Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World: Adaptation and Resistance

Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World

Deanna de Zilwa

Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World Adaptation and Resistance

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Deanna de Zilwa Monash University Faculty of Education 3800 Melbourne Victoria Australia [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-9236-6 e-ISBN 978-90-481-9237-3 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010929614 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Learning without thought is labour lost: thought without learning is perilous Confucius (551BC –479 BC ), The Confucian Analects This book is dedicated to Professor Burton R. Clark. His work established the ontological, epistemological and methodological frameworks that shaped the genesis and trajectory of the sociology of higher education. Clark’s labour will not be lost, as many contemporary higher education scholars including myself follow in his footsteps and no doubt future generations of higher education scholars’ work will be inspired and enriched by his scholarship too.

Preface

As clocks struck midnight on the 31st December 2009 announcing the dawn of a new decade, amidst the jubilation of a new beginning we paused momentarily to reflect on the decade that had just past. It was a difficult era for many people and organisations. Many were affected by war, terrorism, famine, fire and tsunamis. First-world citizens enjoyed opportunities to relax in a technologically driven nirvana. People on streets, trains and planes from London, Tokyo to New York sported the white ear buds of iPhones as de rigueur adornments. The pace and intensity of our lives now seems to run at warp speed, we rush from appointment to appointment swigging vitamin-enhanced mineral water obsessing about fluctuations in our body mass index and the Dow Jones index in equal measure. Yet as individuals we can choose to accept or reject some of these changes. Those with sufficient material resources can cocoon themselves in high-security fortress homes or relocate to safer, more tranquil environs, or even redesign themselves with the aid of Botox and a skilled plastic surgeon. Yet some organisations do not have the luxury of volition, they cannot choose whether to accept or reject the affects of environmental changes. A type of organisation that has found itself situated in environments that are increasingly complex and turbulent are academic units (departments, schools and faculties) in many publicly funded universities around the globe. The last decade has seen these units encounter similar sets of challenges from these environments including declining levels of public funding pushing units towards marketisation and entrepreneurialism, with intensified competition in globally contested student, staff and research funding markets and pressures associated with the massification of student cohorts. Yet units respond to these challenges in vastly different ways. Some academic units relish these challenges, they are invigorated by the possibilities for development and innovation that these challenges herald. Other units display inertia or path-dependence. Other units defiantly resist pressures to change any aspect of their unit to accommodate these environmental changes. Why are these responses so disparate? Do academic units that respond to environmental challenges proactively have particular attributes not present in other units? Is it necessarily detrimental for academic units to resist environmental pressures for change? Can resistance be sustained over the long term? These are some of the key issues explored in this book. Analysing data from case studies that investigated how academic units in Australian vii

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public universities responded to changes in their exogenous environments, the book offers higher education scholars new conceptual insights on academic units’ modes and processes of adaptation and resistance. The book’s suggestions on how to enhance academic units’ adaptive capacities and develop entrepreneurial selfreliance are useful for practitioners: university executives, heads of academic units, administrators and academics (faculty). Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Deanna de Zilwa

Acknowledgments

I have long suspected that my fascination with change and how people and organisations react to change is something deeply ingrained within my DNA, as generations of my family have left behind the known and set sail for foreign shores moving first from Europe to Asia and more recently to Australia. It takes confidence and bravery to embark upon such journeys and an openness of spirit and acceptance of difference to learn to live in unfamiliar lands. From my forebears I have inherited a fortitude and resilience that has nourished and sustained me throughout the journeys of my life including taking this book from concept to fruition. Many people have assisted me with this work at different times and in different ways. My papa Gerald’s wisdom and insight into human kind has provided constant guidance. Friends, colleagues and academic mentors at home and abroad have provided material and conceptual sustenance. Thanks to Professor Simon Marginson at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Australia for his advice during the embryonic stages of the project. Thanks to Professor Richard James from the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne for assisting the project’s gestation. Thanks to Professor Dr. Marijk van der Wende and Associate Professor Leo Goedegeburre, then at the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, The Netherlands and Professor Gary Rhoades, then at the University of Arizona, United States of America for theoretical critiques that enhanced the fabric of this work. Professor Sue Willis, Dean of the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia and Professor Jane Kenway, Faculty of Education, Monash University nurtured and protected the project in its later stages ensuring its delivery. The critical reflections of the book’s anonymous reviewers enhanced this work. My editors at Springer, Bernadette Ohmer and Yoka Janssen were encouraging and supportive throughout the project. Change, especially change that we do not choose, nor whose shape and direction we do not control can instil fear, denial and resistance. For others change offers new possibilities, challenges and achievements. This book tells the story of how 16 academic units in Australian public universities responded when they found themselves thrust into a changing world. This story could not have been told without the

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help of the 112 university staff: vice-chancellors and their deputies, deans, heads of academic units, academics and administrators who gave their precious time freely and spoke with candour and valour; for this I am grateful. Melbourne, VIC, Australia August, 2009

Deanna de Zilwa

Contents

Part I

The Framework

1 Complex, Turbulent Exogenous Environments . . . . . . . Globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marketisation of Higher Education: Declining Public Funding and Increasing Operating Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developments in Information Communication Technologies . Massification of Student Cohorts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Increased Accountability to Stakeholders (Governments, Professional Associations, Employers and Students) . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Research Design and Methods Research Questions . . . . . . Key Concepts . . . . . . . . . Research Design and Methods . Selection of the Case Studies . Data Collection . . . . . . . . Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . Alternative Research Methods . Limitations of This Work . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 Introduction to the Empirical Findings . . . . . . . . . Miles and Snow’s Typology of Organisational Adaptation Defenders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prospectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analysers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reactors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part II

Contents

The Case Studies

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Part III Conceptual and Practical Reflections 8 Discussion and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interaction Between Academic Units’ Exogenous Environment and Endogenous Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Academic Units Display Heterogeneous Interactions with Their Exogenous Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purposes of Adaptation Vary, Some Academic Units Seek Equilibrium with Their Exogenous Environment Others Seek Disequilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some Academic Units Resisted Changes in Their Exogenous Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Delineating Causation and Processes of Adaptation and Resistance Resistance Cannot Be Sustained Over the Long Term . . . . . . . Decisions About Academic Units’ Adaptation or Resistance Are Made by Consultative Processes Between Heads of Units and Senior Academics and Administrators . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Academic Units Do not Use Strategic Planning or Strategic Management to Determine Processes for Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . Academic Units Need to Enhance Their Adaptive Capacity and Develop Entrepreneurial Self-Reliance to Overcome Their Resource Dependency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Exploring Conceptual and Practical Implications of This Work . . Conceptual Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Adaptive Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CAS Principles Could Enhance Academic Units’ Adaptive Capacity . Enhancing Understanding of and Interaction with Environments: Strategic Thinking and Strategic Positioning . . . . . . Creating Disequilibrium to Overcome Resistance and Encourage Flexibility, Risk Taking, Entrepreneurialism and Innovation Self-organising Teams Using Collegial Participative Decision-Making Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transforming Academic Unit’s Organisational Culture and Values . . . Academics Affiliation with Their Academic Unit Should Be Strengthened . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconfiguring Academic Units’ Spatio-Temporal Orientation: Looking Outwards, Moving Quickly Over the Long Term . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Orientation Towards Change: Letting Go of the Past, Developing Openness Towards Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implementing Distributed Leadership, Management and Decision-Making Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Undertaking Strategic Thinking and Positioning for Differentiation in Core Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enhancing Flexibility and Risk Taking to Develop the Capacity for Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developing Units’ Entrepreneurial Capacities and Using Entrepreneurial Activities to Attain Fiscal Self-reliance . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Current and Emerging Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . Developments in Information Communication Technologies Fiscal Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Increased Accountability to Stakeholders . . . . . . . . . . Massification of Student Cohorts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendix A Details About Interviewees from Academic Units . . . . .

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Appendix B Interview Questions – Academic Units For Academics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organisational Culture and Values . . . . . . . Funding and Resource Management . . . . . . Marketing and Communications . . . . . . . . Strategic Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quality Assurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Management and Decision Making . . . . . . . Institutional Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . For Administrators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organisational Culture and Values . . . . . . . Funding and Resource Management . . . . . . Marketing and Communications . . . . . . . . Strategic Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quality Assurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Management and Decision Making . . . . . . . Institutional Governance . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendix C Interview Questions for University Executives . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of Figures

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Funding of Australian public universities 1995 . . . . . . . . . . . . Funding of Australian public universities 2002 . . . . . . . . . . . . Additional funding for higher education and innovation . . . . . . .

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List of Tables

1.1 1.2 4.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6

Overseas students as a percentage of total number of students in Australian universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Revenue generated from overseas students fees as a percentage of total operating revenue for Australian universities Academic units’ responses to changing exogenous environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Commonwealth government grants for Australian public universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Total number of students taught by Australian public universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Projects allocated funding 2009 Australian federal budget . . Australian public university operating expenses before abnormal items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Difference between total revenue and total expenses for Australian public universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SJTU ranking criteria and weights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the Author

Deanna de Zilwa is a sociologist of higher education at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. She completed her PhD at the CSHE (Centre for the Study of Higher Education), University of Melbourne, Australia. Deanna came to academia via the route of senior administration roles in higher education policy, strategic planning and quality assurance at the chancelleries of various Australian universities. She has published journal articles in Higher Education, reviews journal articles for the Journal of Higher Education and is a member of the Society for Researchers into Higher Education (United Kingdom) and the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (Europe). Her next research project explores university organisational structures and cultures post the era of new public management. Deanna can be contacted at [email protected].

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Introduction

As 2008 drew to a close newspaper headlines told the story of a global financial crisis decimating economies: ‘German bank seeks $10.5 billion in bailout aid’ (Jolly, 2008), ‘Recession will hit UK hardest, says EC’ (Gow, 2008), ‘Aso unveils ¥ 27 trillion stimulus package’ (Fukada, 2008). ‘China sees $877 billion package also as stimulus to world economy’ (The Straits Times, 2008). ‘Business confidence at record low’ (Australian Financial Review, 2008). Around the globe currencies were devalued, firms were forced into bankruptcy, thousands of people lost their jobs and homes. Governments bought banks, firms and currency in a desperate effort to stabilise their nations’ economies and stave off recession. This situation was a powerful illustration of globalisation at work. This economic crisis started in 2007 when hedge funds owned by Bear Stearns, a US investment bank incurred huge losses as a consequence of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Yet the interconnectedness of countries economies saw the meltdown of the US economy cause severe disruptions to other nations’ economies. The media focused its attention on how commercial firms were affected by the economic crisis, yet they were not the only type of organisation that was affected; public entities including universities were affected too. Such extreme degrees of economic volatility are infrequent, yet they provide a dramatic illustration of the dynamism, complexity and uncertainty of organisations’ exogenous operating environments. So how do organisations cope with these challenges? Organisational theorists have long been fascinated with this question. One stream of scholarship in organisational theory explores organisations’ adaptation to changing environments. Lewin, Weigelt, and Emery (2004) is recommended for an overview of this literature. Another stream of organisational theory literature focuses on organisations’ resistance to environmental change. Fleming and Spicer (2007), Jermier, Knights, and Nord (1994) and Piderit (2000) are valuable examples of this work. Higher education scholars have explored the issue of how universities cope with changing environments. Trow (1970) investigated how universities’ exogenous environments influenced their endogenous environments. More recently, higher education scholars have undertaken macro-level investigations of how universities have adapted to exogenous environmental pressures such as intensified levels of competition in global higher education markets (students, staff and research funding) and declining levels of public funding for universities (Amaral, Fulton, & Larsen, 2003; xxi

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Geiger, 2004; Harman, 2005; Jongbloed, Maassen, & Neave, 1999; Maassen & Gornitzka, 1999; Marginson & Considine, 2000; Musselin, 2007; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). A few higher education studies have investigated why and how universities resist environmental changes (Bridgman, 2007; Chandler, Barry, & Clark, 2002; Lane, 2007). Yet, by and large higher education literature has focused on the issue of how and why universities adapt to environmental challenges rather than the issue of how and why universities resist these changes. Much of this work has focused on the macro-level, taking the entire university as its unit of analysis. Whilst this macro-level work has significantly advanced our understanding of university/environment relations by definition it is generic, it does not drill down to the meso- and micro-level. It does not consider how and why particular academic units (faculties, schools and departments) adapt to or resist the environmental challenges they encounter. The term academic units is a generic phrase that encompasses organisational units of varying size, wealth and diverse functional specialisation (Bolton, 2000). Despite these variations between academic units, they share the characteristic of being the base, or micro-level academic organisational unit of most universities throughout the world. This situation is confusing because in some universities organisational structures that are typically found at the meso-level of universities such as faculties or schools can be base-level academic units in other universities. Clark coined the term ‘academic heartland’ to depict units’ vital functional role within universities (Clark, 1998a, p. 7). Academic units are key organisational units for universities because most academics undertake their teaching and research work from within the organisational and institutional structure of academic units1 creating knowledge through research and distributing knowledge through teaching. Academics’ labour within academic units generates significant proportions of the revenue earned by universities. It also plays a key role in establishing and maintaining a university’s academic capital2 its reputation and prestige within the broader community and amongst other scholars situated in different universities around the globe. In a cyclical fashion a university’s academic capital affects the university’s capacity to generate additional revenue, to attract future students, research funding and staff that generate more intellectual property, publications and other research outputs. As such an academic unit’s capacity to adapt to changes in its environment is crucial to the university’s survival. This is why much of the existing scholarship in higher education literature has focused on adaptation. However in my view it is equally important for us to explore resistance. Why do academic units exposed to similar types of exogenous environmental challenges respond to these pressures in different ways? Why do some adapt and others opt for resistance? Do units that opt for resistance have particular attributes such as patterns of power, authority and decision making, resource bases, or academics (faculty) of particular rank or tenure that make them more likely to resist pressures for change? Is resistance always problematic? Is it imperative for university executives or heads of academic units to implement strategic interventions to overcome academic units’ resistance to change? Or is units’ resistance just a stage on the pathway towards adaptation? These are some of the issues explored in this book.

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There is an inherent dilemma in writing a book like this and that is that there are two audiences for this text and they have divergent needs and interests. The first audience practitioners, heads of academic units and administration managers and academics, view the issue of how units’ respond to challenges emanating from their exogenous environments as a practical problem that needs an efficient and effective solution. So heads of academic units want a text with a practical focus; for them turbulent, erratic exogenous environments need to be stabilised, managed and controlled. They want to steer their units towards adaptation as quickly as possible. In contrast the book’s other key audience, higher education scholars, interpret the issue of academic units’ relationship to their exogenous environments as a conceptual puzzle that requires rigorous exploration, they want to drill down to uncover the layers and sub-strata of this conceptual problem. It is an ambitious project, yet I have attempted to seek the middle way, to write a book that serves the needs and interests of both audiences. So this work has two goals. First, it contributes to higher education scholarship. It offers some new conceptual insights about why academic units encountering similar exogenous environmental pressures respond in different ways: why some academic units adapt and others seek to resist these pressures. It also offers some conceptual insights about different modes and processes of adaptation and resistance used by academic units. Second, I hope this book assists practitioners: heads of academic units, administration managers and academics to take a step back from the day-to-day operational pressures units encounter and to think more strategically about their unit’s operating environment, to identify the unit’s inherent strengths, potential capacities and problems that units could face and then develop strategies and ideas to deal with these issues. The book presents case studies of academic units’ responses to environmental challenges and then analyses these case studies to provide conceptual insights about different modes and processes of adaptation. As these case studies unfold it becomes apparent that there is no template that academic units can employ to adapt to the environmental challenges that they encounter. Academic units and their environments are far too complex for that to work. Every academic unit has a unique history, a different relationship with the other units in its university and with the university’s executive managers and governance bodies, different strengths and weaknesses in its various markets and staff with different capacities and problems and different resource bases. Heads of academic units and their staff can evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches to adaptation presented here to determine whether particular approaches are appropriate for their units’ context, whether approaches can be modified to suit their units’ circumstances. Does the unit have the resources (fiscal and human capital) to adopt a particular approach? Does the unit need to attract and retain new staff with innovative and entrepreneurial skills in new research and teaching domains? Does the unit face constraints that render a particular approach to adaptation inappropriate, such as entrenched cultural resistance to risk or aggressive competitors in particular markets? The case studies demonstrate that originality and differentiation are keys to academic units’ adaptation. In the end, no book or management consultant (no matter how high their fee or how prestigious their qualifications) can provide academic

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units with a solution that will ensure that the unit successfully adapts to its environmental challenges, it is up to the people working within academic units to devise these solutions for themselves. Yet it is hoped that this book provokes some debate within academic units and that it encourages critical reflections and analysis about how and why units function as they do. I hope that this book helps academic units to break down some of the rigidities and barriers that have hindered units in the past and assists them to devise their own means of adapting to future challenges. While this book does not offer a normative template for academic units’ adaptation, Chapter 9 offers heads of academic units and their staff some recommendations on strategies and actions that units can adopt to enhance their adaptive and entrepreneurial capacities. I decided that the most feasible way of exploring academic units’ adaptation and resistance to environmental challenges would be to focus on academic units situated in a single national context. Whilst comparative work contrasting how and why academic units situated in different nations’ universities would yield rich data, analysing such comparative data would pose challenges of dealing with multiple layers of complexities, contrasting and considering systemic variations between higher education governance, policy, historical, political and socio-cultural factors within and between different nations universities and their academic units. In addition, a comparative project requires significant fiscal resources that were not available to me at the time the empirical work for this book was undertaken. The advantage of focusing on a single nation is that it offers an opportunity for deep analysis. I live in Australia, so I chose to use academic units in Australian public universities as the empirical site because this was the easiest and cheapest research site for me to access. Although the data presented here refers to this national context, the book investigates issues that are relevant to and useful for academic units and university executives in many nations. Including, why do academic units facing similar environmental pressures respond in different ways? Why do some units adapt and others resist? Do academic units comprised of particular academic disciplines adapt in similar or different ways? Do academic units display similar or different patterns of resistance to environmental change? Who determines whether academic units adapt to or resist environmental changes – institutional-level executives, governing bodies, academic unit heads, academics or administrative staff? The book has three parts. Part I comprises two chapters: Chapter 1 identifies key attributes of Australian academic units’ exogenous environments at the time the case studies were undertaken, 1999–2002; it argues that the defining characteristics of these environments was that they were dynamic, complex and uncertain. Some readers may be concerned that the empirical work reported here is dated and irrelevant. This view is incorrect. The key point of the book is that it investigates how academic units contend with complex, volatile exogenous environments; these defining attributes of academic units’ exogenous environments have not altered. If anything, the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 stands as testament that academic units’ exogenous environments are now even more volatile and challenging than they were when the case studies were undertaken. Chapter 2 outlines the research methods used to explore the research problem.

