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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.

The goal of this chapter is to review the potential of institutional logics theory for the study of higher education. After providing a concise introduction to institutional logics, the chapter reviews the small number of studies in higher education that have adopted this approach. It is concluded that most uses of New Institutionalism in the field are still based on its original formulation in the late 1980s, which emphasized the importance of compliance and isomorphism; it is suggested that logics theory could provide a more nuanced and flexible framework, which takes into account the role of (embedded) human agency and the multi-level nature of societal dynamics. The last section of the chapter therefore provides a few directions for future research grounded in logics theory. We distinguish in this respect between the investigation of the field-level coexistence and the interaction between managerial and professional logics; studies of how higher education institutions manage conflicting institutional pressures, for example, through selective compliance; and analyses of the emergence of hybrid practices in academic work and higher education management.

In this chapter, the authors analyze the relationship between academia, organization, and gender in Chile. In particular, the connection between academic practices, management, and hegemonic masculinity throughout the history of Chilean universities. The authors took a critical approach from the field of gender and organizational studies, shedding new light on a longstanding problem: gender-based violence in universities. The authors will discuss how the centrality of management in Chilean universities makes sense in a late and globally connected capitalist scenario, characterized by the introduction of managerialism and business logic in higher education. Consequently, the practice of management acquired a central and hegemonic status that articulates the rest of the academic practices, organizing them not only in terms of the hegemony of management but also in terms of male hegemony.

In this study, we are addressing changes in managerial logics after the introduction of New Public Management (NPM)-reforms in two public sectors in Norway, namely the hospital and the university sectors. These sectors were previously dominated by professional and political logic in management, and the focus is on professionals in managerial positions. We are asking: How do professionals in managerial positions across universities and hospitals mediate between previous and newly introduced logics in management after NPM-reforms? We have chosen to compare changes in management across the hospital and the university sectors. Both sectors are largely publicly owned and dominated by professions, but their mission differs. The empirical material comprises interviews with formal leaders from dissimilar professional backgrounds, at different levels in the organisations in two cases. The findings show that management influenced by the market logic has been introduced, but in a hybrid version. The professional logic has however not been left behind, but expanded and supplied by a neo-bureaucratic logic. Leadership is functioning as a ‘catalyst’ to handle the different logics. The originality of this paper is a comparison of management in health care and higher education related to a model of hybrid management.

Drawing on examples from the more developed realms of technology transfer and other “managerial professions” (Rhoades, 1998; Rhoades & Sporn, 2002) in the academy, this paper explores possible organizational sites for housing protocols for the measurement of the social value of individual innovations in higher education (that may enter the market or and augment or precede commercial valuation), and the possible implications of those different settings for the academy (particularly in terms of motivating more faculty to engage in more innovative and entrepreneurial activities). Organizational location matters. Organizational site is related to professional perspective and to the institutional outlook that attaches to various sorts of work in the academy. Five possible sites are explored, analyzing the dimensions of such locations from the experience of other “new” activities in universities. One type of site consists of an interstitial (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), nonacademic, support unit of managerial professionals (neither faculty nor senior level administrators), as in an Office of Technology Transfer or an Office of Institutional Research. A second type of site would be an academic unit in which measurement tasks could be performed by faculty members. A third type of site would be a hybrid model that combines elements of the first two models, as in the case of entrepreneurship units in many universities. A fourth possible type of site would be to situate such activity in an intermediating association (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004) outside of the university, which mediates between public and private sectors, and that promotes various sorts of innovation and measurement as in the case of Educause and innovative information technologies. A fifth type of site would consist of establishing university extension units in the community, to provide services more directly to constituents, as traditionally was the model for agricultural extension in land grant universities. Each of the models has its owns benefits and challenges, its implications for what sorts of professionals would be doing the work and what they would see their principal function as being, and for the impact they would have on the academic workforce and the institution's direction.

Recent reforms to higher education systems in many OECD countries have focused on making universities more effective organisations in competing for resources and reputations. This has often involved increasing their internal cohesion and external autonomy from the state to make them more similar to private companies. However, pre-reform universities differed so greatly in their governance and capabilities that the impact of institutional changes has varied considerably between three ideal types: Hollow, State-chartered, and Autarkic. Furthermore, the combination of: (a) the inherent uncertainty of scientific research undertaken for publication, (b) limited managerial control over work processes and reputations, and (c) the contradictory effects of some funding and governance changes has greatly restricted the ability of universities to function as authoritatively integrated organisations capable of developing distinctive competitive competences.

This article questions how institutional change influences actors’ behavior within organizations affected by the evolution of their institutional environment. This issue is addressed by looking at how university leaders are empowered by the external reviews led by evaluation agencies and research councils and how they use these reviews as managerial tools and to make decisions. It is argued that this process is complementary to the reforms in university governance and structures and amplifies their effects because it is more legitimate, favors organizational coupling and the appropriation of new norms. It draws on a study led in three French universities in 2011.

While the university as an institution is a great success story, one hears the constant chatter of the crises in higher education usually associated with the organizational transformation of universities. Regardless of one’s normative assessment of these observations, the institutional success of the university has been accompanied by the emergence of universities as organizational actors. I reflect on how these changes could alter the university as an institution, using the Australian higher education sector as an example. In doing so, I explore how universities as organizational actors, in responding to the demands of their external environment, set in motion a series of changes that redefine highly institutionalized categories, and, in doing so, radically remake the university as an institution.

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight how universities got into the predicament in which they currently find themselves in, or somewhat planned to be in, in the 2020s. The historical account outlines the purpose of higher education and who it was for throughout the last few centuries, before a more in-depth analysis of the last few decades will highlight how, and why, neoliberal and subsequently managerial aspects of leadership and performance metrics crept into universities before an analysis of the last 5–10 years, including the onset and consequences of COVID, will demonstrate that many ‘COVID recovery plans’ around staff cuts and course reforms were already in place before COVID, but it was COVID that allowed these plans in most cases to be escalated.

Quality management is high on the reform agenda of both universities and hospitals. This paper studies how quality management is implemented: who is responsible for QM and which instruments are used? The guiding research question is whether these two very distinct professional organizations respond in similar or different ways to a common reform trend. To analyze the extent of isomorphic tendencies a cross-sectoral, descriptive data analysis with data from 135 hospitals and 83 universities in Germany has been conducted. The results show that QM in hospitals is more elaborated in terms of quality instruments and at the same time more standardized. Universities, in contrast, follow quite individualistic ways to organize quality management.