“Strategic bureaucracy” may be an oxymoron, but it explains how universities work – and don’t.
Peter Woelert (Uni Melbourne) researches the ways universities are run, previously pointing to a disconnect between what looks like efficiency from the top but doesn’t to those doing the work.
Now he and Bjørn Stensaker (Uni Oslo) explain how universities have developed a governance style they call, “strategic bureaucracy” where “a strong focus” on leadership is accompanied by “an increasingly professionalised and managerial administrative apparatus.”
The operational model comes, they argue, from two interrelated changes, the reduction in state control of universities and competition between them. The issue that interests them is how institutions have incorporated strategic leadership supported by bureaucratic hierarchy.
Which creates a paradox (FC’s word not theirs). “At the level of individual universities, this bureaucratisation process has occurred despite that strengthening universities’ institutional autonomy was, ultimately, meant to overcome some of the perceived deficiencies associated with the state’s direct bureaucratic control of universities and their operations.”
But the bureaucracy is in the service of central strategy-setting authority, which ends the old model of universities as “loosely coupled systems” with “high levels of autonomy for and weak linkages between the various parts.” Top management uses performance indicators and accountability to extend control to university domains, they nominate teaching and research, “previously left largely to professional self-control.”
Which again, paradoxically, makes them harder to run, with the leadership struggling to assert itself over the centralising bureaucracy meant to serve it. “The capacity of universities to act strategically may actually become increasingly restricted the more sedimented the strategic bureaucracy becomes within their organizational fabric,” they suggest. By taking autonomy away from operating units, the leadership model disempower the people who can, “quickly recognize and exploit academic opportunities.”
the take-away: “in endeavouring to eliminate organizational ‘slack’ and looseness within universities, the strategic bureaucracy and the associated features thus ultimately may end up undermining some of the key foundations from which universities derive their responsiveness as organizations in the first place.”
