The Alpha, the Omega, and Everything in Between

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how the combination of expectations on higher education institutions affects their capacity to stake out their own strategic positions. This purpose is established in relation to an ongoing transformation of the conditions of higher education and research through a global development often called the rise of the knowledge society, positioning universities as increasingly important instruments for societal development through their dominion over academic knowledge generation and proliferation. With this growing importance, an increasingly wide variety of expectations from an increasingly wide variety of stakeholders has followed, stemming from within and outside the confines of the university and blurring the lines between the university and its surrounding environment. Taking its point of departure from the multitude of expectations laid upon higher education institutions, the overarching research question of this thesis is as follows: How can a higher education institution consolidate disparate expectations into cohesive positioning?

The thesis approaches this question from four different and complementary angles, guided by an overarching resource dependence perspective that places the spotlight on the management and negotiation of internal and external pressures that provide inputs to the positioning process. This overarching perspective is complemented by insights from theories of organised hypocrisy, the principal–agent problem, crisis management, academic freedom and organisational hybridity. Together, they provide a varied yet consistent image of how uncertainties are managed, and balances are negotiated in the processing of myriad expectations. The empirical focus of the thesis is on Swedish higher education, studied through in-depth interviews exploring internal decision-making processes, survey data generating overviews of systemic patterns, and publicly accessible opinion papers highlighting the interfaces between universities as organisations and their stakeholders.

The results of the thesis show that the internal balancing of expectations systematically reinforces the status quo while changing conditions are met by adaptation, resulting from an internalisation of external pressures through the management of uncertainties. The balance does not move unless necessary, and when necessary, it moves only as much as it must. Thus, higher education institutions respond readily to changing conditions to maintain continued operation but are subject to severe constraints in their capability to actively shape their own strategic positions.

The responsiveness of higher education institutions to pressures means that the way they function becomes fundamentally contextual. Cultural conditions, physical realities and mechanisms of governance matter, because they act as determinants of the way the balancing of expectations moves. Paradoxically, this may make higher education institutions — nominally the most unmanageable of organisations — easier to influence than most, but perhaps not with easily foreseeable results. 

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