Introduction

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Part II consists of five chapters presenting empirical findings from case studies that investigated how and why 16 academic units in Australian public universities responded to changes in their exogenous environments. Chapter 3 introduces these findings explaining the conceptual framework employed to present these findings. Chapter 4 is about Defender academic units. Chapter 5 is about Prospector academic units, Chapter 6 is about Analyser academic units and Chapter 7 is on Reactor (resistant) academic units. Part III comprises three chapters: Chapter 8 presents conclusions. Chapter 9 discusses some conceptual and practical implications of these conclusions. Chapter 10 revisits Australian academic units’ exogenous environments at the time of writing, late 2009, this discussion illustrates that these units’ exogenous environments are still fundamentally dynamic, complex and uncertain. Chapter 10 also identifies some emerging environmental challenges for Australian academic units; these challenges could also affect other nations’ academic units.

Notes 1. Some academics undertake research in research centres that operate independently from academic units, some of these centres are temporary, funded only for designated projects; they are often interdisciplinary and include industrial partners, many work on applied rather than pure research often trying to develop patents, technologies or other research outputs that can be sold in commercial markets, Mode 2 style (Gibbons et al., 1994). 2. Here academic capital is used in a similar way to Bourdieu’s notion of social capital, not in the sense of Slaughter and Rhoades’ notion of academic capitalists who seek wealth and prestige from their research.

Part I

The Framework

Chapter 1

Complex, Turbulent Exogenous Environments

This chapter describes the nature of Australian academic units’ exogenous operating environments at the time the case studies were undertaken, 1999–2002. It argues that these units’ exogenous environments were characterised by dynamism and complexity. The case studies presented in Part II of the book illustrate how the complexity and turbulence of these environments posed significant challenges for Australian academic units. These academic units had to adjust to an uncertain resource base, increased competition from other Australian and overseas universities for students, staff and research funding. At the same time, academics (faculty) in these units had to teach significantly larger numbers of students from a more diverse range of backgrounds than they had ever previously taught. In addition Australian academic units had to attend to the needs and expectations of a disparate group of stakeholders. Five key trends within these exogenous environments can be identified: 1. Globalisation 2. Marketisation of higher education: Declining public funding and increasing operating costs, 3. Developments in information communication technologies, 4. Massification of student cohorts, 5. Increased accountability to stakeholders (governments, professional associations, employers and students). Each trend is defined followed by a brief discussion of why it was significant for Australian academic units. Some trends such as globalisation, marketisation of higher education and the massification of student cohorts are evident in other nations’ higher education systems and pose challenges for academic units in their universities. To enhance the clarity of this discussion each issue is treated separately. I do this with some hesitation; whilst this approach enhances the clarity of the discussion, it gives the impression that each of these trends occurred in isolation or in a given sequence. This is not the case. These trends are intertwined in a complex web and, as we shall see, aspects of these trends can contradict another trend, pushing and pulling academic units towards contrary actions. It is also important to state that these are by no means the only influences at play in the case study academic D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_1, 

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units’ exogenous environments, each of the case study units had additional factors specific to its operating domain and institutional context – these are identified and their significance discussed in each case study in Part II of the book.

Globalisation Defining globalisation is a difficult task; there are a plethora of definitions to choose from. Globalisation is sometimes confused with internationalisation, yet it is possible to distinguish between the two concepts. Globalisation refers to the interconnectedness, interdependency or integration of national systems, the ‘blurring of boundaries’ at a global level (Beerkens, 2003, p. 129, 141; Teichler, 2004, p. 8). Internationalisation refers to increasing trade or associations between nations (the basic unit, the nation state remains unchanged) (Beerkens, 2003, pp. 140–141; Teichler, 2004, p. 7). According to the historians Hirst and Thompson, (1999) globalisation is a myth because contemporary flows of trade, investment and labour are not unprecedented. Economists, political scientists, sociologists and cultural theorists debate which national systems are linked through globalisation: economic, political, socio-cultural, technical or educational. They also contest the effects of globalisation upon these systems. Some argue that systems simply become interconnected; others that they become interdependent, yet others assert that they become fully integrated. Various academic disciplines offer conceptualisations of globalisation that privilege core disciplinary concerns. Held and McGrew (2000), political scientists, offered a definition of globalisation that focused on power and social relations: . . .globalisation denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of interaction. It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human social organisation that links distant communities and expands the reach and power relations across the world’s major regions and continents (Held & McGrew, 2000, p. 4).

Other theorists integrate political and economic dimensions of globalisation. Ohame, an economist, argued that the key impact of globalisation is the creation of a new world order where the nation state no longer exists (Ohmae, 1995, pp. xiii–xiv, 2000). Wallerstein, a political economist also argued for a world economy, although he dates its origins to the 1640s. Wallerstein distinguished between powerful nation states at the core of world capitalism and weaker nation states on the periphery and semi-periphery (Wallerstein, 1984, p. 7, 2004, pp. 65–67). Others point to flows of trade, capital and rising wealth of multinational corporations as evidence that capitalist enterprises and nation states are exercising political hegemony over the governments, firms and workers of weaker nations (Klein, 2001, 2002; Sen, 2004). For cultural theorists and sociologists, the debate focuses on whether globalisation results in cultural homogenisation, heterogeneity, hybridisation or cosmopolitanism (see Appadurai, 1990, 2001; Pieterse, 1995; Robertson, 1992; Tomlinson,

Globalisation

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1999). Beck, a sociologist interpreted globalisation in a pessimistic light, he warned that global capitalism is spreading unfettered by world governance, creating a risk society where the long-term sustainability of people and the environment is threatened (Beck, 1994, pp. 36–37, 2000, pp. 98–101). Giddens also supported the risk society thesis. Yet for Giddens risk is an essential element of innovation and development (Anthony Giddens, 2000, pp. 36–37; Anthony Giddens & Hutton, 2001, pp. 4–5). Other theorists equate globalisation with Westernisation, or more particularly Americanisation, or ‘McDonaldisation’ (see Barber, 2004; Klein, 2001, 2002; Ritzer, 2000). Other sociologists have focused on the technological innovations associated with globalisation. For example, Castells argued that information technology and communication networks, especially the Internet and email act as the conduit facilitating global connectivity which is the backbone of the new economy (Castells, 2000, pp. 69–78). These debates over whether the economic, political, socio-cultural or technical dimensions of globalisation are the most significant cannot be resolved here. Nor can we determine the effects of globalisation – whether it involves capitalist enterprises or nation states deliberately exercising hegemony over other nation states. Nor can we articulate a view on whether globalisation results in social and cultural homogeneity, heterogeneity or hybridisation. Each issue is intriguing; yet attempting to resolve these debates would see us pursuing issues tangential to our main goals. Our main objective is to identify how globalisation has affected academic units in Australian public universities. Australian universities have always had international connections1 and have been influenced by academic trends in Britain and the United States of America (Marginson, 2002b, p. 412). The emergence of globalisation has extended the number, strength and significance of global connections for Australian universities and their academic units, they are developing a new cosmopolitan identity that takes them beyond traditional local, national and regional boundaries2 (Beerkens, 2003, pp. 144–145; Gibbons, 2002; Marginson, 2002a; Marginson & Rhoades, 2002a; van der Wende, 2003; Wagner, 2004). The significance of globalisation for Australian universities and their academic units is evident from the increasing numbers of overseas students studying in Australian universities, see Table 1.1, and the growth in revenue generated from tuition fees paid by overseas students, see Table 1.2. Another facet of globalisation that has been especially important for Australian universities and their academic units has been the extension of academic networks and improvements in communication between academic networks spread around

Table 1.1 Overseas students as a percentage of total number of students in Australian universities Year Percentage

1998 10.7

1999 12.02

2000 13.7

2001 15.5

2002 20.6

2003 22.6

2004 24.2

Source: DEST Selected Higher Education Statistics (Students) 1998–2004 (DEST, 2004).

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Table 1.2 Revenue generated from overseas students fees as a percentage of total operating revenue for Australian universities Year Percentage

1998 8.3

1999 9.1

2000 10.2

2001 11.4

2002 13.0

2003 14.4

2004 14.5

Source: DEST Selected Higher Education Statistics (Finance) 1998–2004 (DEST, 2004)

the globe (Castells, 2000, p. 164, 209; Steger, 2003). In the past Australia’s distance from Europe and the United States posed difficulties for Australian academics wishing to participate in international academic debates and undertake collaborative research projects. Reductions in the cost and time involved in travel from one continent to another have enabled more Australian academics to travel abroad. These exchanges aid the establishment and maintenance of academic networks and collaborative research partnerships, which enhance the academic capital of Australian universities (Altbach, 2004, p. 9). Globalisation has also enabled some Australian universities to participate in trans-national teaching partnerships, such as Universitas 213 (Beerkens, 2004; McBurnie & Ziguras, 2001). Some Australian universities have offshore campuses. Others have twinning (franchise) arrangements with offshore providers to teach their curriculum, or where students undertake part of their degree offshore and complete their studies in Australia. The impacts of globalisation for Australian universities and their academic units are continuously evolving and emerging. There is some debate over whether trade liberalisation policies of the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services signed by members of the World Trade Organisation) will lead to an ‘opening up’ of national higher education markets, intensifying competition between universities for students and staff (Deem, 2001; Knight, 2002). The extension of Australian academic units’ boundaries through the emergence of globalisation is a double-edged sword. It simultaneously creates opportunities for academics to forge new academic networks, enhancing the calibre of their scholarship. It also provides students with richer cultural exposure and generates revenue for academic units. Yet it also exposes academic units to potential new risks. For example, when academic units become heavily reliant on revenue generated from teaching international students, student enrolments can fluctuate because of extraneous factors beyond the control of Australian academic units such as downturns in global financial markets, natural disasters such as epidemics and man-made problems such as acts of terrorism or perceptions of increased levels of racism.

Marketisation of Higher Education: Declining Public Funding and Increasing Operating Costs From the early 1970s until the late 1980s Australian universities received almost 90% of their total operating revenue from the state (Marginson, Considine, Sheehan, & Kumnick, 2001). Australian universities and their academic units were operating

Marketisation of Higher Education

7

in a stable financial environment. They could focus on their teaching, research and community work confident in the knowledge that they would have adequate funding to continue this work. Gradually this situation changed. The public funding of Australian universities and hence of their academic units was reduced. In 1989, the federal government shifted a proportion of the costs of higher education from the state to students. Known as the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), domestic students were charged a tuition fee. HECS4 was an income-contingent loan. Students could opt to pay their HECS fee at enrolment and receive a discount, or repay their HECS debt through the taxation system once their income reached the threshold for repayment. In 2002 Australian public universities received 16% less public funding from the federal government than they had received in 1995, whilst funding from State governments was 8% less (see Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Figure 1.1 shows that in 1995 revenue from independent (non-government) sources comprised 25% of the total revenue of Australian universities5 (DETYA, 1995a). Figure 1.2 shows that by 2002 revenue from independent sources comprised 55% of the total revenue of Australian universities (DEST, 2002b). Not only did Australian universities generate more independent revenue in 2002 than they did in 1995, but they diversified their independent revenue streams across a broader range of sources of independent revenue. Comparing Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 demonstrates the movement from public funding of Australian universities to independent funding. In 2002, despite Australian universities’ attempts to diversify independent revenue streams, one source was clearly more important than others – fees and charges at 21% of total revenue (DEST, 2002b). Within the category of fees and charges revenue, one component was particularly significant, fee-paying overseas students contributed 59% of the total amount of independent revenue earned by Australian

Commonwealth Government Grants 1% 1%

HECS 13%

Fees and Charges

4% Investment Income 12%

57% 12%

State Government Donations and Bequests Other Sources

Fig. 1.1 Funding of Australian public universities 1995 Source: DETYA Finance Statistics (1995a)

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Commonwealth Government Grants State Government 4%

11%

HECS

1%

2%

41%

Fees and Charges Investment Income

21% 16%

4%

Consultancy and Contract Research Other Income PELS

Fig. 1.2 Funding of Australian public universities 2002 Source: DEST Selected Higher Education Statistics (Finance) (2002b)

universities (DEST, 2002b). Academic units play key roles in recruiting, selecting, supporting and teaching many of these overseas students.6 Another important source of independent revenue for Australian universities in 2002 was income from research and consultancy work7 (DEST, 2002b). Much of this commercial research work was conducted by academics within academic units, although research centres and ‘spin-off’ companies situated outside academic units, yet affiliated with the university also conducted commercial research work. These shifts in Australian higher education policy comprised part of a broader global trend, the marketisation of higher education; this is the process of moving from a state-steered system to a hybrid market-oriented and state-oriented system (Dill, 2003; Jongbloed, 2003; Teixeira, Jongbloed, Dill, & Amaral, 2004). As Dill stated marketisation is the ‘increasing influence of market competition on academic life’ (Dill, 2003, p. 136). The key outcome of the marketisation of higher education was the development of global student, staff and research funding markets where universities compete against each other for market share and income. However, the Australian federal governments and state governments still steer Australian public universities. They provide a significant proportion of their funding, regulate key aspects of their operations such as entry and exit into the market (accrediting providers) and negotiate with universities over which courses individual universities will deliver; there are also state-mandated provisions for capital asset management, the state also determines numbers of Commonwealth government-supported student places and quality assurance measures (Jongbloed, 2004, pp. 292–294; Marginson, 2004, pp. 218–221). Therefore the Australian higher education sector is more accurately depicted as a quasi-market or a hybrid market – a mixture of a market-oriented and state-oriented systems (Liefner, 2003, p. 470; Marginson, 2004, pp. 218–221). It is also important to recognise that Australian universities and their academic units

Developments in Information Communication Technologies

9

are involved in multiple interrelated markets (students: undergraduate, postgraduate, domestic, international); labour markets for academics and administrators, research funding markets, markets for donations and other forms of independent revenue (Dill, 1997, p. 168; Jongbloed, 2003, p. 111). The decline in public funding of Australian universities and consequently of their academic units was a significant factor contributing to the increasing complexity and turbulence of the exogenous environment of academic units. Academic units could no longer focus only on their teaching, research and community work. They now had to devote considerable time, energy and resources to generating revenue to replace revenue they were no longer receiving from public funding. This was a pressing need. Without adequate funding the continued operation of teaching, research and community work of many academic units was jeopardised. They needed a solution, and they needed it quickly. Many academic units found this solution in turning towards marketisation, using entrepreneurial initiatives as a means of generating additional independent revenue. Entrepreneurialism refers to taking risks on new ventures in a business enterprise in an attempt to make a profit (Schumpeter, 1934, p. 132). Entrepreneurialism requires cultural attributes such as flexibility, innovativeness, a capacity for risk taking, willingness to change, overcoming inertia and path-dependency (Bhide, 1999, 2000; Bygrave & Hoffer, 1991; van der Veen & Wakkee, 2004). Details of academic units’ approaches to entrepreneurialism are provided in the case studies. In addition to declining public funding, academic units also faced increasing operating costs. A significant factor contributing to rising operating costs for academic units was unfunded salary costs. Conventionally Commonwealth government operating grants provided to universities included funding for increases in staff and salary costs. After 1996, academic units had to fund pay increases awarded to staff as a consequence of new enterprise bargaining agreements (AVCC, 2002). A common strategy used by academic units to reduce expenditure was hiring ‘cheaper academic staff’ – reducing the number of full-time tenured senior academics and replacing them with part-time, contract, casual and more junior academic staff. Evidence of the casualisation of academic staff to reduce operating costs is found by contrasting employment data. In 1995, 20% of academics were part-time or casual. By 2002, 26% of academics were employed on part-time or casual contracts (DEST, 2002c).

Developments in Information Communication Technologies From the 1990s onwards there have been significant developments in the speed and capacity of information communication technology (ICT), in computer hardware, networks and software (Bell, 1999, pp. 188–189; Castells, 2000). These advances in ICT have had a profound effect on contemporary patterns of work and leisure. E-business has transformed the operations of financial markets enabling trading in capital and equities across the globe at unprecedented speeds.

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Innovations in ICT have transformed teaching, research and administration work conducted within academic units in Australian universities (Castells, 2000, pp. 1–4). The Internet, search engines, web applications for course management (Blackboard) and email are extremely important for academics and students in academic units8 (Dutton & Loader, 2002, pp. 1–11); (Laurillard, 2002, pp. 13–18). Software applications such as SAP (financial management) and Callista (student administration) have the potential to improve the efficiency of human resource, facilities and student administration functions in universities. Software applications such as PowerPoint, video conferencing and multimedia can enhance teaching. The significance of advances in ICT for teaching is evident from a survey that indicated 23 Australian universities offer courses ‘fully online’ and 54% of university subjects now contain an online component (Bates, 2000). Using ICT for teaching has extended the student markets of many academic units in Australian universities. This has occurred because asynchronous online learning offers greater flexibility and ease of access and this attracts students from broad demographic cohorts (mature-age ‘earnerlearners’, off-campus, international) (Bates, 2000, p. 515; DEST, 2002d, pp. 14–15). However, academic units in Australian universities offering online courses are competing in heavily contested ‘borderless education’ markets where there are a number of established successful providers offering courses9 (HEFC, 2000; O’Donoghue, Singh, & Dorward, 2001; Ryan & Stedman, 2001). Initially it was envisaged that online learning would be lucrative for universities; however some Australian academic units have found that it is quite expensive and time-consuming to create high quality web-based learning materials (Cunningham, et al., 2000, p. 209). Some academics are concerned that activities such as responding to student emails, designing Power Point slides, uploading lectures onto online learning systems and entering student results in databases actually increases their workload (Bates, 2000, p. 35). Other academics are sceptical about the quality of online learning (Collis & van der Wende, 2002, p. 209). As a result of these concerns about using ICT for teaching some academic units in Australian universities have opted to blend online learning with traditional forms of teaching (lectures, tutorials and seminars) (Brabazon, 2002, p. 62). Developments in ICT have also brought about significant changes in the way that research is conducted by academics in academic units (Collis & van der Wende, 2002, p. 25). Online databases, libraries, journals, web pages and powerful search engines enable researchers to access vast quantities of information comparatively cheaply and quickly (Castells, 2000, p. 23; de Boer, et al., 2002, p. 76). These developments in ICT and the enhanced capacities of networks have enabled Australian academics to work in collaboration and competition with colleagues situated around the globe (Castells, 2001; Gibbons, et al., 1994; Ryan & Stedman, 2001, pp. 116–133). Advances in ICT have provided greater flexibility for academics whose research is not laboratory-based – they no longer need to attend campus to conduct research; they can work anywhere that a laptop, iPhone or Blackberry can access the Internet. The consequences of the developments in ICT for academic units, and how knowledge is produced within universities are contested. According to Trow,

Massification of Student Cohorts

11

developments in ICT are blurring disciplinary boundaries, leading to more interdisciplinary work (Gibbons, Scott, & Nowotny, 2001, p. 3). Trow asserted that academic departments are increasingly irrelevant, that their only function is administrative and that they are a hindrance to the creation of new knowledge (Trow, 2000, p. 4). In a similar vein, Gibbons asserted that universities and their elite disciplinebased departments that previously dominated knowledge production (Mode 1 knowledge) are being challenged by new distributed knowledge networks comprised of interdisciplinary university researchers and researchers situated in industry producing new applied problem-solving research (Mode 2 knowledge) (Gibbons, et al., 2001). The ‘unbundling thesis’ suggest that it is too costly for universities to ‘virtualise’ both research and teaching, so they are forced to re-configure the roles of academic departments and academic staff, electing to employ ICT resources in either research or teaching (de Boer, et al., 2002). Developments in ICT have contributed to the complexity of the operating environments of academic units. This has occurred because the developments in ICT can be beneficial for academic units, yet there are also significant costs attached to implementing, maintaining and upgrading sophisticated ICT infrastructure. Australian universities and their academic units now need to make decisions about the extent to which they will utilise ICT. These decisions involve risk assessments of the potential advantages and disadvantages of opting for particular ICT projects.

