‘Strategic Bureaucracy: The Convergence of Bureaucratic and Strategic Management Logics in the Organizational Restructuring of Universities’ by Peter Woelert and Bjørn Stensaker in (2024) Minerva comments
Over recent decades, the organizational dimensions of universities have taken a center stage in analyses of higher education policy reform and governance change (e.g., Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2015; Fumasoli and Stensaker 2013; Seeber et al. 2015). Research from different parts of the world has documented a changing university where key organizational trends include greater centralization and formalization, more external and internal reporting and accountability pressures, and the growth of an increasingly professionalized and managerial administrative apparatus within universities (e.g., Christensen 2011; Croucher and Woelert 2022; Ramirez and Christensen 2013).
Across the literature examining the changing organizational governance of universities, one can identify two related but differently accentuated narratives concerning the observed changes. The first narrative is broadly associated with analyses of public sector reform along New Public Management (NPM) lines and the associated policy and governance changes (Ferlie et al. 1996). Key elements in this narrative are, first, the state’s off-loading of responsibilities for organizational governance to universities and increases in universities’ institutional autonomy in operational matters, and second, increases in universities’ accountability to government authorities and other key stakeholders setting the broader policy goals and objectives (e.g., Capano 2011; Christensen 2011; Enders, de Boer, and Weyer 2013). This shift towards increased institutional autonomy and accountability entails new and expanded administrative responsibilities and demands that, so the narrative goes, compel universities to increasingly acquire the characteristics of formalized, centralized, and hierarchical organizations (Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2015; Musselin 2006). In view of these apparent changes, universities thus can be said to have undergone an organizational process of bureaucratization.
The second narrative is related to the first in that it also sees the environment as the core driver of change within universities. However, in contrast to linking organizational change in the university directly to public sector reform and ‘steering at a distance’, this narrative foregrounds the emergence of dynamic forms of institutional competition including those associated with markets or quasi-markets (see Jungblut and Vukasovic 2018) as a key driver of change. Intensifying institutional competition for domestic and international students and university ranking positions (Brankovic 2018; Espeland and Sauder 2007), the narrative then goes, has made it imperative for universities to become comprehensively managed organizations capable of strategic decision-making and swift internal restructuring to effectively identify and realize opportunities offered by their environment (see, e.g., Krücken and Meier 2006; Thoenig and Paradeise 2016). In short, according to this narrative, an increasingly competitive and uncertain environment has driven universities to transform into strategically managed organizations.
Despite the ongoing centrality of these two narratives to accounts of university reform and change, the question of how specifically the two associated organizational logics – bureaucratic and strategic – interrelate in the restructuring of universities has received little attention. This is in parts because the strategic organizational logic, on a more general level, has been frequently yet simplistically painted as implying a radical departure from bureaucratic forms and processes (see on this point, e.g., Hoggett 2007; Wright, Sturdy and Wylie 2012). Applied to the domain of universities, such ‘post-bureaucratic’ notion of strategic management thus provides little scope to account for any common ground or convergence between the two logics in processes of organizational restructuring and change.
This is an issue also since more recent empirical studies from around the world appear to present a mixed picture as to how universities are changing as organizations (see, e.g., Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2017; Ramirez and Christensen 2013; Seeber et al. 2015). There is, for example, a range of evidence suggesting that universities have become more tightly integrated and managed as organizations (Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2015, Seeber et al. 2015). Yet there are also signs of ongoing fragmentation in university organization due to the successive addition of new administrative layers that ultimately appear to have expanded the bureaucratic dimensions of university life (Maassen and Stensaker 2019, Ramirez and Christensen 2013; Woelert 2023).
In this conceptual paper, we argue that bureaucratic and strategic logics, despite their different emphases and points of departure, converge and combine with respect to key dimensions of universities’ internal governance and organizing, ultimately giving rise to a hybrid form of organizational governance we refer to as ‘strategic bureaucracy’. We suggest that the manifestation of strategic bureaucracy within universities is inter alia characterized by a strong focus on strategic leadership and the associated management techniques alongside intensification of organizational features and dimensions traditionally associated with bureaucratic governance such as formalization and hierarchical authority.
The key research questions guiding our discussion are:
1.
What are the key characteristics of bureaucratic and strategic logics in a university setting?2.
How are the bureaucratic and strategic organizational logics articulating within universities?3.
What are some of the key organizational implications arising from this articulation between both logics?
Our use of the notion of organizational logic throughout this paper is motivated by the ambition to conceptualize (a) distinctive forms or types of collective rationality that frame, legitimize, and guide organizational activities; and (b) the relationships between these forms. There are affinities to the institutional logics conception that has become widely popular in the social sciences over recent decades, and which assumes that typically there are several such forms, or logics, to be found and interacting within organizations, and which further posits that understanding of the articulation of such different forms is key to understanding organizational change also (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). In contrast to the institutional logics perspective and its ambition to integrate macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analysis (see Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012), our analyses remain, however, more modestly focused on the organizational level and, in particular, do not attempt to integrate individual or micro-level dimensions or foundations.