Session Information
32 SES 13, From Alma Mater to VUCA-demia? Strategies of Organizational Change in Academia Between Risks and Alternative Futures
Symposium
Contribution
Recent decades have seen ground-breaking changes in a transforming world. Whereas the ‘modern’ world was perceived and rationalized as offering a relatively stable living environment, today it is seen under the VUCA lense: a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world of organizing the present and the future. The processes of globalization and digitalization have altered not only individual and collective lives but as well the way organizations act within it. As well the idea of the university – and with it, the idea of a traditional “alma mater” has changed. Since its modern inceptions at the beginning of the 19th century, nowadays historical changes affect the classical idea of science and knowledge production.
These changes have been described as a shift towards the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Clark 1998; Barnett 2011). From a discourse-oriented perspective, Michael Peters has problematized managerialism and the neoliberal university and showed, how “New Public Management” is used to legitimize the redesign of state educational bureaucracies, educational institutions, and the public policy process. Bröckling and Peters (2017) regard this new rationale embedded as the dispositive of excellence, which no longer problematizes universities as ‘agents of ascertaining the truth’ but as competitive actors, that are rationalized through economic reasoning. As a way of (being) governed within dispositives (Foucault 1978), the dispositive of excellence organizes the discourse of competition, rankings and entrepreneurial subjectivation of the researcher (Weber 2014a). Universities and their members relate differently to one another, as they shift into becoming economic ‘subjects’. Today’s homo academicus now is equipped with entrepreneurial qualities to ensure a successful fit to the market.
Within these shifting roadmaps, however, not only managerialization and bureaucratization but also “openness” and organizational change are becoming new paradigms of research and development (Roberts and Peters 2011). “Open” research and design platforms are becoming ever more relevant in program regulations as well as in the steering instruments of research and innovation policies (Weber 2014b). From an analytical perspective, oriented towards epistemic regimes, we are interested in a “material analysis” of the orders of knowledge at play. The ‘virtues of openness’, as Roberts and Peters (2011) put it, bring about the dispositive of collective design and collective knowledge creation.
As we can see, universities are involved and embedded in different notions and strategies of organizational change between marketization and societal transformation within these global trends. Within the notion of the entrepreneurial university and within political strategies, academic autonomy seems to be at risk, as academia and research are now addressed as service for the society. Applied research and societal usefulness become relevant dimensions of “public scholarship”. In the Innovation Union agenda, the EU regards multistakeholder platform strategies for innovation as a crucial part of the common research agenda ‘Horizon 2020’. Innovation capacity is promoted in different fields like industrial leadership, societal challenges, and science. Here, academia and science are asked to provide research for innovation and to develop competencies for innovation in new designs (Weber 2014b) and formats of Open Innovation (Chesbrough 2010), cross-sector innovation approaches involving politicians, entrepreneurs, civil society and academia. Academia appears as contested terrain. The contributions in this symposium thus raise the question, how universities as “special organizations” deal with these polyphonic discourses? How do they address and deal with gender equality and diversity policies, different rationalities and interests? How can universities offer alternatives pathways to emerging futures? And how can organizational education science contribute to being a beacon of hope in an era of risk?
References
Barnett, Ronald (2011): The coming of the ecological university. In: Oxford Review of Education 37 (4), S. 439–455. DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2011.595550. Chesbrough, Henry William (2010): Open innovation. The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. Clark, Burton R. (1998): Creating enterpreneurial university. Organization pathways of transformation. Bingley: Emerald. Foucault, Michel (1978): Dispositive der Macht. Michel Foucault über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit. Berlin: Merve. Roberts, Peter; Peters, Michael A. (2011): From Castalia to Wikipedia: Openness and Closure in Knowledge Communities. In: E-Learning and Digital Media 8 (1), S. 36–46. Weber, Susanne Maria (2013): Imagining the Creative University. Dispositives of Creation, Strategies of Innovation, Politics of Reality. In: Michael A. Peters und Tina Besley (Hg.): The Creative University: SensePublishers, S. 161–192. Weber, Susanne Maria (2014a): Change by Design!? Wissenskulturen des „Design“ und organisationale Strategien der Gestaltung. In: Susanne Maria Weber, Michael Göhlich, Andreas Schröer und Jörg Schwarz (Hg.): Organisation und das Neue. Beiträge der Kommission Organisationspädagogik. Wiesbaden: Springer, S. 27–48. Weber, Susanne Maria (2014b): Transforming the academic field. Field-reflexivity and academic access for non-traditional doctoral candidates. In: A.-Chr Engels-Schwarzpaul und Michael A. Peters (Hg.): Of Other Thoughts. A Guidebook for Candidates and Supervisors. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, S. 115–130.
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