Massification of Student Cohorts Massification refers to the increasing size and diversity of student cohorts (de Boer, et al., 2002, p. 19; Teichler, 1998; Trow, 1999, p. 415 ). Analysts classify a higher education system as a mass system when the proportion of students gaining access to a university course is greater than 15% of the age cohort (Alexander, 2000, p. 20; Teichler, 1998, p. 315). From the late 1980s10 to the present day, Australian universities and their academic units have experienced massification of student cohorts (Marginson, 1997; Trow, 1999, pp. 186–194). In 1995 there were 604,176 students in Australian universities; by 2002 there were 896,621 students (DEST, 2002a; DETYA, 1995b). This growth in student numbers was due to the implementation of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in 1989; former colleges of advanced education being included in the university systems and increases in the number of student places funded by the Commonwealth government (DEST, 2003, p. 163). In addition, there was a significant increase in numbers of overseas students undertaking courses in Australian universities (DEST, 2002a). The massification of student cohorts for Australian universities and their academic units also involved an increasing diversity amongst students (DEST, 2002a, p. 315). Students were drawn from broader demographic groups including older part-time students, people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, more women, overseas students with English

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as a second language, the disabled and students from rural and isolated areas (Trow, 1999, p. 163). The World Bank observed that massification of student cohorts ‘ . . . has forced many public systems (higher education) to operate with overcrowded and deteriorating physical facilities, inadequate staffing, poor library resources and insufficient scientific equipment and instructional materials’ (World Bank, 1996, p. 2). Massification, combined with declining public funding and increasing operating costs (academic labour and infrastructure such as information communication technology), created additional pressures for many academics and administrators in academic units in Australian universities (World Bank, 1996, pp. 74, 106–108). Staff in academic units now had to teach more students, with decreased resources. However, it was not just the increasing numbers of students that caused difficulty. Under massifiaction policies many of the students now embarking upon university courses required additional support and time from academics because of a lack of proficiency in English, weaker academic foundations or because of cultural reasons such as a lack of experience with self-directed learning (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997, p. 22). The consequences of massification of student cohorts – increasing numbers of students of greater heterogeneity and reduced learning capacity contributed to the complexity and difficulty of academic units’ operating environments. They were now in a situation where they had to cope with the consequences of massification of student cohorts whilst also contending with increasing operating costs, and declining public funding. Not surprisingly, this made governments and other stakeholders (such as employer groups and professional associations) concerned about the quality of teaching (Teichler, 1998, p. 417). Concerns about quality assurance were accompanied by concerns about fiscal management and governance that resulted in the implementation of increased accountability to stakeholders, especially governments.

Increased Accountability to Stakeholders (Governments, Professional Associations, Employers and Students) The term ‘stakeholder’ comes from business and management literature.11 It was introduced to indicate that firms are accountable to a broader constituency than their shareholders, that others have a stake in the firm’s performance. Alexander (2000) writing about firms’ stakeholders distinguished between claimant stakeholders who have a legal or moral stake in a firm and influencer stakeholders whose power enables them to influence how a firm operates. Australian universities were always accountable to stakeholders. The federal government has traditionally sought to steer how universities operate. This goal has been accomplished by imposing a range of regulations on graduate outputs by fields of study, research management, financial management and the governance of Australian universities (Mitchell, Agle, & Woodward, 1997, p. 9). Professional associations for medicine, law and engineering have traditionally vetted the curriculum taught in university courses required

Increased Accountability to Stakeholders

13

for admission to practice in these fields to ensure that graduates satisfy professional accreditation standards (Gallagher, 2000, p. 4, 173). Yet, it is only relatively recently that the concept of stakeholders has emerged in higher education discourse (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Changes in federal government higher education policy made academic units even more accountable to stakeholders. The Dawkins reforms of 1987–1990 re-configured the governance and management of the Australian higher education system by abolishing the binary division between universities and colleges of advanced education, merging institutions, introducing new forms of resource allocation, reintroducing student tuition fees, instigating substantial changes to university governance and management and placing greater emphasis upon research (Neave, 2001, p. 169). These new public management changes (some refer to them as managerialist) corporatised university governance and management, and there was a shift in power and authority from academics to university executives (Councils, vice-chancellors and their deputies) (DEST, 2001, pp. 8–10; Harman, 2005, pp. 325–332; Meek, 2003, pp. 189–190). Key aspects of the corporate management rubric adopted by Australian universities included strategic planning, resource-based decision making and performance management for academic staff. At this time the federal government imposed three main accountability measures on Australian universities: institutional profiles, key performance indicators and quality assurance (Meek, 2003, pp. 7–10). Institutional profiles12 were agreements between Australian universities and the federal government, which reported a university’s performance in key areas and determined its level of public funding. The composition of institutional profiles varied from year to year. Institutional profiles have included a student load statement (number of students taught in various disciplines), budget statements, strategic plans, capital asset management plans, research management plans, equity plans, indigenous education plans and quality assurance measures. The federal government also asked Australian universities to provide data on a number of key performance indicators. These included the number of school leavers that selected the university as their first preference for study, attrition rates, graduate attributes, higher degree by research completions, academic staff with PhDs, numbers of publications and grants (DETYA, 2000a, p. 27; Vidovich & Slee, 2000). In 1993 and 1995 quality reviews of the performance of Australian universities were conducted (Gallagher, 2000, p. 7). These reviews created league tables that ranked Australian universities according to their performance on a number of indicators for teaching and research (Vidovich & Slee, 2000, p. 570). In 2001 the Australian Universities Quality Agency was formed with the objective of making Australian universities more accountable to stakeholders by improving their performance through quality audits (Vidovich & Porter, 1999, p. 138). In addition to these accountability measures requested by the federal government, Australian universities were also required to submit detailed Annual Reports to their relevant state governments; Australian universities and their academic units are always alert to the fact that their performance is also monitored by

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external agents in the media and from analysts producing comparative rankings of university performance (Williams & Van Dyke, 2004; Woodhouse, 2003). Some higher education scholars contend that these governance and management reforms have turned Australian universities into neo-fordist workplaces where academics become managed professionals and there are low levels of trust between academics and managers (Meek, 2003, p. 188; The Times Higher Education Supplement, 2004, p. 352). Some view these changes as evidence of a neo-liberal agenda that undermines the traditional core values of the university, research, scholarship and teaching (Meek, 2003; Zipin & Brennan, 2003, p. 103). These critics contend that the idea of ‘the university’ is being debased whilst the university is being re-engineered as a profit-making firm (Bourdieu, 1989, 1998). It remains open to debate whether these critics have overstated the impact of these governance and management reforms. However, it is evident that these accountability measures and reporting requirements increased the administrative workload for Australian universities and their academic units. Many Australian universities have created specialist planning and quality audits situated at the institutional level of the university to collect, analyse and report on data and to conduct quality assurance audits. These units often make multiple requests to academic units for data and information to comply with accountability measures mandated by the state. These requests sometimes annoy staff in academic units who view them as ‘onerous to already over-loaded staff’ (Cooper, Hinkson, & Sharp, 2002, p. 137). Others in academic units resent the fact that resources are allocated to these administrative units for planning and quality whilst they are trying to teach and conduct research with diminished funding. Some academics are sceptical about the validity and usefulness of accountability measures such as key performance indictors (Coady, 2000, p. 43; Woodhouse, 2003, p. 9). The net result of academic units having increased accountability to stakeholders is that they were under more pressure. Academic units were now operating in an environment that was more complex and difficult to negotiate. Like a juggler trying to keep several balls in the air, academic units need to meet the requirements of claimant stakeholders such as governments, whilst satisfying the often-competing desires of influencer stakeholders such as students and academics. These five trends: globalisation, marketisation of higher education, developments in information communication technology, the massification of student cohorts and increased accountability to stakeholders combine and interact creating an external operating environment for academic units in Australian universities which is complex and turbulent. An environment which is ‘far-from-equilibrium’, far from academic units’ normal mode of operating (Meek, 2001, pp. 32–35; Taylor, 2001, p. 123). This book explores why and how academic units in Australian universities responded to this situation. Did they adapt to it, if so, how? Or, did they ignore and resist these changes and pressures in their exogenous environment? Or, did they try to alter their exogenous environment? The following chapters explore these questions; the next chapter outlines the research methods used in an empirical study that investigated these research questions. The final chapter of the book, Chapter 10, re-examines Australian academic units’ exogenous environments at the time of

Notes

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writing (late, 2009) to investigate whether the five key trends discussed here still affect Australian academic units; it also discusses a new trend that has emerged, a growing concern with university’s performance on international ranking scales.

Notes 1. Australian universities participated in the Colombo Plan where students from Southeast Asian countries studied in Australian universities as part of humanitarian agreements between these countries (Marginson, 2000), pp. 135–136. 2. Others contest this position (see Jan Currie & Newson, 1998, pp. 4–5; Jan Currie, 2004 p. 44; Simon Marginson, 2002b; Marginson & Rhoades, 2002a). They argue that globalisation is part of a neo-liberal project whereby the state pushes universities towards marketisation failing to acknowledge the nation-building capacity of universities. Beerkens (2003) argues that Currie and Marginson’s thesis conflates the meaning of globalisation with its (potential) effects. 3. Universitas 21 is a network of 21 member universities: Auckland, Birmingham, British Colombia, Delhi, Edinburgh, Fudan, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Korea, Lund, McGill, Melbourne, New South Wales, Nottingham, Peking, Queensland, National University of Singapore, Shanghai JiaoTong, Tecnologico de Moneterrey, University College, Dublin, Virginia, Waseda. Universitas 21 Global is a company formed with Thomson Learning initially to deliver online programmes; however it is now also offers exchange and dual-badged programmes at partner universities such as its Global Issues Progam, http://www.universitas21.com/globalissues.html. In December 2009, the University of Melbourne announced that it would relinquish its controlling interest in the Universitas 21 project because the project has only enrolled 5000 students yielding lower than anticipated revenue. The Manipal Group, an Indian firm with interests in the health care, manufacturing and financial services industries will take control of Universtas 21 and it will change its focus from master’s degrees to short, non-award courses/corporate training http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/u21. 4. HECS is now known as the CSP (Commonwealth Supported Place) scheme. 5. By 2002 Australian universities had six sources of independent revenue (HECS, Fees and Charges, Investments, Consultancy and Contract Research, Other Income and PELS) (DEST, 2002b). 6. In some Australian universities other organisational units such as International Student Units, Student Administration, Student Services, Marketing and Language Support Units can be involved in particular aspects of the education of international students – yet conventionally most of this work is conducted by academics in academic units. 7. It is difficult to calculate how much revenue Australian universities earned from consultancy and contract research in 2002 because some income from commercial research firms owned by universities is included in ‘other income category’ and disaggregated data on the ‘other income category’ is not available (DEST, 2002b) 8. It is estimated that there are 550 billion documents on the web (95% of which are publicly accessible) and the world’s annual production of information amounts to 1.5 billion gigabytes (Lyman & Varian, 2000) in (Castells, 2001, p. 90). 9. The University of Phoenix, De Vry, Keller Graduate School of Management are offshore providers that deliver online courses to Australian students. Other offshore online providers include the publishers, Pearson and Thomson, information technology firms, CISCO and Microsoft as well as the global consortium of universities, Universitas 21 (HEFC, 2000). 10. Before the 1980s Australian universities were relatively elite institutions. Most students commencing undergraduate courses were school leavers who had achieved high marks in their final secondary school exams. These students were a relatively homogenous group, young

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1 Complex, Turbulent Exogenous Environments

predominately middle class with English as a first language (DEST, 2001, pp. 161–162; S. W. Marginson, 1997, p. 29). 11. See Freeman (1984) for a history of the concept of stakeholders. Theories on the nature of interactions between firms and stakeholders. See Clarkson (1995), Donaldson and Preston (1995), Ogden and Watson (2003), and Rowley (1997) for an analysis of the interactions between firms and stakeholders. 12. Institutional profiles are currently known as the Institutional Assessment Framework.

Chapter 2

Research Design and Methods

Clark issued a warning to sociologists of higher education to be mindful not to damage the integrity of the emerging discipline by allowing case studies of higher education organisations to ‘shade off into journalistic vignettes’ (Clark, 1973, p. 7). Essentially Clark was advising higher education scholars to abide by the founding principles of qualitative research methods when undertaking case studies; to employ rigorous data analysis informed by and situated within theoretical debates drawn from a range of salient disciplines. Clark’s later work employing case studies to present empirical findings stands as an exemplar of such rigorous qualitative research methods (Clark, 1998a, 2003, 2004a). Heeding Clark’s warning and emulating the qualitative research methods of his later work I framed the research design and methods for this work. This chapter tells the story of this process. Chapter 1 outlined the research problem that prompted the study; this chapter builds on this work by explaining how I conducted the empirical study and why I chose these research methods.

Research Questions The overarching research question investigated in this book is how do academic units in Australian public universities relate to complex, turbulent exogenous environments and why do they relate to these environments in these particular ways? In addressing this main research question a number of subset research questions are also explored: Why do Australian academic units facing similar sets of environmental pressures relate to their environments in different ways? Why do some units adapt to these pressures and other units resist them? What modes and processes of adaptation and resistance do units use? Do units that pursue particular modes of adaptation or resistance have particular attributes? How do units make decisions about whether they adapt to exogenous environmental pressures? Who is responsible for making these decisions?

D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_2, 

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Key Concepts This work employs Cameron’s definition of adaptation because it provides a comprehensive view of the concept. It depicts adaptation as a continuously evolving process rather than a static event and acknowledges that particular organisations may employ different modes or strategies for adaptation; some are reactive, others proactive: “Organizational adaptation” refers to modifications and alterations in the organization or its components in order to adjust to changes in the external environment. Its purpose is to restore equilibrium to an imbalanced condition. Adaptation generally refers to a process, not an event, whereby changes are instituted in organizations. Adaptation does not necessarily imply reactivity on the part of organizations (i.e. adaptation is not just waiting for the environment to change and reacting to it) because proactive or anticipatory adaptation is possible as well. But the emphasis is on responding to some discontinuity or lack of fit that arises between the organization and its environment (Cameron, 1984, p. 123).

This work uses Agocs’ definition of resistance because it provides a multidimensional view of the concept that acknowledges that resistance can have multiple causes and be manifest in a variety of ways: Organisational resistance to change can take the form of denial for the need for change, attacks on the credibility of the change message, attacks on the messengers and their credibility. Refusal to accept responsibility for dealing with the change issue. Refusal to implement change that has been agreed to. Repression: actions to dismantle change that has been initiated (Agocs, 1997, p. 920).

This work also draws on Agocs and Pfeffer’s work on the institutionalisation of resistance within organisations (Pfeffer, 1981): Institutionalized resistance may be directed toward undermining the content of a change proposal or initiative, or toward the silencing, marginalizing or sanctioning of its advocates. Hence institutionalized resistance entails a cycle of processes and behaviours that operate and have impacts at two levels: the level of organizational structure and processes, and the level of individual behaviour and experience. At both levels the dynamic is political, in that the exercise of power and control are central, and ethical, in the sense that fundamental values and principals are at stake in the struggle over change (Agocs, 1997, p. 920).

Part II of the book provides a detailed discussion of why particular case study academic units chose to adapt to changes in their environments and other units tried to resist these changes. Part II of the book also provides a comprehensive analysis of how case study academic units adapted to changes in their environments or resisted these changes, the different modes (strategies) and processes (actions) for adaptation and resistance adopted by units and why units chose particular modes and processes of adaptation and resistance.

Research Design and Methods The first task in designing the study was to choose its epistemological paradigm. This decision was important because it effected subsequent decisions about the study’s research methods. There are many epistemological paradigms that I could

Research Design and Methods

19

have employed in this study including objectivism, positivism, post-positivism, constructionism and subjectivism1 (Corbetta, 2003, pp. 13–22; Crotty, 1998, pp. 5–9). A constructionist epistemological paradigm assumes that there is no objective truth and meaning, that meaning is socially constructed, varying according to endogenous factors such as an individual’s class, gender or race (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Crotty, 1998). In my view the post-positivist contention that there is an observable reality, and that there are relevant theories and concepts to interpret this reality is more credible than the constructivist paradigm (Corbetta, 2003, p. 20; Patton, 2002, pp. 92–93). Whilst I acknowledge that the aforementioned endogenous social characteristics influence how an individual interprets particular events, I do not accept the view that there is no such thing as an observable reality. A further reason why a post-positivist paradigm appealed to me is because it focuses on discovering the dialectic processes involved in analysing and interpreting empirical phenomena (Fischer, 1998, pp. 133–137). Fischer states that researchers operationalise the post-positivist paradigm by establishing the interconnections amongst empirical data, the normative assumptions and interpretative judgements involved in the data collection process and by discussing why particular theories are selected to interpret empirical findings and arrive at conclusions (Fischer, 1998, pp. 136–137). This integrative, iterative approach is especially appropriate given the complexity of the study’s research problem. I operationalised a post-positivist research approach by employing an inductive research method; I undertook an empirical study and then interpreted what these findings meant through various theoretical perspectives. I chose not to adopt a deductive research approach selecting particular theories of organisational adaptation to environmental changes, developing hypotheses and then testing these hypotheses in various empirical settings because this approach would have restricted the study’s findings to confirming or disproving a limited set of hypotheses. In contrast the inductive research method used in this study enabled new theoretical insights to emerge by analysing findings from particular empirical sites. This approach enhances the validity of the theories that emerge from this study because they are based on the analysis of what was actually occurring in several academic units. However any theories that emerge from this study are of a preliminary nature; in order to enhance their validity they would need to be tested in a broader range of empirical contexts. The next decision that I made was how to conduct the empirical study. What research methods should I adopt – qualitative, quantitative or mixed mode? I chose a qualitative approach because I considered that it was the most suitable approach given the complex nature of the research problem (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 51). The research problem is complex because there are many factors that have the potential to influence how case study academic units choose to respond to environmental changes. These factors include characteristics of an academic unit’s internal environment such as its academic discipline, demographic characteristics of its staff such as age, gender, seniority, the particular culture, history, resources and management and decision-making style of the unit. In addition it is possible that other factors such as the relative power and status of the unit within the university and the nature of the relationship with the university’s executive managers and the type of

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university that the unit is situated in could potentially affect how units respond to external pressures. Further, it is also possible that an academic unit’s market position and its reputation within its academic discipline and amongst the broader community could potentially affect how and why units respond to their environments. Given these multiple layers of complexity and the potential for interactions between these factors I decided that a qualitative research approach would yield a richer and deeper understanding of research problem than a quantitative approach would (Smith, 1998, p. 349; Yates, 2004, pp. 139–140). The next decision that I made was choosing the type of qualitative data and data collection technique. I decided that case studies were the most suitable method of data collection for this study because they convey information about the depth, inter-relationships and interactions between multiple factors (Flyvbjerg, 2004; Merriam, 1998, p. 19; Stake, 2000; Yin, 2003, p. 13).

