality journey about two years ago. Their choice to continue their quality progress beyond ISO 9001 and to adopt the TQM approach is also described. The details provided are accurate and complete, except that the names have been changed to preserve the confidentiality of the organisation due to the strategic nature of the information presented. Further details about the case study may be available from the author.