Session Information
32 SES 13, From Alma Mater to VUCA-demia? Strategies of Organizational Change in Academia Between Risks and Alternative Futures
Symposium
Contribution
Contemporary political and managerial agendas of quality assurance as well as new organizational structures following from that have changed university education in many ways (see e.g.Paldam, 2015). We can see, that some lament the developments toward quality and new organizational structures. They (for)see a loss of academic autonomy and classic virtues in university education such as scholarly absorption and the seeking of knowledge for the sake of knowledge seeking itself (Peters, 2007; Readings, 1996). Others complain that liberalism and new public management ethods are turning universities into factory-like institutions producing uniform students without profundity nor critical aptitude (Czarniawska, 2015; Kallio, Kallio, Tienari, & Hyvönen, 2016). Only little knowledge exists about the organizational consequences of these developments on university education. Therefore this paper will contribute with organizational analyses on university education development with special attention to the unexpected outcomes and sometimes perplexing results hereof. Education is increasingly the main task and main source of income for universities, leading to new organizational structures and intra-organizational collaboration. However, intra-organisational dynamics have not been addressed in any detail. This has led to a call for an organisational perspective on higher education research by opening the ‘black box’ of universities as organisations, and providing insight into how its main activities - teaching, research, and services, are carried out (Fumasoli & Stensaker, 2013). In this paper we will analyse the changes in university education from an organizational angle, and we will do this from the most basic organizational perspective: division of labour and the coordination following from that (Mintzberg, 1983; Vikkelsø, 2015). Our analysis will take point of departure in the propagation of institutional accreditation as part of a general, global, quality assurance agenda. We will explicate three perplexing consequences in terms of division and coordination of work: First, that counter to popular belief among academics the quality agenda seems to lead to a stronger focus on research-based education. Second, the effort to enhance quality in education has resulted in the development of a new category of administrative employee brokering the administrative and the academic milieus at the universities. Thirdly, the quality agenda has organizational effects on how student education can take place, as teaching routines, collaboration between staff, evaluation of teaching increasingly focus on measurable and/or known variables as for instance the quantity of teaching hours, general student satisfaction, research coverage etc.
References
Bleiklie, I., & Byrkjeflot, H. (2002). Changing knowledge regimes: Universities in a new research environment. Higher Education, 44(3-4), 519-532. Budd, R. (2017). Undergraduate orientations towards higher education in Germany and England: problematizing the notion of ‘student as customer’. Higher Education, 73(1), 23-37. Czarniawska, B. (2015). University fashions. On ideas whose time has come. In P. Gibbs, O.-H. Ylijoki, C. Guzmán-Valenzuela, & R. Barnett (Eds.), Universities in the flux of time. An exploration of time and temporality in university life. London and New York: Routledge. Elkjaer, B. (2017). Knowledge production as organizational learning: The case of Danish universities. In Holford, Jarvis, Milana, Waller, & Webb (Eds.), Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning. London: Palgrave. Fumasoli, T., & Stensaker, B. (2013). Organizational studies in higher education: A reflection on historical themes and prospective trends. Higher Education Policy, 26(4), 479-496. Kallio, K.-M., Kallio, T. J., Tienari, J., & Hyvönen, T. (2016). Ethos at stake: Performance management and academic work in universities. Human Relations, 69(3), 685-709. Peters, M. A. (2007). Higher education, globalisation and the knowledge economy: Reclaiming the cultural mission. Ubiquity, 2007(May).
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