Selection of the Case Studies This was a self-funded research project that meant that the number of units in the sample, numbers of academic disciplines and numbers of types of universities were all restricted. Yet my goal in selecting the sample case study academic units was to try and make the sample as heterogeneous as possible. This study comprised 16 case studies of academic units. There were four aspects to the diversity of the sample. First, to investigate whether units from different academic disciplines responded to their environments in different ways; the sample comprised academic units representing different academic disciplines. The selection of academic units for the case studies was informed by Becher’s typology of academic disciplines (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 36). Becher’s typology categorises academic disciplines according to the nature of the knowledge and the methods they use to acquire knowledge. Becher identified four disciplinary groupings: Hard/pure sciences, concerned with universals, is value free, results in discovery and explanation. Soft/pure humanities and social sciences, concerned with particulars, is value laden and results in interpretations. Hard/applied technologies, purposive and pragmatic, results in products and techniques and applied/social sciences, functional, enhances professional practice (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 36). I selected academic units from four disciplines situated in four Australian universities for case studies: law, civil engineering, business systems/information technology and biology. Law represented the applied social sciences; civil engineering represented a traditional ‘hard applied’ subject; business systems/information technology a hybrid social science/technology discipline; and biology a hard pure discipline. The academic units in this sample offered undergraduate and postgraduate courses and had academics conducting research across a broad gamut of subfields. The biology units included subfields in biotechnology, zoology, botany, microbiology, genetics and marine sciences. The law units had subfields in tax, commercial, human rights, constitutional, environmental, family, property and

Selection of the Case Studies

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intellectual property law. The civil engineering units taught courses and had academics conducting research in structures, transport, water and geo-mechanics. The business systems/information technology units covered the subfields of enterprise management systems, computing, architecture and design, robotics, software engineering, systems analysis and e-commerce. When a university did not have an academic unit from the precise academic discipline chosen, then the academic unit that comprised the most closely related academic discipline was selected as the case study. The second point of diversity within the sample was the type of university. I wanted to investigate whether academic units situated in different types of Australian public universities experienced the changes in external environments discussed in Chapter 1 in different ways, or to different degrees. I also wanted to explore whether the type of university that an academic unit is situated in influenced why and how it responded to changes in its external environment. Marginson’s typology of Australian universities2 was used to select the universities where the case studies of academic units would be conducted. Marginson’s typology identifies five types of Australian public universities (Marginson & Considine, 2000, pp. 189–202): 1. Sandstones • • • • • •

the oldest universities in each state, with superior economic resources, capacity to attract leading academics, strong networks with alumni, professions, international scholars, strong discipline-based academic cultures and do not need to be entrepreneurial

2. Redbricks • second university in capital city,3 • less traditionally academic than sandstones and • more corporate and modernised than sandstones 3. Gumtrees • • • • • •

founded between the late 1960s and 1975 modern and nationalistic, reflected in their native tree plantings, interdisciplinary, democratic governance and informal management style, weaker links to alumni and professions and school leavers’ second, third or fourth choice

4. Unitechs • formed from institutes of technology, • weaker discipline-based cultures than in pre-1986 universities, • strong graduate professional cultures,

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• • • • •

teach occupational skills, strong links to industry, move quickly into new markets, innovative curriculum – new media, communications, creative industries, committed to mass access for students regardless of age or background and corporate, market-oriented culture,

5. New universities • • • •

developed from merger of expansion of Colleges of Advanced Education post-1986 establishment, a heterogeneous sub-sector that may eventually fragment and some are regional, rural universities with branch campuses in metropolitan cities

I decided to conduct case studies of academic units situated in four types of Australian public universities: redbrick, unitech, gumtree and sandstone. I did not include academic units from the ‘new university’ category because of the inherent heterogeneity of this group (Marginson & Considine, 2000, p. 201). To protect the anonymity of the individuals who participated in this study I have decided not to disclose the names of the universities where the case studies were undertaken, or to provide descriptions of the universities that would reveal their identity. Instead the Sandstone University is referred to as University D, the Redbrick University is referred to as University A, the Gumtree University as University C, and the Unitech as University B. The selection of nomenclature A, B, C and D does not imply any reference to the reputation, quality or fiscal resources of the university. The third point of diversity in the selection of the sample was geographic. The four universities from which the case studies were drawn are situated in four Australian states. I did this because I wanted to investigate whether academic units situated in universities in different Australian states were affected by the five external environmental changes identified in Chapter 1 to the same extent and in the same way. I also wanted to explore whether regional variations in student, staff and research funding markets affected how or why academic units responded to changes in the exogenous environments such as reduced levels of public funding and expansion of student cohorts. The fourth point of diversity in the selection of the sample was that I chose a diverse group of people to be interviewed for each case study. I would more likely attain an accurate understanding of what was happening in the academic unit, whether it was experiencing particular exogenous pressures, how and why it was responding to these pressures if I interviewed a diverse range of staff as contrasted with selecting a homogenous group of staff. I used staff profiles and biographies published on academic units’ websites to select who would be interviewed for each case study. I chose academic and administrative staff with different levels of seniority, males and females, people from different races and ages. I also tried to include a mixture of academics; some were research only academics, others were academics focused on teaching and were not actively engaged in research. However in some academic units the sample of interviewees was not as diverse as I wanted. At each of

Data Collection

23

the law faculties in this study permission to interview staff from the unit was granted by the dean on condition that he selected those who were interviewed. And in the civil engineering and information technology units it was not possible to obtain a sample that represented both genders in equal numbers, as women are underrepresented in these disciplines in Australian universities. Similarly the sample of administrative staff across all academic units in this study did not include an equal number of men and women because there are a much smaller number of men who are administrative staff in Australian academic units than women.

Data Collection I sought approval to conduct the case studies from the heads of academic units. Approval was obtained in all but one case, at University D’s School of Information Technology. The case studies comprised data gathered from three sources (triangulation). This was done to enhance the study’s validity (Yin, 2003, pp. 97–101). The primary data source was face-to-face interviews with 95 staff from the 16 case study academic units. These interviews were conducted between 1999 and 2002.4 Of the 95 staff interviewed for the case studies of academic units, 70 were academics and 25 were administrators. Typically six people were interviewed from each of the case study academic units, the dean, head of school/department, administration manager, junior administration and/or technical staff (HEW 3–6) and junior academics (Level A and B). Appendix A provides further details about the sample of interviewees for the case studies of academic units; however this data is reported at the aggregate level for the entire study in order to protect the anonymity of the interviewees. The second data source was 17 interviews with executive managers from each university (vice-chancellors, deputy and pro-vice-chancellors).5 These interviews were conducted and analysed using the same techniques as the interviews with academic unit staff. The vice-chancellors and their deputies were interviewed to gain their perspective on relations between themselves and the case study academic units and to gain their views on the exogenous pressures faced by academic units in their universities and how and why the case study academic units were responding to these pressures. The third data source was budgets, strategic plans, reports and policy statements produced by the academic units and their universities.6 Most of these documents were obtained from publicly accessible web pages; some heads of academic units provided additional documents when I visited them to interview academic unit staff. I operationalised the study’s research question as follows. First, I identified the external changes and pressures that case study units were experiencing. I decided that obtaining data on this issue should be straightforward; so I asked interviewees to respond to this question directly. Second, I wanted to determine why case study academic units chose to adapt to or resist exogenous environmental pressures? Third, I wanted to investigate how case study units were undertaking adaptation or

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resistance? What modes (strategies) and processes (actions) were involved in units’ adaptation or resistance? I was concerned that if I asked interviewees to respond to questions two and three directly that I may not get an accurate or complete response to these questions. I was concerned that some staff from academic units that had resisted the exogenous pressures they encountered may have been reluctant to state this because of fear of repercussions from management. I was also concerned that some interviewees, especially junior administrators and academics may have had difficulty understanding what I was referring to if I asked them directly whether their units were adapting to or resisting changes in their environments. Therefore I decided that a direct set of questions about why and how units were adapting to or resisting changes in their exogenous environments could yield data that was potentially fragmented, distorted or incomplete. To overcome this problem I decided that a more effective means of obtaining a comprehensive account of the impact of changing exogenous environments on the case study academic units was required: whether units were adapting or resisting environmental changes and the modes and processes of adaptation or resistance they employed would be to seek an overview of the academic units’ teaching, research and administrative work. After this data was collected I would determine whether case study units were adapting to the changes in their environments or resisting these changes and how they were undertaking adaptation or resistance, the modes and processes involved. So I asked interviewees questions on these topics. Had the academic unit altered the number and type of courses taught? Were class sizes larger? Were student contact hours with staff reduced? Had modes of delivery changed? Were more courses put online or taught in workplaces? Were budgets for teaching and research reduced? Were staffing levels altered? Were staff made redundant? Were more casual or junior staff hired? Did the number and type of research projects undertaken change? Had the funding sources for research changed? Were academic units undertaking entrepreneurial activities such as fee for service teaching, selling patents or participating in commercial ventures, doing more consultancy and contract research work in an effort to generate independent revenue, as a means of adapting to external pressures? In addition interviewees were asked questions about seven issues that influence an academic unit’s internal environments: organisational culture and values, funding and resource management, leadership and management, strategic planning and thinking, marketing and communications and quality assurance. The seventh issue investigated the nature of academic units’ relationships with university executives and central administrators. Appendix B list interview questions for academics and administrators in case study units.

Data Analysis When designing the study I initially decided not to use any computer software to analyse the data because the software that was available at that time did not seem to enhance the speed or accuracy of this task. However, after completing the transcription of 112 interviews yielding thousands of pages of data, I realised

Alternative Research Methods

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that manual coding and analysis of such a large volume of data would be timeconsuming and may lack accuracy; so I began to explore options for computer analysis. I decided to use ATLAS.ti.7 Data analysis involved reviewing the information that interviewees provided in response to the questions on the topics mentioned above. The mechanics of the data analysis process involved identifying patterns, contrasts, similarities, connections and significant themes, issues and problems. These were coded; memos, notes, preliminary theories and network diagrams linking concepts and ideas were recorded (Lewis, 2004; Miles & Huberman, 1994). Data from the interviews with academic unit staff and managers were then supplemented with information from written policies, plans and reports and contrasted with data from the interviews with university executives. This process of data analysis enabled me to determine whether case study units were adapting to changes in their exogenous environments or resisting these changes. Then comparing and contrasting findings across the different case studies enabled me to determine the study’s conclusions: whether particular patterns of adaptation or resistance were evident and whether other factors such as the units’ academic discipline, university type and geographic location were relevant to whether units adapted or resisted their environmental pressures and how they undertook adaptation or resistance.

Alternative Research Methods I decided to conduct face-to-face interviews because they allowed me to gather rich data. I was able to observe participants responses to questions, gauge whether an issue was sensitive, whether a participant did not understand a question, or wanted to expand on a topic. Participants in the study signed informed consent forms agreeing to participate in the study on the proviso that nothing they said in the interviews would be directly attributed to individuals. On this basis the interviews were taperecorded and full transcripts were made of all interviews. I decided to tape-record the interviews so that detailed, comprehensive and accurate records of the interviews could be obtained, and a further advantage was that these recordings could be revisited. I decided not to use the alternative data collection method, taking notes whilst conducting the interviews because this would have taken my attention away from the participants’ responses, damaged the spontaneity of my interaction with the participants and reduced opportunities for follow-up questions clarifying and extending initial responses. Also, in many cases it was not possible to ‘write up’ the interviews immediately after they occurred because often I did not choose when the interviews were scheduled; sometimes they were organised ‘back to back’, hence it would have been difficult for me not to misattribute comments or forget responses. I considered using other research methods and data collection techniques for this study, such as policy analysis and participant observation. However, given the complexity of the research problem I decided that relying solely on policy analysis was not a suitable research method because policy documents, strategic plans and budgets reveal information about how academic units intended to deal with changes in

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their exogenous environments but they would be unlikely to reveal detailed information about how and why decisions and actions were made. A further problem that I faced was that increasing levels of competition between academic units within and between universities meant that some heads of academic units denied access to policy documents, strategic plans and budgets. Participant observation is a research technique frequently used by ethnographers seeking a naturalistic form of inquiry, to understand their subject’s culture, values and views without imposing their own interpretations on these findings (Le Compte & Schensul, 1999, pp. 9–13; Merriam, 1998, p. 98). However it was not practical, or appropriate to use participant observation for this study. To use participant observation I would have needed access to several academic units, taking a role within them either as an academic, administrator or student. However taking any of these roles within an academic unit at the same time as undertaking research and analysis of what was occurring within the academic unit would have been problematic, a blurring of the boundaries between subject and object would have occurred. I would be trying to analyse academic units’ decisions on how to respond to changes and challenges from their exogenous environments at the same time as participating in the processes of making those decisions; it would be extremely difficult to provide objective analysis in this situation and would have diminished the reliability and validity of the study’s findings (Miles & Huberman, 1994). In addition, whilst it may have been possible to obtain participant roles in one or two academic units, it would have been difficult to obtain roles in several academic units.

Limitations of This Work The first limitation of the study is that its empirical work was confined to a small sample of 16 case studies from a large population of academic units. Unfortunately the restrictions upon the study’s empirical work were mandatory as the study was self-funded; I did not have the funds to undertake a more comprehensive empirical study. Therefore although this study proposes some new theoretical insights about how and why some Australian academic units adapt to or resist changes in their exogenous environments, it does not claim that these theoretical insights apply to all Australian academic units, or to academic units in different nations’ universities – systemic variations are too significant to make this feasible. The second limitation of the study also emanates from the fiscal constraints of the project. As the previous chapter illustrated and following chapters also note academic units in Australian public universities operate in exogenous environments that are dynamic. In an ideal world investigating how organisations interact with a dynamic exogenous environment would be a longitudinal study so that the study could track changes in units’ exogenous environments and how units were affected by or sort to affect their exogenous environments. Yet, we do not live in an ideal world; as noted the study was self-funded which means that it had to be undertaken using a ‘freeze-frame’ approach identifying recent changes in case study units’ exogenous environments and immediate responses, interactions with these

Notes

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environments. Of course I hope that this study’s exploratory findings may inform such future larger scale longitudinal studies of how and why units respond to changes and challenges posed by their exogenous environments.

Notes 1. Objectivism is the view that things exist as meaningful entities independent of consciousness and experience. Objectivism underpinned the theoretical perspectives of positivism and postpositivism. Positivism founded by the nineteenth century sociologists Comte and Durkheim proposed that phenomena (social facts) can be observed, measured and mathematically analysed. Constructionism also known as interpretivism was founded by the twentieth century sociologist Weber, it is the view that there is no objective truth and meaning, meaning is constructed, different people construct different meanings from the same phenomenon. Subjectivism is the perspective that meaning is not given or inherent but is ascribed by subjects, importing meaning from elsewhere (Crotty, 1998, pp. 5–9;Corbetta, 2003, pp. 13–22). 2. Australian universities can be classified in other ways (e.g. resource level, size, geographical location). However this study employs Marginson’s typology because it has been verified in other studies, (see Ramsden, P. (1999) predicting institutional research performance from published indicators: a test of a classification of Australian university types, Higher Education, 37(4), 341–358.) 3. This applies to Monash and the University of New South Wales but not to the Australian National University. 4. The interviews were conducted over a 4-year period because my employer would not grant leave to conduct the field work and hence it was conducted during annual leave over 4 years. 5. Sixteen males and one female executive manager were interviewed, fifteen were aged between fifty-one and sixty-five, two were aged between forty-one and fifty. The deputy vice-chancellors from the University of Sydney declined to participate in this study. 6. Some academic units did not provide access to their strategic plans or their budgets as they considered this information to be commercial in confidence. 7. ATLASti 5.0 produced by Scientific Software, Berlin.

Chapter 3

Introduction to the Empirical Findings

It is important to explain how the findings from the empirical study are presented and why they are presented in this way. Musselin (2007, p. 29) makes a strong case that universities are specific types of organisations arguing that a university’s core functions, teaching and research are loosely coupled and unclear processes. I support Musselin’s proposition; however, I suggest that there are other factors as well that make many universities unique organisations. For example Australian public universities now have a hybrid identity as public/private organisations: they obtain funding from the state and must continue to operate within regulatory and accountability frameworks mandated by the state. Some functions such as teaching in professional disciplines: law, medicine, engineering, dentistry, architecture, veterinary science and teaching must have course structure and curriculum approved by external stakeholders, professional associations. Yet at the same time, some academic units and other organisational units within these universities are highly entrepreneurial, they obtain substantial amounts of revenue from independent (non-government) sources and these units have a commercial, competitive organisational culture and values that have a greater affinity with the norms and values of corporations than with the traditional norms and values of public universities. The significant point here is that even though contemporary universities possess some distinctive attributes and operate within unusual contextual paradigms, this does not mean that theories on organisational adaptation and resistance derived from the discipline of organisational studies are irrelevant to analyses of what is occurring in contemporary universities. I suggest that these organisational theories offer useful ways of analysing and understanding how and why academic units respond to changes and challenges posed by their exogenous environments. However I would add the caveat that it is imperative that organisational theories are viewed critically and modified to suit the atypical characteristics of contemporary universities; this is the approach taken in this book. As discussed in the previous chapter, I used an inductive research methodology for the empirical research; field work was conducted first and then the empirical findings were contrasted with theories of adaptation and resistance from organisational theory and higher education studies. I found a clear pattern of adaptation and resistance in the case studies. Case study academic units displayed four distinct responses to their exogenous environments. D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_3, 

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One group of academic units adopted a proactive, expansionist mode of adaptation actively pursuing marketisation using entrepreneurial activities to develop new research, teaching and staff markets (Clark, 2004b, p. 175; de Zilwa, 2005; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, pp. 181–206). The nature of these entrepreneurial activities is discussed later. In this introduction it is sufficient to note that these entrepreneurial activities enabled these units to generate additional revenue creating competitive advantages for these units over other academic units, and that these activities sometimes exposed these units to risk. A second group of academic units adopted a conservative mode of adaptation and their primary focus was on conservation and defence of existing markets and operations. A third group of academic units used a combination of expanding into new markets and defending existing markets. A fourth group of academic units tried to deal with environmental pressures in a reactive fashion by ignoring these pressures, displaying inertia and resistance to change. This last group of units tried to continue operating much as they always had done hoping that environmental pressures such as declining public funding and enhanced market competition would eventually cease and things would return to the way that they had been in the past. After the case studies were undertaken I reviewed literature on organisational adaptation and resistance to environmental changes from organisational studies and higher education. It would be very easy to be diverted from the project at hand by embarking upon a critique of this scholarship; however, such a task warrants an entire book, so I instead offer readers a few recommendations from this body of work. Lewin et al. (2004, pp. 108–160) provides a valuable overview of this organisational adaptation literature: it discusses a comprehensive range of adaptation theories including resource dependency theory, contingency theories, transaction cost economics, organisational learning and institutional theory, identifying each theory’s assumptions, empirical focus and the challenges mounted against each perspective. Agocs (1997), Fleming and Spicer (2007), Jermier et al. (1994) are recommended as organisational studies on resistance. Readers may also find psychological studies of resistance helpful (see Oreg, 2003, 2006). Organisational studies on inertia and path-dependency such as Di Maggio & Powell (1983) and North (1990) are also useful. Cameron (1984), Cameron and Tschirhart (1992), Maassen and Gornitzka (1999), Sporn (1999), and Zammuto and Cameron (1983) are recommended as valuable studies on adaptation in higher education. Bridgman (2007), Chandler et al. (2002), El-Khawas (1998), Lane (2007) and Musselin (2007) explore resistance in higher education. Examining the case study findings and contrasting these findings with the literature on adaptation and resistance, I identified a pattern of adaptation and resistance that shared several features with the typology of organisational adaptation to changing environments developed by the organisational theorists (Miles & Snow, 1978). Miles and Snow developed their typology of adaptation by conducting three empirical studies exploring why and how US organisations coped with changes in their exogenous environments. Miles and Snow’s first empirical study was on 16 firms in the college textbook publishing industry, the second on 49 organisations in the electronics and food processing industries and third was conducted in 19

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Introduction to the Empirical Findings

31

voluntary hospitals (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 9–11). Miles and Snow chose these industries for their empirical work because each had a high degree of environmental uncertainty (turbulence) and complexity (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 10). From this empirical work Miles and Snow identified four modes of adaptation used by organisations to deal with complex, turbulent exogenous environments. Group one are known as prospectors, group two as defenders, group three as analysers and group four as reactors. With each empirical study Miles and Snow refined and further developed their typology of organisational adaptation (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 10). Although Miles and Snow’s typology was developed 32 years ago it is still relevant and useful. Whilst many changes have occurred in culture, science and technology and economies across the globe since 1978 such as the emergence of globalisation and the transformation of work and leisure as a result of developments in information and communication technologies, the emergence of new features and trends in organisations’ exogenous environments does not nullify the validity of Miles and Snow’s typology. Rather these and other recent exogenous environmental changes such as the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 stand as a testament to the enhanced complexity and turbulence of organisations’ exogenous environments. As mentioned it is important to acknowledge that it is not only contemporary commercial firms that are situated in and affected by these volatile exogenous environments, public sector organisations and hybrid organisations operating in both the public and private domains, such as academic units in Australian universities and academic units in other nations’ universities also need to operate in these complex, turbulent exogenous environments. Indeed since Miles and Snow conceived their typology1 in 1978 it has been tested in several empirical settings by other researchers and work has been conducted investigating the validity and reliability of its constructs (see, for example, Conant, Mokwa, & Varadarajan, 1990; Desarbo, Di Benedetto, Song, & Sinha, 2005; Hambrick, 1983; James & Hatten, 1995; Kabanoff & Brown, 2008; Shortell & Zajac, 1990; Snow & Hambrick, 1980). Miles and Snow’s typology of adaptation has been applied to other public service organisations (see Boyne & Walker, 2004; Meier, O’Toole, Boyne, & Walker, 2006). Other higher education scholars have used Miles and Snow’s typology. Cameron and Tschirhart (1992) used Miles and Snow’s typology of adaptation to construct a Likert scale for a survey on university managers’ strategic approach to environmental changes. Rowley and Sherman (2001) used Miles and Snow’s typology to analyse patterns of strategic management in US universities. Given that academic units in Australian public universities face the same operational context as the organisations Miles and Snow studied – complex, turbulent exogenous environments, and that their typology has a long-established credibility and veracity, I have adopted it as the framework to report findings from these case studies. It was not a perfect match; there are some significant points of difference, which are discussed later. Part II of the book is organised as follows: Chapter 4 is on units that used a defender mode of adaptation, Chapter 5 is on units that used a prospector mode of adaptation, Chapter 6 discusses findings from units that chose an analyser mode of adaptation and Chapter 7 is on units that displayed resistance to the challenges they faced from their exogenous environments (reactors). Each chapter

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in Part II of the book has a similar structure. First some contextual information about each case study is provided about the size, age and staff profile and fiscal position of the unit. Then specific exogenous environmental challenges faced by the units are identified. Each chapter also includes a discussion of who made the decision about the unit’s response to its exogenous environmental challenges and how the decision whether it would adapt to or resist its changing environment was made. Each case study also outlines how each unit approached adaptation or resistance; this discussion is presented with specific reference to the seven themes relating to academic units’ core operations that were mentioned earlier: leadership and management, organisational culture and values, strategic planning, funding and resource management, marketing and networking, quality assurance and on the units’ relationship with university executives and central administrators.

Miles and Snow’s Typology of Organisational Adaptation Miles and Snow adopt Cameron’s definition of adaptation; according to this definition adaptation is a process whereby an organisation seeks to align itself with its exogenous environment. A key aspect of Miles and Snow’s views on organisational adaptation is that all organisations have a dominant coalition of top executives who are the key actors performing the role of scanning the organisation’s exogenous environment (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 20). Miles and Snow argue that the dominant coalition of managers make an organisation’s strategic choices about adaptation – either adopting a proactive stance anticipating events and acting quickly determining the mode and processes of adaptation or reactively waiting for events to occur and then responding to these events (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 20–21). Miles and Snow argue that organisations are ‘limited in their adaptive behaviour to those strategies which the top management believes will allow the effective direction and control of the human resources’ (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 5). At this stage I want to flag this as a key point of departure between this study’s empirical findings and Miles and Snow’s work. Later I discuss how and why in several of the case study academic units, leaders and managers of academic units were not the key actors responsible for choosing and enacting an academic unit’s mode of adaptation. Returning to my outline of Miles and Snow’s framework of organisational adaptation, we can observe that it comprises two interrelated conceptual elements: (1) a general model of the process of adaptation that describes the decisions needed by the organisation to maintain an effective alignment with its environment and (2) an organisational typology that portrays the different patterns of adaptive behaviour used by organisations within a given industry or other grouping (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 5).

Miles and Snow called their ‘general model of the process of adaptation’ ‘the adaptive cycle’ arguing that effective adaptation involves the dominant coalition of managers solving three key problems: the entrepreneurial problem, the engineering problem and the administrative problem. The entrepreneurial problem refers to

Defenders

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which market or market segment to target with what products and services. The engineering problem refers to selecting appropriate technology and means of production or of delivering services. The administrative problem refers to reducing uncertainty within the organisation, rationalising and stabilising the organisation (creating the structures and processes) to accomplish an organisation’s solutions to the entrepreneurial and engineering problems (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 28). Here I want to flag the second significant difference between this study’s findings and Miles and Snow’s work. The case studies presented subsequently show that adaptation was often far more chaotic; it was an emergent process rather than a rational, planned, controlled strategic choice made to address these three problems. The final part of this chapter outlines Miles and Snow’s four archetypes of organisational adaptation: defenders, prospectors, analysers and reactors. Before presenting these outlines it is important to clarify the definitions of key terms. Miles and Snow use the term archetypes of adaptation to refer to the different types of adaptation used by organisations in their empirical studies. Weber refers to archetypes as ideal or pure types, something that is aspired to, similar to but not a perfect replica (Roth & Wittich, 1978, p. 215). Miles and Snow chose the term archetype because their empirical studies indicated that organisations had some of the characteristics of the archetype but did not share all of its features (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 30). This was a legitimate thing to do. However it creates ambiguity, it raises the question to what extent were particular organisations typical examples of the archetype? Which features or characteristics of the archetype did the organisation display? So I have refined Miles and Snow’s typology by distinguishing between modes and processes of adaptation and resistance. Modes of adaptation and resistance refer to the strategies, objectives, type or category of adaptation or resistance pursued by case study academic units. A process of adaptation or resistance refers to the actions taken for adaptation or resistance. This distinction is significant because some case study academic units chose the same modes of adaptation of, for example, the prospector mode; yet employed different processes in their efforts to pursue their chosen mode of adaptation.

Defenders Miles and Snow describe defenders as organisations that have ‘narrow productmarket domains’ (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 29). Put crudely, rather than diversifying their operations across a range of markets or types of products or services, organisations using a defensive mode of adaptation specialise on a few markets, products or services. The key objective for defenders is to improve the efficiency of their operations (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 29). According to Miles and Snow, executives in this type of organisation have an inward orientation; they do not scan their external environments looking for new markets, developing new products, services or technologies (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 29). An advantage of this mode of operating is that these organisations do not need to devote resources (time, financial and human capital) to developing new technologies, structures or operations (Miles & Snow, 1978,

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p. 29). Another advantage is that this specialisation creates expertise; these organisations have a narrow span of focus; so they can constantly enhance and improve their operations. A disadvantage of this approach is that the inward orientation can mean that the organisation fails to monitor shifts in its external environment that could affect its current operations or markets. Another potential disadvantage of this approach is that because this type of organisation seeks to maintain its traditional structures and operational processes it could fail to consider new ideas that could have been profitable. Miles and Snow suggest that for defenders the entrepreneurial problem is how to acquire and protect a segment of the total market creating a stable set of products and loyal customers (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 48). The defenders’ key engineering problem is cost-efficiency, how to enhance the efficiency of the production and distribution of their current range of goods and services (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 48). The defenders’ administrative problem is how to acquire and maintain control over the structures, operations and employees in the organisation so as to optimise efficiency (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 48).

Prospectors The prospector mode of adaptation is the antithesis of the defender mode of adaptation. Organisations using a prospector mode of adaptation have broad, dynamic product-market domains (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 49). Their key priority is innovation; being the first to develop a new product or service or find a new market. Unlike defenders who seek stability and equilibrium with their environments, prospectors welcome change they are comfortable with high levels of turbulence and environmental uncertainty because these conditions enable innovation, the development of new products and markets. Indeed prospector organisations’ innovations can create environmental turbulence and enhance the complexity of markets forcing other organisations to respond to these redefined environments (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 57). Prospector organisations are continuously innovative because many of their employees are actively scanning their environments. These constant environmental scanning activities enable prospector organisations to react quickly to market changes and to anticipate changes in their markets enabling them to develop new products or services and identify new markets before their competitors do (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 57). Organisations using a prospector mode of adaptation usually have decentralised flexible power structures. They often use project teams of professional experts who work on projects with autonomy over product development, marketing and problem solving. Prospector organisations have a high tolerance towards risk; they accept that some of their innovations, new products and new markets may not be profitable. The key entrepreneurial problem for organisations using a prospector mode of adaptation is how to identify and capitalise on new market opportunities (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 56). For prospectors growth can occur in spurts; this can tax the organisations’ financial, technical and human resources. The key engineering problem for organisations using a prospector mode of adaptation is ensuring that they

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maintain flexibility in their technological processes to ensure that they have sufficient technological resources available to deploy on new projects (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 58). The primary administrative problem that organisations using a prospector mode of adaptation face is how to facilitate and co-ordinate multiple diverse projects (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 65). The main advantage of adopting a prospector mode of adaptation is that it is a proactive strategy rather than sitting back and allowing competitors to shape a market, prospectors’ innovative products, services or marketing play a significant role in defining markets. Prospector organisations are ideal work environments for scientists, researchers, developers and marketing staff; their knowledge and skills are valued and rewarded in their companies and they can pursue their work on innovations with high levels of autonomy and ample resources. The key disadvantage for organisations using a prospector mode of adaptation is inefficient use of resources. They can over-extend themselves taking on too many projects at the same time. Prospector organisations can also under utilise or mis-utilise staff; technical or financial resources investing in new ideas that may not work (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 65). However this situation does not concern these organisations unduly because they value effectiveness (innovation) over efficiency.

Analysers The analyser mode of adaptation is a hybrid form of adaptation, combining strategies and actions of the prospector mode of adaptation and the defender mode of adaptation (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 68). Organisations adopting an analyser mode of adaptation often adopt a matrix organisational structure with functional units such as manufacturing, or customer service, engineering, marketing and finance and special project units (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 71). The functional units undertake work on products or services for the organisation’s core markets. Analyser organisations operate like typical defenders in these core markets, they want to create stability in these markets; so they plan, regulate and control their operations to enhance the efficiency of their operations so as to maximise their profits. Yet at the same time organisations using an analyser mode of adaptation are closely observing the strategies and actions of prospectors; their aim is to identify successful new products or markets developed by prospectors. Once analysers have identified a prospector’s successful new products or markets, they quickly launch their own imitations of these products or markets (mimetic isomorphism). An advantage of this strategy is that analysers do not have to expose themselves to the same level of risk (product or market failure) as prospectors do; yet because they act quickly, entering these markets shortly after prospectors they can capture segments of the prospector’s markets. A key tactic used by analysers encroaching on a prospector’s market is to offer a similar product or service to the prospector organisation at a reduced price. Analysers can offer price discounts because their production costs are lower than prospector organisations because they do not have to cover the costs of research and development of new products, and they often have more streamlined engineering and technological processes which enhance their operational efficiency. Another tactic

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employed by analysers is to make minor modifications or refinements to a prospector’s product or service based on feedback from the prospector’s customers; then seek to sell their version of the product or service as superior to that of the prospector. For an organisation pursuing an analyser mode of adaptation, obtaining and then maintaining the fine balance between its stable core operations and its dynamic, flexible specialist units is a significant challenge; they have to find ways of allocating resources between the sections of the company and resolve internal conflicts over strategic directions and priorities. The main entrepreneurial problem for analysers is how to identify and exploit opportunities for new products or markets whilst simultaneously ensuring the stability, efficiency and viability of their core operations (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 72–73). The prime engineering challenge for organisations using an analyser mode of adaptation is how to gain maximum efficiencies in their stable markets whilst ensuring that they have sufficient capacity for flexibility and innovation in their new and emerging markets (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 73–74). The key administrative problem for organisations trying to pursue an analyser mode of adaptation is how to create administrative structures and processes that enable the organisation to attain its contrary objectives, stability in one area of its operations and dynamism in its other markets (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 74–75).

Reactors Miles and Snow argue that the defender, prospector and analyser modes of adaptation to environmental changes are stable and consistent ways for organisations to operate, whereas the reactive mode of adaptation is inconsistent and makes organisations unstable (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 81). They identify three reasons why organisations display a reactive response to environmental pressures: first, ‘when management fails to articulate a viable organizational strategy’ (inertia) (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 82). Second, management articulates a clear strategy but appropriate technology, structure and processes to realise the strategy are not created (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 82). Third, management continues to pursue particular strategies and employ particular structures within their organisation even though their environmental conditions have changed and the current strategies and structures are now inappropriate (path-dependence) (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 82). According to Miles and Snow, an organisation can fail to develop a decisive strategy to adjust to its environmental pressures because of a lack of consensus amongst the executives in the organisation; when faced with several alternative strategies they cannot decide amongst them (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 86). Organisations employing a reactive response to their environment are often passive; they assume that turbulent, competitive environmental conditions will eventually abate. Reactors do not have solutions or plans for the entrepreneurial, engineering and administrative problems. Another common characteristic of reactors is that they have an inward orientation, devoting little attention and resources to scanning and monitoring their external environments. It seems likely that if

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operating environments remain turbulent, competition in markets intensifies and organisations continue with a reactive response to these changes, eventually the organisation may not survive. If reactive organisations are to survive in sustained turbulent, complex, competitive environments then they would need to adopt either a prospector, defender or analyser mode of adaptation. Given that organisations that displayed this set of behaviours are actually attempting to resist and ignore changes in their environments I think that it is more precise to refer to this pattern of behaviour as resistance rather than reactors; so this is the term used in this book. The next chapter explores case studies of academic units that chose a defensive mode of adaptation.

Note 1. In an interview published in The Academy of Management Executive in 2003 marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the typology, Miles and Snow noted that the book had been cited in ‘the Social Science Citation Index well over 1,000 times’ although almost all of these citations occur after 1985 (Ketchen, 2003, pp. 95–96).

Part II

The Case Studies

Chapter 4

Defenders

Chapter 2 provided a detailed account of the research design and methods employed in the empirical work, so it is unnecessary to reiterate this information. Yet before presenting the findings from these case studies it is important to restate that because this is a qualitative study with a relatively small sample size, and much of the territory explored here is sensitive to participants,1 every effort has been made to ensure that the research sites cannot be identified and that participants’ confidentiality is not compromised, including removing the names of universities and people and places mentioned by interviewees. Universities where the case studies were undertaken are referred to as university A, B, C and D. For the same reason information that could reveal the university’s identity such as its history, geographic location and demographic characteristics are not provided but replaced with pseudonyms. Direct quotations provided by participants are not attributed to individuals; only the person’s position and their academic unit are disclosed. Table 4.1 provides a summary of case study academic units’ responses to changes in their exogenous environments. Five of the sixteen academic units2 in this study adopted a defensive mode of adaptation as their response to changes in their operating environments: University A’s Law Faculty, University B’s Law School, University C’s Law School, University D’s School of Biological Sciences and University D’s Department of Civil Engineering. This chapter identifies each unit’s specific environmental challenges, supplementing the general discussion of academic units’ environmental pressures presented in Chapter 1. Then it discusses why these units chose a defensive mode of adaptation, identifying who made the decision to pursue a defensive mode of adaptation and the processes each unit used to pursue a defensive mode of adaptation.

University A’s Law Faculty The case study of University A’s Law Faculty was undertaken in 1999; the year was a pivotal turning point in the landscape of Australian higher education. Some background notes about this academic unit help us to understand this unit’s position at this time, to identify its strengths and the external environmental challenges it encountered. This faculty was situated in University A, a redbrick university, the D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_4, 

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4 Defenders Table 4.1 Academic units’ responses to changing exogenous environments

Defenders

Prospectors

Analysers

Reactors

University A Law faculty

University A School of business systems University D Law faculty

University A Department of civil engineering University B School of information technology University B School of life sciences

University A Department of biology

University B Law school University C Law school University D School of biological sciences University D Department of civil engineering

University B Department of civil engineering University C School of biological sciences

University C School of information technology University C School of engineering

second oldest university in this state. This law faculty has a long-standing rivalry with its sandstone elder sibling in this state. It does not share the advantages enjoyed by its sandstone sibling: wealth, prestige and social capital obtained from network alliances with powerful elites in major law, accounting firms and banks and a central business district location: We are hoping to differentiate ourselves from ‘University X’ at the moment we have a bit of a cringe mentality about ‘University X’. We can never match them I mean that sandstone environment and the establishment attitude that goes with it. It is a bit like Australia developing its own identity away from Britain (Law Faculty Manager, University A).

The dean identified three ways that University A’s law faculty aspired to differentiate itself from its sandstone rival: First, through its clinical legal education programme whereby students undertake placements in legal aid centres offering probono advice to clients with legal problems. Second, through curriculum and research focusing on social justice, ethics and humanitarian concerns rather than commercial, contract and administrative law, which were the key foci of the sandstone university’s law faculty. Third, by introducing international comparative themes into its subjects, recruiting international students for its onshore courses and developing offshore teaching programmes. Internationalisation was a key strategic objective of this university, so the dean’s plans to internationalise the law faculty’s operations were an attempt to align the faculty with these institutional-level goals. However staff had dissonant views about this strategic direction. The faculty manager stated ‘there is no market for us offshore because law can only be taught in Commonwealth countries anyway, so there is a limitation on the number of countries that we can actually recruit from’ (Law Faculty Manager, University A). A junior academic remarked One change that I would like to see is that they seem to be obsessed with this globalisation point, according to the union they have got thirty million dollars which they are investing developing offshore campuses, these are great ideas but right at the moment we need the

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money here. I mean my teaching hours are being increased because we can’t afford to hire more people, they have got their priorities all wrong and it makes me very annoyed that they are doing this (junior academic, University A, Law Faculty).

On the one hand the faculty was in the fortunate position that student demand outstripped the supply of available places, ‘we are beating school leavers and internal transferees off with a stick’ (law faculty manager, University A). ‘Our LLB is already the largest undergraduate fee-paying course in the university with 75 EFSTU (Effective Fulltime Students)’ (dean, law faculty, University A). ‘This year we set up a special mature-age entry scheme especially for people who had life and work experience as well as far as possible a completed qualification, we had about 160 applicants, this sort of thing is quite a departure for this sort of rather precious Law faculty but necessity is the mother of invention’ (Law Faculty Manager, University A). The ‘necessity’ that the faculty manager was referring to was that this was the first time in the faculty’s history it was experiencing significant operational pressures. There were two reasons for this pressure. As observed, the first reason the unit was under pressure was because of the massification of student cohorts; increased student numbers and a more diverse student cohort including fee-paying students who brought with them customer service demands upon academics and administrators and mature-age ‘earner learners’ some of whom also placed additional demands on academics because of their combination of weak academic foundations and lack of experience with self-directed learning. The second source of pressure for this unit was that for the first time in many years the faculty faced a significant funding cut: We are facing a funding cut of 4.3 per cent so I have the distinction of presiding over the largest cut of any faculty in the university. The 4.3 per cent is based on the assumption that our fee income increases by 29 per cent if we don’t make that target then the funding cut will be even larger (Dean, Law Faculty, University A).

This situation was a tremendous shock for this law faculty’s academics and administrators as they had come to take for granted that they would always have sufficient resources to operate as they pleased, to run whatever courses they wanted to teach and to undertake whatever research projects that they were interested in. This was unfamiliar territory, staff were uncertain about how to deal with this situation. As is commonplace when any organisation encounters difficulties some staff looked for a scapegoat, they blamed the management for creating the conditions that enabled this problem to emerge: Our former Dean was conservative, he was right for the times but in a sense we became like a fortress Australia Law Faculty. We have always been rather protected and inward looking. The Dean was not into consultation so a sense of complacency and detachment developed amongst the academics. When it came to making the big decisions they just left it up to him because they knew he would not listen to them if they offered a suggestion. It was weird the academics had a kind of child like quality when it came to being aware of what was going on in the university and the outside pressures beyond the walls of the university (law faculty manager, University A).

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Here the faculty manager’s observations about the academics childlike naivety about the external pressures affecting the academic unit, academics’ detachment from the academic unit and lack of involvement in dialogue about how to address these issues was extremely astute. Interviews with academics and administrators revealed a rigid hierarchical power structure and dynamic between the executive managers of the unit, the dean, the faculty manager and the associate deans of research and reaching and the lower ranks of academics and administrators. A senior academic remarked: We [academics] are treated like children, we should be seen and not heard, if we offer an opinion that differs from the management, or ask a question then you get branded a troublemaker, you get ostracised and punished, sent to the naughty corner, so to speak (senior academic, law faculty, University A).

So in this organisational climate where the power relations of new public management held sway, silence reigned, academics withdrew into their shells; they focused on their teaching and research, they detached themselves from the academic unit, and responsibility for devising strategies for the unit to deal with its environmental pressures fell entirely on the shoulders of the executive managers of the unit. The dean and his team of executive managers decided that University A’s law faculty would adopt a defensive response to these environmental pressures. This response was designed to obtain greater efficiencies from its teaching, research and administration to enhance productivity whilst reducing expenditure on resources (staff costs, infrastructure, equipment, operational costs). The dean identified a series of actions (processes) that the unit would employ to reduce expenditure that year by AU$500,000, including not filling four advertised academic posts, increasing academics’ teaching loads, reducing research allowances for academics, reducing expenditure on the clinical legal programme, reducing expenditure on administration and equipment by 10% and changing the way research fellow positions in the faculty were funded. However this was not the dean’s preferred method of dealing with this situation. The dean wanted the faculty to pursue a prospector mode of adaptation, to embrace marketisation, to aggressively compete in its existing markets and expand into new markets: We are going to be the Law School for a changing world. The defining theme of this faculty is going to be change and understanding it. Understanding the phenomenon of change, what is driving it and how it might be harnessed to make the world a better place, we are going to be a learning organisation. For too long now we have been supply driven we have taught and researched what we wanted, we need to be demand driven, more responsive to market needs, to teach what students want to learn and what firms want to pay for (Dean, Law Faculty, University A).

The dean suggested that online learning was a way of developing these new student markets for fee-paying domestic, international undergraduates, postgraduates and continuing legal education students. The dean added that academics in the faculty should also engage in entrepreneurial activities such as commercial research partnerships and consultancies and obtain commercial sponsorship for teaching.

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Tensions between the academics and executive management team in the faculty deepened; yet because of the power dynamic that existed within the faculty academics did not articulate their disagreements with the decisions made by the dean and other executive managers about how the faculty should deal with its current set of environmental pressures or the dean’s plans for the unit’s future strategic directions. The faculty manager said that there was a strong undercurrent of discontent amongst the academics in the faculty, some academics still adhered to the view that ‘the dean was the first amongst equals’, that his role should not encompass the power and authority to ‘lead’ or ‘manage’ academics, ‘he shouldn’t set the course for what we are going to do (senior academic, law faculty, University A). More particularly some academics in the faculty did not approve of the dean’s views that the faculty should adopt entrepreneurialism and marketisation. The faculty manager observed that the dean was a pragmatist, he realised that ‘he could not foist entrepreneurialism onto the academics, it was an ideology that was too alien from their social justice ethos’ (law faculty manager, University A). So instead the unit adopted a defensive mode of adaptation. These remarks from a junior academic articulate the reasons why academics in this faculty were opposed to marketisation and entrepreneurialism: ‘I would hate to see this university, or any other major university turned into a multi-national corporation because that just destroys academia, it destroys what we do’ (junior academic, law faculty, University A). While comments made by another junior academic in the faculty suggest that resistance to change is the default reaction that people have to change irrespective of the nature of the change or how it is implemented: People always respond to change with a great deal of fear and loathing. That is just the nature of things. People are naturally resistant to change whatever the change is because I have been doing this for twenty-five years I do not want to change the way I am doing it (junior academic, law faculty, University A).

So the scene was set for some difficult times ahead for this academic unit. As the faculty manager commented ‘we are headed for some turbulent times, there is going to be some pain along the way as people shift into a different gear’ (law faculty manager, University A). While the faculty manager was confident that the dean had the capacity to ‘make these changes happen’ (law faculty manager, University A). A junior academic in the faculty observed that ‘the dean would have had more success attaining his agenda, if he was less authoritarian and more consultative with academics, compliance attained through bullying and creating a climate of fear is not as effective as actual support’ (junior academic, law faculty, University A).

University B’s Law School The case study of University B’s Law School was undertaken in 2000. University B is a University of Technology, in contrast with Australia’s sandstone and redbrick universities it has only attained university status recently. University B was formerly a CAE (College of Advanced Education), many of its academic staff focused

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on teaching; they did not have PhDs and were not research active (did not obtain research grants or publish books and journal articles). University B has a corporate ethos with strong links to industry. Its curriculum is innovative, with an applied vocational orientation, research work undertaken here often shares this applied focus. University B’s Law School is one of four law faculties in this state. The dean stated ‘that one of the ways that it has differentiated itself from the other law faculties in this state was through its strong professional focus on preparing practitioners and its strong emphasis on teaching right from the beginning’ (dean, Law School, University B). The dean explained that this academic unit had also endeavoured to differentiate itself from rival law faculties in this state by targeting specific student cohorts and developing unique programmes: University X’, (sandstone) caters predominantly for school leavers whereas with our LLB (undergraduate law degree) over ninety per cent of our first year intake are graduates and they undertake an accelerated program. ‘University Y’s’ (gumtree) Law faculty has some of that market but we have the largest proportion of the three Law schools in the metropolitan area. We also have had a practical legal training course, a Diploma of Legal Practice for a very long time and up until very recently we were the only provider of this course in this state (dean, Law School, University B).

As a consequence of an external review of the school in 1998, the school’s organisational structure was altered. Prior to the review the school had a unitary structure, following a recommendation of the review the school established four separate departments: ‘Justice Studies which comprises fourteen academics, five of them are lawyers and the rest of them are social scientists their research and teaching takes a critical view of the law, they have 390 EFSTU’ (law school manager, University B). The main department of the law school has 1500 EFSTU its academics teach ‘mainstream’ law courses to undergraduates and postgraduate coursework students in commercial, property, taxation, administration and family law. Initially after the review there was a separate department for research and postgraduate students, however later this was amalgamated with the main law school. There was also a department of legal practice with 65 EFSTU, six permanent full-time academics and a lot of part-time and sessional academics. Several participants in the case study (academics and administrators) suggested that there were negative consequences that arose from this structural arrangement; these are explored later. Academics in this law school had strong network ties to city legal firms: ‘I see it as a beneficial thing for staff to practice or do consultancy for law firms (dean, Law School, University B). These connections yielded several benefits for this law school including ensuring that courses focused on issues that were relevant to practitioners, that graduates had a skill set that matched firms’ needs, that graduates had opportunities for internships and advantages in gaining employment with these firms. These legal firms also provided sponsorships for professorial chairs, equity scholarships for students; practitioners from these firms took on roles as adjunct teaching staff. Another key advantage for University B’s Law School was that its campus was situated adjacent to the city’s central business district making it extremely convenient for mature-age students working in city legal, accounting, insurance firms and banks to attend lectures after work.

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The case study revealed that University B’s law school had two key external environmental challenges, the first of these challenges, a decline in public funding was also experienced by several other academic units in this study. However the second challenge that University B’s law school encountered was more specific to this academic unit – this was increasing levels of competition from other law academic units in its core student markets and the challenges of trying to compete in these student markets as a law school situated within a University of Technology. It was also evident that the school’s efforts to deal with these challenges were affected by three attributes of this academic unit’s internal environment. First, factional tensions between sub-cultural groups within the academic unit created a fissure in the unit’s goals. Second, academics’ alienation and disassociation from the academic unit meant that they did not view it as their responsibility to be concerned with or work towards the academic unit’s efforts to adapt to its environmental challenges. Third, some academics in the unit were keen to pursue entrepreneurial activities though they lacked knowledge about how to engage in entrepreneurial activities and the confidence to take risks on entrepreneurial ideas; details of each of these points follow. The school manager said that that year (2000) the school received ‘AU$7.2 million in public funding (operating grant)’, he continued, ‘we are in a sense running a deficit budget we have had a deficit budget for 2 years, it is not actually recorded as a deficit because we have been able to carry over an AU$750,000 surplus from the last couple of years, we had this surplus because we followed chancellery’s instructions not to hire new staff and not to replace people who left’ (law school manager, University B). The school manager explained that the school had diversified its revenue streams, ‘in the past, 96% of our funding came from public operating grant, that is down to 90% now, the university wants us to reduce this even further and we want to go down that road too (law school manager, University B). It was interesting to note that there was a discrepancy between the dean’s views on how much revenue the school earned from independent (non-government revenue) and the school managers’ views on these figures. According to the dean the school currently earned ‘about 17% of its operating budget from student tuition fees’, he noted that chancellery was pleased with this result yet they were not performing as well as ‘Business, they have hit 50%’ and ‘Information Technology is 50% as well’ (dean, Law School, University B). In contrast the school manager indicated that the school earned ‘between half and one million from full-fee-paying courses and sponsorship of professorial chairs and rooms by law firms’ (law school manager, University B). Unfortunately it was not possible to clarify the discrepancy in levels of independent revenue because disaggregated budget data were not available. However one financial trend was clearly evident, ‘five years ago we would get AU$4600 per EFSTU now we only get $4000 per EFSTU, the university is creaming this amount off the top, so we have to pump more volume through’ (law school manager, University B). Both the dean and the school manager predicted that public funding for the school would continue to decline over the next decade. University B’s Law School had traditionally dominated the niche markets of graduate law degrees, masters coursework programmes and practical legal training.

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Yet recently other law schools in this state were challenging University B’s Law School’s position in each of these student markets. The school manager observed ‘University X’ (sandstone) ‘had gone through a period of stagnation and decline but it is starting to revive and pose a greater amount of competition’ (law school manager, University B). University B’s Law School had enjoyed a monopoly as the only provider of a diploma for professional accreditation (Australian solicitors (lawyers) must complete this training in addition to their law degree to gain admission to practice as solicitors); yet recently the sandstone university’s law faculty had developed a similar course directly competing with University B’s programme. In the past the gumtree University’s Law School had a small masters coursework programme preferring to focus on postgraduate research degrees, yet it had recently developed more fee-paying masters coursework programmes. The dean noted that as competition between the law faculties in the state intensified, it was always challenging for the school to attract students and academics because it was situated within a University of Technology: ‘we do not fit, when people think about law faculties, they automatically think about the faculties in the group of eight (elite Australian universities)’ (dean, Law School, University B). University B’s Law School responded to these environmental pressures by adopting a defender mode of adaptation, a decision made by the dean and school manager in conjunction with senior academic staff. The school’s primary focus was on improving the efficiency of its operations; we have already noted that the school saved AU$750,000 by not hiring new academic and administrative staff or replacing staff that left. As is often the case with organisations contracting expenditure, those staff that remained had increasing workloads, academics had greater teaching loads and administrators work roles expanded to cover tasks previously done by other employees. Not surprisingly this intensification in workloads was not welcomed by some academics in the unit: What do they think we do with our day? How can we be expected to be entrepreneurial if all you are doing all day is dealing with students who use up every single second of consultation time wanting personal tutorials, these students expect spoon feeding. Then we have 1000 emails and phone calls, we aren’t in a position where we can say I’m sorry I can’t talk to you just at this moment’ (junior academic, Law School, University B).

However a senior academic offered a counterpoint to this view: ‘there are a number of under-performers in the school who are tenured, who we never see, who never do anything, they won’t be affected by performance management processes, they have never been able to be managed previously and they are not going to start to be managed now, these systems just raise the bar for everybody else’ (senior academic, Law School, University B). When asked why these academics were under-performers this senior academic responded: There is a coterie of people who really don’t see the point any more, prospects of promotion have perhaps left them behind and I think that is a problem for this university as a whole, not just our school. Twenty years ago when these people came here when it was a CAE (College of Advanced Education) their appointments were teaching only appointments, they did not have do research or publish. They have got used to their teaching responsibilities being their whole job and when you say to them that they need to start doing research they say, why

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should I? They are not aware of the constraints on the school because of the university’s lack of funding. Most of these people do not identify with the objects, strategies and goals of the university, they just get to the point where they become complacent, they just do the minimum amount of work required to keep their job, or else they withdraw, they don’t even have the energy left to get up and go somewhere else (senior academic, Law School, University B).

According to another senior academic at University B’s Law School many of the academics in the school were ‘absolutely self-absorbed, they only care about their own teaching or research; they don’t care about the future of the school (senior academic, Law School, University B). This senior academic added that some of the academics in this school ‘are stuck in a time-warp, they don’t understand what you might call the parameters of the job in the new economy, they come in here do their 8 hours per week and think they are onto a great lurk’ (senior academic, Law School, University B). These observations about the alienation of academics from the academic unit illustrate a key obstacle for the academic unit’s efforts to adapt to the challenges of reduced levels of public funding and intensified competition from other law schools for students, academics and research funding. Another obstacle inhibiting this law school’s efforts to adapt to its environmental challenges was that the school was not a cohesive organisational unit. There were several factions amongst academics in the school (one group focused on social justice while another concentrated on commercial and property law). ‘A lot of the academic staff have been here for 20 years since the school started some have created alliances that have lasted, others have created hatreds that have lasted’ (law school manager, University B). Tensions between these factions meant that the school was losing focus, dissipating time, energy and resources on battles over internal matters such as workload allocations for teaching, allocations of research grants and promotions rather than working together to deal with the environmental pressures that the school faced. These dysfunctional attributes of this law school’s internal environment exacerbated the affects of its external environmental challenges. Institutional executive managers urged academic units to adopt a prospector mode of adaptation, to undertake entrepreneurial initiatives to extend operations in existing markets and develop new markets. There was a small group of academics within the school whose goals were aligned with these institutional executives’ goals; however they identified several obstacles that prevented them attaining these goals. The first obstacle identified by these academics was a lack of knowledge about how to undertake entrepreneurial activities. Plans were underway to address this problem by undertaking a benchmarking exercise with other law faculties so that ‘our academics can learn how to be entrepreneurial’ (dean, Law School, University B). In addition to a lack of knowledge about how to become entrepreneurial some of these academics who aspired to be entrepreneurial lacked the confidence to initiate entrepreneurial activities, to take risks on new ventures, ‘we can’t get a couple of million just out of Indonesia, like ‘University X’, it just won’t happen (senior academic, Law School, University B). While according to one senior academic in this law school, the school faced two fundamental problems: ‘we are trying to be all things to all people, we need to identify some key priorities,

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key markets and focus our resources on developing these areas’ (senior academic, University B’s Law School). This senior academic added that academics lack the skill set to manage academic units that had to contend with such turbulent complex environments: We are a bunch of legal academics sitting around talking about how to make money and we are not equipped and we are not getting the strategic advice, we are doing the best we can, we employed a marketing person, but a marketing person just knows how to do up a pretty advertisement, they don’t know how to do strategic positioning . . . we are a bunch of amateurs, we can’t run a 12 million dollar budget, managing by throwing things at a dart board (senior academic, University B’s Law School). I think academic unit management is now in crisis. I think the day has now past where you pulled a research professor out of his study where he had been sitting for fifteen years and put them into managing seventy disgruntled academics, to be proficient at budgeting and forward estimating. There is too much ad-hockery going on, we need professional managers. You need a person who is entrepreneurial, who is incisive, and who is a strategic thinker, who has a sense of the corporate world. Of course the issue is the university won’t pay for this sort of person (senior academic, University B’s Law School).

Whilst this senior academic subscribed to the view that the school needed a ‘leader and manager’ to steer the academic unit through its difficulties, other academics in this school contested this view, others vehemently protested his call for the unit to embrace corporatisation. Perhaps the underlying reason why this school adopted a defensive mode of adaptation was because this was its only viable option as its high levels of discord amongst staff meant that it could not agree on any other approach to dealing with its environmental challenges and its staff lacked the knowledge, skills and confidence to think of any more innovative solutions.

University C’s Law School University C is a gumtree university. Its main campus is located 15 km from the capital city in this state. University C is an archetypal gumtree university, established in the mid-1970s. Its founding academics were ‘young radicals’ committed to overturning the conservative, hierarchical rigidities of established academic norms, disciplinary boundaries, committee structures and bureaucratic decision-making processes prevalent in sandstone and redbrick universities. Many of its founding staff remain, devoting their entire academic careers striving to sustain its egalitarian, anti-establishment, interdisciplinary norms and values. There were three law faculties in this state. The other law faculties were located at a sandstone University and another at a private university. Each of these law schools focused on attracting a different type of undergraduate student. University C’s Law School attracted ‘second chance’, mature-age students with its critical approach to the law as a social institution, social justice and jurisprudence. The sandstone University’s Law Faculty had research and teaching strengths in commercial, property and taxation law and strong network links with large, prestigious law

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and accounting firms through alumni and company boards. These firms hired the law faculty’s graduates, provided donations and bequests and some staff accepted adjunct teaching appointments. School leavers from the state’s elite private schools were lured to the sandstone’s law faculty because they hoped to acquire wealth, power, social capital that flowed from graduating with a law degree from this faculty. The private university’s law faculty charged high tuition fees, so its students were also primarily drawn from the upper echelons of the middle class. This differentiation of student markets benefited University C’s Law School, as it meant that they were not directly competing for the same student cohort with the other law faculties in their state. While the small number of law faculties in the state ensured a scarcity of supply of law school places, demand always exceeded supply. The net effect of this situation was that University C’s Law Faculty was in a relatively privileged position in contrast to other academic units in this study and other units at its university. ‘We remain economically viable, so the Vice Chancellor is not about to shut us down. Yet departments like Political Science, Economics, Women’s Studies and Chinese, he has been threatening to shut those down’ (junior academic, Law School, University C). According to this junior academic the vice-chancellor was putting pressure on these units to be more corporate, to be more entrepreneurial, yet the law school was immune from these pressures and could afford to ignore these requests: It is all a matter of fear if you have enough money then you don’t have to be afraid of it because you can sit back and say no we are not changing anything. But if your whole survival is at risk then you are going to be afraid and then you are going to respond in whatever way, just to survive (junior academic, Law School, University C).

This junior academic remarked that the vice-chancellor was encouraging competition amongst academic units in the university arguing that this competitive ethos contravened the egalitarian, community ethos that the university had always stood for: The schools are becoming divisive and fighting over the very small pie instead of getting together and saying how can we make that very small pot bigger as a whole community. Or they are looking at the outside and saying well we may not get a larger share but we are going to ensure our survival and there is absolutely nothing about the whole community surviving (junior academic, Law School, University C).

University C’s Law School experienced a decline in public funding, yet this fall in income had minimal impact on the school’s operations. The dean, academics and administrators were reluctant to furnish details of the schools financial position, all that they were prepared to offer was that the school had experienced some reduction in public funding. University C’s Law School responded to these funding cuts by implementing a defensive mode of adaptation that mirrored Miles and Snow’s defender archetype, this decision was made by the dean in consultation with the academics. The key processes that University C’s Law School adopted to implement its defensive mode of adaptation focused on obtaining greater efficiency from its resources. Funding for the library was reduced resulting in fewer librarians and the discontinuation of

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journal subscriptions. Academics were not replaced when they left so teaching loads for those that remained increased; the number of elective subjects was reduced and class sizes were increased. The dean of University C’s Law School stated that the school had obtained some independent revenue, it earned $400,000 from the federal government’s attorney general’s department for a project investigating clinical legal education’, yet because the school only had a few academics (15 in 2001 when the case study was undertaken), it lacked the critical mass of academics to engage in multiple entrepreneurial activities such as developing new courses, new student cohorts or commercially sponsored research projects. According to the dean large law schools can take the risk of undertaking several entrepreneurial activities simultaneously but a small law school like University C’s cannot afford exposure to this sort of risk: If you are large enough you can generate entrepreneurial income and generate a portfolio of income sources of size, which means that if one of them is down the other one is likely to be up, which means that over all it is a reliable stream. We have from time to time generated outside sources of income but actually we can’t generate very many at any one time and they are therefore fragile, soft income. I don’t mind soft money as long as you can count on sustained flow and if you can then you can convert that money into that precious of all currencies additional colleagues . . . (dean, Law School, University C).

There was a group of academics at University C’s Law School who were committed to a social justice, egalitarian, anti-market ethos. The teaching and research work of this group of academics focused on critiquing the law and legal structures, they had no interest in pursuing entrepreneurial activities designed to focus on revenue generation, they resisted involvement with commercial markets. When the interviews were undertaken, this group of academics was the dominant coalition within University’s C’s Law School, so its norms and values held sway, the dean also subscribed to their position, and as noted the fiscal pressures on the unit were relatively mild, so they opted for a defensive mode of adaptation. Yet as a junior academic observed if the public funding for the unit was reduced even further, or a new dean was appointed ‘who did not share the same values as us, if we get someone more conservative that is just going to swallow the whole party line (views of university executives) about how we have to become more entrepreneurial’ then the unit could be forced to undertake more entrepreneurial activities, act more aggressively in its markets. In other words it could be forced to adopt a prospector mode of adaptation.

University D’s School of Biological Sciences University D is a sandstone university. Its main campus is situated within walking distance of the central business district in this state. It is an archetypal sandstone university: a wealthy, prestigious, establishment institution with strong networks with social elites; many of whom are alumni of this university and now hold powerful roles in the professions, commercial firms and government. In 2002 when the case study was conducted University D’s School of Biological Sciences had 85 staff, 35 academics and 50 administrators, laboratory and information communication

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technology staff. Its budget was AU$9 million with AU$4.6 million public funding for EFSTU approximately AU$3 million in ARC (Australian Research Council) research grants and a further 9% of its income from full-fee-paying domestic and international students. University D’s School of Biological Sciences experienced four significant external pressures: declining public funding, intensified competition for research grants, staff markets and competition from other academic units within University D offering similar courses to their programmes, reducing enrolments and eventually revenue generated from these programmes. Staff reported that they had experienced a steady reduction in public funding from 1997 onwards, although they were not prepared to provide precise figures, nor was this data publicly accessible.3 According to a senior administrator in the school, in the past the school had enjoyed considerable success in obtaining ARC research grants; yet in 2002 when the case study was undertaken they obtained fewer grants than in previous years. This administrator observed that the school had recently lost two high-profile marine biology researchers to other universities: ‘they had brought in millions of dollars worth of research grants and income from postgraduate students’. The school had earned substantial revenue from service teaching for courses in medicine, dentistry and nursing; however biological sciences staff were concerned that these academic units could develop their own biology courses and then the School of Biological Sciences would lose this revenue. In addition academics stated that microbiology, biochemistry and physiology and pharmacology had each begun teaching courses in molecular biology and biochemistry, threatening the School of Biological Sciences programmes. University D’s School of Biological Sciences comprised two distinct academic coalitions: research active and teachers, with strong tensions between the two that were exacerbated when the teaching loads of teaching academics were increased as a result of reduced public funding. University D’s School of Biological Sciences responded to these environmental pressures by adopting a defensive mode of adaptation; this decision was made by the head of school in consultation with senior academics and administrators. The adaptation processes the school pursued in its efforts to defend its position in its markets were aligned with Miles and Snow’s defender archetype, focusing on improving the unit’s efficiency in resource management. . . . ‘The first thing we have tried several times is to rationalise our teaching and cut a few of the marginal courses with smaller enrollments, a lot of people have said yes but then when it came to the crunch they said oh no, not mine’ (senior administrator, School of Biological Sciences, University D). ‘. . . there are twice as many students and we teach two or three times as many units of study, things have been divided up into small parts, sure that makes it more intensive, numbers of support staff, secretaries, technical and lab staff have been reduced (senior academic, School of Biological Sciences, University D). The head of school stated that the school had devoted more resources to marketing its programmes in an effort to attract more fee-paying domestic and international students to increase these revenue streams. According to a senior administrator, the school was too reliant on a single revenue stream, international fee-paying students: ‘if competition in our international catchment areas intensifies then we are going to

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be in deep trouble’. This administrator commented that if the school was to enhance its adaptive capacity it was crucial for it to diversify its revenue streams. The head of school stated that in order for the school to adapt to current and future environmental changes it needed to develop research projects in areas that were ‘commercially viable’ developing intellectual property and patents that generated revenue. Yet the head remarked that researchers in the school had only ‘limited activity in these ‘commercially viable’ research domains such as biotechnology and genetics, they tend to be more interested in ecology and environmental projects and those areas are not very attractive in the marketplace’. When the head was asked why this was the case the answer was: . . . there is more resistance to change than I realised before I became head. I have found that I am a bit concerned by how long it takes to change things but I also don’t think that we should rush change. I think that the present circumstances are going to last a while and we have to be careful that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, particularly with young staff and good value staff, we have got to make sure that we keep the flame. (head, School of Biological Sciences, University D).

University D’s Department of Civil Engineering University D’s Department of Civil Engineering experienced two key external environmental pressures, declining public funding and increased competition in its primary market – undergraduate students. Staff identified the decline in public funding from 1996 onwards as the primary external environmental pressure for the department. ‘In 1996 we had thirty academics, now (2002) we have twelve academics. We had an aging cohort of academics who have retired, resigned or moved elsewhere and because of the reduced public funding there has not been an opportunity to replace those people which unfortunately might be seen as a department in decline’ (head of department, Civil Engineering, University D). In 2002 the department’s revenue was AU$4 million; again it was not possible to obtain data on the department’s budget over the previous years. Although a junior academic from this department stated that ‘our budget has I think halved in the last 5 years along with the number of academic staff, our salary bill for the department is bigger than the amount of money that we get in, so that does not bode well for the future’ (junior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University D). Civil engineering academic staff commented that competition in undergraduate student markets was intensifying. Staff asserted that the undergraduate market for engineering in this state was saturated because six universities were offering very similar engineering programmes. University D‘s civil engineering department maintained its undergraduate student numbers because it was a sandstone university. However according to staff this market would not grow because comparatively low salaries and a difficult curriculum with few options made engineering less attractive than some other undergraduate courses. Staff reported that they were unable to attract domestic fee-paying students to the civil engineering course because the tertiary entrance cut-off score was too low, if students missed out on a place in

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civil engineering at University D they would enrol in similar courses at another university in the state. According to staff at University D’s Department of Civil Engineering it was difficult to attract international students to civil engineering, although 10% of its postgraduate coursework cohort were full-fee-paying international students. Staff indicated that they would like to have a larger postgraduate student cohort however it was difficult to encourage students to undertake postgraduate study because potential students regarded Master of Business Administration qualifications as enhancing their competitive position in employment markets more than postgraduate engineering qualifications. When analysing the data from University D’s Department of Civil Engineering it was evident that this department’s response to its environmental pressures was situated at the boundary between Miles and Snow’s defender archetype and the reactor archetype. It potentially could have been classified as a reactor because several academics commented that ‘there was no leadership, no strategic planning, no meetings, no communication and no decision-making, we have no vision, no direction we just stumble along’ (junior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University D). The interview with the head of department revealed an individual insecure in his position and somewhat overwhelmed by the problems that the academic unit faced. When interviewed the head of department mentioned that he had sought the approval of the other academics before proposing that he become head of the department. The head of department expressed concern that ‘because he had to lay off (terminate the employment) some administrators that this research project and the interviews could be perceived as part of this process’. The head was suspicious about whether I was ‘conducting a genuine research project’ or ‘had I been sent from the Vice Chancellor to investigate them’. Eventually I classified University D’s Department of Civil Engineering as a defender because academics in the unit were undertaking initiatives (processes) designed to assist the unit to adapt to its environmental pressures and survive. These included a structural engineering centre that generated AU$750,000 in consultancy fees in work undertaken for government departments such as the Roads and Traffic Authority, Public Works and Maritime Services and the Electricity Authority. It had a masters coursework programme in project management delivered online that generated student fee income. It also had a foundation that was trying to obtain commercial sponsorships for research and donations from firms. Yet it is extremely important to note that the head of department actually played no role in planning, implementing or sustaining any of these adaptive initiatives; it was the academics in the department that were responsible for all of these things. This point challenges Miles and Snow’s contention that it is managers that are responsible for making the strategic choice of how an organisation will adapt to environmental pressures and co-ordinating all of the administrative and engineering solutions to achieve the organisation’s strategic goals. Yet it is important to note that University D’s Department of Civil Engineering was in a tenuous and vulnerable position, it could easily tip over to become a reactor. Academics in the department commented that the reduction in staff numbers meant that the department lacked the critical mass of researchers necessary to undertake large-scale projects; ‘those that have survived

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the cuts have huge teaching loads, they don’t have the time or energy to do research’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University D). Several academics noted that the revenue from consultancy was unreliable, it could easily ‘evaporate’; ‘if academics doing consultancy work left the department loses this revenue, also if the individual academics decide they want to keep the consultancy income rather than permitting it to be added to the department’s general revenue then the department’s deficit will be substantial’ (junior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University D). An administrator said ‘we are just treading water at the moment, if the current changes we could very easily be wiped out’. In contrast a senior administrator was confident that the lack of interference from central administration and the university executive meant that the department was in a strong position, ‘if they were worried about us, if we were in deficit or something they would have intervened’ (senior administrator, Department of Civil Engineering, University D). It is interesting to observe that three of the five academic units in this study that chose a defensive mode of adaptation were law schools. This raises the issue of whether there is a connection between an academic unit’s discipline and how it responds to environmental pressures? Do law schools choose defensive modes of adaptation, opting for traditional, conservative modes of operating because they are inherently conservative and therefore likely to display path-dependency and a tendency to resist change? While this may seem an obvious conclusion, caution is urged before accepting this proposition. Many members of the Australian legal profession are powerful and wealthy elites with strong social capital, many of them are of a conservative ilk (Bourdieu, 1986; Gilding, 2004; James, 2004). Yet not all Australian lawyers fit this stereotype. Nor can it be assumed that Australian law schools share this conservatism and would therefore opt for a defensive mode of adaptation, displaying path-dependent, traditional responses to change and resisting entrepreneurialism. James (2004), Parker and Goldsmith (1998) note that there is an entrenched tension in Australian law schools, they identify two factions with antithetical norms and values. One group, some legal academics in this study referred to them as ‘black letter lawyers’ have conservative, utilitarian, corporate views of the law; they see the role of law schools as ‘training the next generation of practitioners, whose job it is to go out there, rack up huge billable hours, earn a huge profit for their firm, and a tidy performance bonus for themselves’ (senior academic, Law School, University C). Another group of legal academics have a more humanitarian view of the law; they define the role of a law school as being distinct from the commercial imperatives of city firms arguing that law schools should explore issues of legal theory and social justice. The case studies of each of these law faculties suggest that these units pursued a defensive mode of adaptation because the executive managers of the unit did not want to alienate the dominant coalition of academics in these law faculties who held a liberal, anti-market and anti-entrepreneurial ethos. These academics were opposed to their academic unit pursuing a prospector mode of adaptation precisely because they perceived it as being too closely aligned with the norms and values of corporate conservative legal professionals.

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Yet there was another factor at play in these case studies. Whilst the primary reason why these academic units adopted a defensive mode of adaptation was because the dominant coalition of academics in these academic units held ideological objections to marketisation and entrepreneurialism, a secondary reason for selecting a defensive mode of adaptation was that they did not want their academic units to take risks pursuing teaching or research that differed from what they had done in the past, or what other academic units in their discipline or geographic region were doing. In other words each of the academic units using a defender mode of adaptation to environmental pressures displayed a significant level of path-dependency and mimetic isomorphism (copying strategies and actions of other academic units that they deemed had successfully adapted). There was some level of institutionalisation of normative patterns of structuring academic units, making decisions within the units and of the nature of those decisions. In may seem paradoxical but in effect these academics were radical/conservatives, their anti-marketisation, anticorporatisation views had become an orthodox ideology, pursued with the same hegemonic zeal as the neo-liberal agendas that they so despised. Given that each academic unit was situated in a turbulent, complex environment, this lack of differentiation in strategies and forms of organising and operating these units could potentially prove problematic; Chapter 8 discusses this and other conclusions and implications stemming from these case studies.

Notes 1. Junior academics and administrators were especially concerned about commenting on how decisions were made in their academic unit. Some were fearful that if they spoke frankly they would lose their jobs, so they were reassured that none of their comments would be directly attributed to them. 2. The Faculty of Information Technology at University D is not included here because the case study is incomplete. I was not granted permission to interview staff and therefore insufficient data were obtained to evaluate the academic unit’s response to its environment. 3. Data on funding that is publicly accessible are not disaggregated to the school level.

Chapter 5

Prospectors

Two academic units employed a prospector mode of adaptation to their environmental pressures: University A’s School of Information Technology and University D’s Law Faculty. Case studies exploring why and how these units engaged in a prospector mode of adaptation follow. These case studies of units adopting a prospector mode of adaptation stand in stark contrast to those of academic units adopting a defender mode of adaptation. As discussed in the previous chapter defender academic units displayed a passive engagement with their operating environments. Defenders allowed changes in their environments to occur and then worked out strategies and processes to deal with these changes. In contrast prospectors had a proactive engagement with their environments. Prospectors shaped changes in their environments, developing new markets and entrepreneurial teaching, research and consulting activities. These proactive actions generated independent revenue that enabled these units to be financially self-reliant, protecting these units from the potential negative effects of declining levels of public funding. A key attribute of prospector units illustrated in the case studies is their external spatial orientation. Prospector units devoted time, money and staff expertise to monitoring their external markets, especially the activities of competitors in their core markets. Prospectors also developed network alliances with firms that provided sponsorships for their teaching and research and purchased courses and consultancy expertise. Prospectors’ external spatial orientation and their open and active engagement with their environments enabled them to identify and anticipate changes in their environments before other academic units operating in the same markets; this gave these units a ‘first mover advantage’ in their staff, student and research markets.

University A’s School of Information Technology From its inception in the late 1980s University A’s School of Information Technology was atypical of the other academic units in this study.1 It had an external orientation, close affiliations with commercial firms and an entrepreneurial focus. Its unusual origins are a key reason why it pursued a prospector mode of adaptation D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_5, 

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to environmental pressures. It was established in the late 1980s when the managing director of IBM Australia approached University A’s vice-chancellor with the idea of forming a partnership between his company, University A and another Australian university to develop a new degree that enabled students to develop information technology solutions for business problems. As negotiations progressed between IBM and University A to create the School of Information Technology, other commercial firms also became sponsors of the school including BHP, Coles Myer (now owned by Wesfarmers), NEC, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Shell, Esso, Andersen Consulting and Boston Consulting. Later other Australian universities of technology became involved in the project. A steering committee comprising representatives from the university’s central administration and faculty of information technology supervised the establishment of the school. However, after a few years the steering committee delegated authority for operational decisions to the head of the school; he was allowed to negotiate with private enterprise firms for sponsorships for research and teaching. The head of school described how he had recruited people from commercial firms to work as academics in the school and why they found the idea of an academic career appealing: Whereas a business environment is well paid, they own you seven days a week and they will spit you out when you are fifty. I have employed a couple of people who have been spat out, finance director level who now work for us. They say “its great to have a role in life, my career was well paid for twenty years but I am now too expensive for these firms.” I don’t need to convince people that teaching young people is fun and having the freedom to do research, to create new knowledge is exciting and valuable, so they want to come . . . (head, School of Information Technology, University A).

These academics recruited from private enterprise firms had a wealth of practical expertise in their fields that they were eager to share with students. They maintained their links with commercial firms and these firms were actively engaged in many facets of the school’s work including providing experts to deliver specialist lectures, acting as research partners, providing internships for students, acting as mentors for students, assisting students to obtain employment in their firms upon completion of their degrees. These academics had a different mindset from many traditional Australian academics. They had an entrepreneurial ethos and an external orientation. They actively engaged with commercial firms and put time and effort into scanning student and research funding markets looking for opportunities to develop new student markets and identify potential commercial research partners. They were keen to undertake entrepreneurial activities to generate revenue rather than rely on public funding. A junior academic at University A’s School of Information Technology articulated this view: ‘My first year, and it is one of the smallest first years, has about 150 students, most of whom pay fees, so most of us are paying for ourselves and are quite happy with this set of rules for the game’. In contrast some academics in units that chose more passive, reactive responses to environmental pressures displayed fear, suspicion and disapproval of the values, norms and mores of private enterprise firms, viewing these firms as ‘the other’, they refused to engage with

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these firms or accept the notion of the marketisation of higher education. This ‘antimarketisation/entrepreneurialism’ attitude held by academics in reactive academic units is explored in more depth in Chapter 7. University A’s School of Information Technology was closely aligned with Miles and Snow’s prospector archetype. It was proactively engaged with its environment, its dynamic innovations shaped the nature of its environment. To borrow from Miles and Snow’s lexicon it redefined ‘its product/market domain, it was a first mover in its markets’. The case study of this unit was undertaken in 1999; that year the school received approximately AU$800,000 in sponsorship from commercial firms for scholarships for students studying its undergraduate course. It also received approximately AU$150,000 in sponsorships for students enrolled in its master’s coursework degree. These firms also contributed ‘several hundred thousand dollars’ as partners on collaborative research projects on neural networks, data mining and data warehousing conducted by academics in the school. The head of University A’s School of Information Technology stated that the school earned ‘a significant amount of revenue’ from international undergraduate students and from its postgraduate coursework students, although neither the head nor staff were prepared to reveal precisely how much revenue was earned from fee-paying students. A senior administrator in the school stated ‘we are not short of money because we are overflowing with students, particularly overseas students who provide vast sums of money’. A senior academic at University A’s School of Information Technology described the situation as ‘an embarrassment of riches’. Key features of University A’s School of Information Technology’s approach to entrepreneurialism was that it had diversified its independent revenue streams; if income generated from one revenue stream declined, that income could be substituted with revenue from another income stream. Revenue raised from independent sources gave the unit self-reliance and a degree of autonomy from central administrators and university executives in its decision making. Income generated from independent sources provided ‘slack resources’, a buffer that enabled the school to take calculated risks offering new courses such as its undergraduate programme in multimedia and expanding the number of places available for full-fee-paying international students in its courses (staff in the school stated that the costs of teaching international students were greater than domestic students because they needed intensive academic and language support and additional staff were required to provide these services). The head of the school expressed pride in his school’s entrepreneurial capacities, he stated that ‘he had a constant stream of academics from top schools in the United States seeking advice on how to get a million bucks a year out of their local industries to sponsor undergraduate degrees’. When asked whether the school undertook any benchmarking activities, he said this was impossible because there is no one in our league’. A junior academic remarked that the head of school ‘doesn’t spend time on stupid committees and institutional politics he is out and about schmoozing the fat cats at the big end of town and we go with him and help out when we can’. In fact when asked what the school’s relationship with university executives was the head of school claimed that although the vice-chancellor’s group was pleased that

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the school was earning so much revenue ‘and could stand on its own two feet’ it was criticised for ‘being too commercial’ and for its lack of success in producing traditional research outputs, ARC grants, books and journal articles. The head of school remarked: . . . this sort of comment gets up my nose we can’t be all things to all men, either we are . . . good at bringing in . . . of money and producing applied research with our industry partners, research that industry needs and wants or we do the traditional academic thing and get ARC grants and write books and journal articles and they are only written for other academics, they have no value in the real world (Head of School of Information Technology, University A).

This comment illustrates how rapidly academic units environments can change. In 1999, when this case study was undertaken an academic unit is criticised for ‘being too commercial’, fast-forward by a decade; commercialism and entrepreneurialism are the oft-repeated mantras of many vice-chancellors and their deputies. These comments by the head of school touch on an issue of great importance to many heads of academic units concerning how to enhance their units’ adaptive capacities. Namely, that it is difficult to find academics with the capacity to undertake entrepreneurial commercially oriented applied research and also produce high calibre traditional academic research outputs, as the two tasks seem to require contradictory skill sets. Academics engaged in entrepreneurial research with commercial partners and sponsors require high level networking communication and interpersonal skills. Entrepreneurial researchers need to find commercial partners and then negotiate through the university’s and partner firms’ plethora of legal and regulatory frameworks. This type of work calls for someone with an extraverted outlook, someone who is prepared to take risks and is confident to explore new territory. In contrast, producing stellar quality traditional academic research can be solitary, insular, almost monastic work. It is almost as if contemporary academic units need two types of academics, yet few units have the fiscal resources to enable them to indulge in such a luxury. Other distinctive characteristics of University A’s School of Information Technology’s prospector approach to adaptation were that it had an informal organisational culture, little hierarchy, collaborative approaches to decision making and did not engage in formal modes of strategic planning. Its lack of formality and shunning of bureaucratic forms of decision making were evident in its communication methods. Several staff in the school stated that they don’t use email; we don’t have formal staff meetings with minutes, agendas, office bearers, etc. The head of school said that ‘the more people you can involve in decision making the more likely your decision is going to succeed’. So there were no formal staff meetings instead it was de rigueur that everybody went with the head of school ‘to the staff club for lunch every Friday and over a couple of bottles of red wine, they will slide up to you and say you got it wrong and I will say well what do you think, it is not confrontational because it is a neutral atmosphere’. The head of school commented that academics in the school ‘turn up whenever they feel like it that is fine because I know that they deliver the lectures, they work weekends and nights they are professionals that is why they became academics they don’t want someone saying be here at seven for

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the big meeting and then stay until seven for the big cocktail party’. The head of University A’s School of Information Technology was most emphatic when he said ‘strategic planning is wrong, planning will never work . . . it’s a clumsy word but its called situatedness, what you do is react to the environment around you, you get on with it, here I am up to my neck in alligators what do I do, look up the plan or do I start to swim, you actually deal with the environment around you, you make a decision’. One of the challenges faced by the school was that some firms that had initially provided sponsorship for the school withdrew their sponsorship or reduced their scholarships, so replacement sponsors and additional funding was required. Another challenge that the school faced was that there was a shortage of people with expertise in the school’s fields of cognate knowledge so firms providing funding for the school ‘were constantly trying to poach the school’s academic staff and even tried enticing its students with telephone number like salaries’ (head, School of Information Technology, University A). The head of school continued, I can’t match those numbers so I have to work damned hard to make sure that the team is happy and comfortable, to motivate staff. I can’t give them a wad of cash but I do make sure that this is a great place to work, that people enjoy coming to work, that is why we have so many parties, and we all go off to the staff club every Friday. We have flexible work arrangements. You want to work from home, sure no worries, you want to go to Stern in New York for two months, fine off you go, fulfill your life, be exciting. You do the time. You teach hundreds of students. You deserve the rewards. You want a mobile phone or a new computer, here you are. You want to go to a conference in Hawaii off you go, . . . (head, School of Information Technology, University A).

Although some contemporary workplaces employing professional knowledge workers have adopted these sorts of workplace reforms as their norm: flexibility, self-management, valuing workers’ contributions, acknowledging diversity of work styles. It was unusual for an academic unit in an Australian university to have adopted these types of approaches to the human resource management of academics in 1999; indeed in some Australian universities they would still be considered dangerously progressive. In concluding this case study we note that University A’s School of Information Technology’s prospector mode of adaptation involved innovator and first mover strategies and processes in each of Miles and Snow’s core domains: the entrepreneurial, administrative and engineering problems. We noted that the school was proactively entrepreneurial, aggressively opening up new student, research and consultancy markets, it had multiple revenue streams and was prepared to take risks on new ventures without expecting them to be immediately profitable. The school’s organisational structures were flexible and flat; the head of school made decisions in broad and open consultation with academic and administrative staff. There was little formality and few bureaucratic and hierarchical power structures within the school. The school was able to capitalise on its unique expertise in using information technology for business problems, the school used its web page for marketing its courses and research expertise and formed short-term research project teams with industry experts using its expertise in information communication technologies to

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assist data sharing, communication and collaboration between research partners. In many respects the school seemed to be organised and operate like a Castellan network enterprise (Castells, 2000, 2000b). Although the case study was undertaken a decade ago, in 1999, the School of Information Technology’s approach to adaptation was ahead of its time and many contemporary academic units would be keen to emulate its entrepreneurial successes. Yet we can also suggest that a decade later when performance management, key performance indicators and accountability have become entrenched mores in Australian universities few deans or heads of academic units would be ‘allowed to get away with maverick counter-cultural’ behaviour such as refusing to undertake strategic planning.

University D’s Law Faculty University D is a sandstone university. Its Law Faculty had traditionally enjoyed its position as the dominant law faculty in its state. It had a long-established strength in postgraduate coursework programmes and was the law school of first choice for school leavers from elite private schools in its state. The case study of University D’s Law faculty was undertaken in 2002; at that time it had adopted a prospector mode of adaptation: it had an external orientation, it was actively scanning its environment to develop new student and research funding markets and it was earning significant amounts of independent revenue. Details of the processes University D’s Law Faculty adopted in pursuing its prospector mode of adaptation follow. This case study revealed that University D’s Law Faculty had not always adopted a prospector mode of adaptation, traditionally it was a defensive academic unit. So it is interesting to explore why and how this change occurred. A professor from University D’s Law Faculty stated that ‘the faculty was traditionally one of the more sclerotic and least responsive to change of those that I know about in the Australian environment’. The dean commented that ‘faculties in old distinguished institutions fall into a classic trap of complacency, academics have a substantial stake in the institution’s history they view themselves as the guardians of the institution’s standards and values, this can make them insular, it is all too easy to go into decline, how many sandstone faculties do you know that are by no means the best in their discipline’. The dean added that this insular, parochial focus and misplaced perception of the faculty’s performance and standing was compounded by cultural divisions between academics in the faculty: I think that it is very important to realise what this faculty has accomplished in the past, to say this faculty has been great precisely because it has continued to speak to the needs of the moment and when it has ceased doing that has tended to be the times when it has got trapped in in-fighting and recriminations and inward looking approaches that have been the death of its contribution rather than the heart of its contribution. It used to be a faculty where we had real trouble working together. We have got to be moving forward with the same rigour and commitment to intellectual contribution that we have always had but that is going to take different forms from decade to decade (Dean, Law Faculty, University D).

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The dean’s comments on factional tensions within the faculty were supported by a professor who observed that ‘there had been a distinct lack of collegiality and cohesion in this faculty, the faculty was atomised, senior professors were at war with each other, that is no longer a feature of the politics of this place’. This situation was made even worse from 1996 when the faculty had to endure a significant reduction in public funding. According to a professor ‘the faculty was in deficit for 5 years, it had three million dollars in reserve which was being run down at a very rapid rate, we were going broke very rapidly, we knew we had to get the recurrent budget back into balance which we have now done’. A new dean was appointed and it is interesting to note that he was an external hire so he had no affiliations or allegiances to any particular faction of academics within the faculty. Yet contrary to the literature on transformational leadership (Bass, 1985; Bass & Avolio, 1990; Bass & Riggio, 2006) and Miles and Snow’s strategic choice adaptation model, the dean was not a heroic white knight riding in on his trusty stallion to avert this ‘crisis’ at University D’s Law Faculty. Instead the dean adopted a distributed or collegial approach to leadership (Bolden, Petrov, & Gosling, 2009; Gronn, 2002; Lumby, 2003) to solve the faculty’s financial problems. The dean held a series of forums for all academics in the faculty; at these meetings he told the academics about the details of the budget deficit. ‘He told us that if we did not do something to turn this situation around then there would be five to eight fewer colleagues in this building. Then he asked us to think of some strategies to fix this problem’ (professor, Law Faculty, University D). Fear and self-interest can be powerful motivators so the academics at University D’s Law Faculty put down their weapons and started to work together to think of ways that they could bring the faculty out of deficit and save their jobs. Academics reported that these debates were heated: It went to a vote but eventually we decided that we would take full-fee paying undergraduates and expand our full-fee paying postgraduate coursework programs; it was a huge cultural shift many academics in the faculty were opposed to these moves on equity grounds. The other thing that we all realised is that we were all going to have to work a lot harder, class sizes would increase and we would need to try and bring in more cash. It is quite atypical but at this time we also abandoned large lectures, we don’t have the 500 in a lecture theatre that other faculties have, we moved to small interactive classes, 25 or 30 in compulsory units and maybe 60 in optional units. This was a good move because we have won some awards and got some money back because the quality of our teaching has improved. So we as a group traded off smaller classes, traded off our working hours, we agreed to take on more hours of teaching (senior academic, Law Faculty, University D).

Another senior academic stated that the academics in the faculty eventually reached a compromise: that the additional revenue generated from postgraduate coursework programmes would be used to provide scholarships for undergraduate students from low socio-economic groups. According to this professor: To pacify the ‘lefties’ we decided to price our postgraduate coursework degrees, like airline tickets: so the purely commercial programs; tax and corporate law, the big firms pay these fees so virtually it doesn’t matter how much we charge for these programs they will pay it. Then our mid price courses are inter-disciplinary ones like our Master of Criminology and at the lower end where people are less well paid, social worker types we price at the lowest

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University D’s Law Faculty undertook market research and direct communication and networking with legal practitioners to identify their needs for postgraduate coursework programmes and their preferences for mode and location of delivery. They used this information to expand the number of postgraduate coursework programmes they offered and to implement more flexible modes of delivery of these programmes; several tax and corporate law courses were customised for particular firms and delivered on site. These strategies for expanding its postgraduate coursework programmes proved successful. In 2002, the year the case study was undertaken, University D’s Law Faculty had more than 1,000 full-fee-paying postgraduate coursework students; these programmes generated more than two million dollars in revenue. According to a professor ‘we are the dominant player in postgraduate law courses in Australia we have more than 40% of the market’. University D’s Law Faculty also generated approximately AU$500,000 per year from full-feepaying domestic and international undergraduate students2 and further revenue from continuing legal education courses and summer schools. Another adaptation strategy that University D’s Law Faculty adopted to increase its independent revenue was to deliver programmes offshore, in Germany, Vietnam and China. At the time of interview its offshore activities were not generating substantial revenue; however staff were confident that the risks that it had taken in entering these offshore markets would eventually be financially successful. Senior administrators and academics were working to strengthen networks that would bolster offshore programmes. Administrative staff also redeveloped the faculty’s web page as market research had indicated that this was a major source of information for potential international students. Academics and administrators undertook networking and fundraising with firms and alumni in Australia. The dean (who came from offshore) observed that ‘when I first came to Australia I was told that there was not a culture of giving to the university and that is true but I actually think that the worse problem is a lack of a culture of asking’. He added that ‘you can’t just ask for money for general operating funds, you have to ask for money for specific academic goals and these have to dovetail with reasons for people’s commitment to the faculty’. The dean had proved to be adept at fundraising as the faculty had several sponsored professorial chairs and large bequests and donations that were used to furnish rooms and provide library resources. According to a professor in the past the faculty had been subjected to ‘barriers of antiquated and overly rigid command and control lines of authority from the upper echelons of the university that impeded us but now we enjoy considerable autonomy they are satisfied that we are well managed, this is good because now we have the flexibility to take up opportunities without waiting ages for approval for something from a committee’. This view was echoed by a junior academic who said ‘we are pretty autonomous partly because we are financially quite independent’ (junior academic, Law Faculty, University D). University D’s Law Faculty did not use a formalised strategic planning process to determine how it would respond to its changing operating environment. In fact when

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the dean was asked about his views on the role of strategic planning in assisting academic units to adjust to environmental pressures he yelled into the microphone: True strategic planning is doing something it is an outcome, not a process, a strategic plan should not just be a document that tries to touch all bases, be all things to all men, if it is it will be useless it will just sit on a shelf. True strategic planning is about making decisions about where you want to end up and deciding how you want to get there, making it clear what your priorities are (Dean, Law Faculty, University D).

The dean’s volatile reaction suggested that I had hit a raw nerve. This reaction is interesting because it was very similar to the reaction of the head of University A’s School of Information Technology, the other academic unit in this study that adopted a prospector mode of adaptation. This suggests that traditional approaches to strategic planning whereby organisations undertake environmental scanning and then undertake a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis are incompatible with a prospector mode of adaptation. This is probably because organisations adopting a prospector mode of adaptation need high levels of flexibility and manoeuvrability, they need to be able to quickly change direction as market conditions change: develop a new course, commence delivery of a course for a new client, submit a tender proposal for consultancy funding, find commercial partners for research projects or replace commercial partners when they can no longer provide funding promised in initial contracts. This situation points to the age-old anomaly of strategic planning: that many organisations’ environments are dynamic, yet most forms of strategic planning are static, linear processes. In a university setting, the limitations of traditional linear and bureaucratic approaches to strategic planning are compounded as older institutions often harbour a minefield of political factions. In these types of institutions the development phase of strategic planning can often be slow and cumbersome as various stakeholders try to broker a deal that accommodates competing objectives; by the time these compromises are reached environmental conditions have usually changed: a new competitor has been awarded the consultancy project, another provider has successfully tendered for a course, rendering the strategic plan obsolete and irrelevant. In concluding this case study we note that University D’s Law Faculty’s prospector mode of adaptation involved proactive engagement with its external environment, both its management and staff had an external orientation, they were constantly scanning their markets, looking for opportunities to develop new entrepreneurial activities and monitoring the activities of rival academic units in their markets. As with the other prospector unit in this study, University A’s School of Information Systems, University D’s Law Faculty was prepared to take risks. At the time the case study was undertaken University D’s Law Faculty had only recently commenced offshore delivery of courses in Germany, China and Vietnam; these activities were not immediately profitable yet the faculty continued to support them by cross-subsidising them from other revenue streams, domestic and international onshore full-fee-paying students. Both prospecting academic units devoted substantial resources, time, money and space to marketing themselves and to forming and maintaining network alliances with key stakeholders, firms that could provide funding or become clients for teaching, alumni that would provide

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grants and bequests, international student recruitment agents and potential domestic students and school leavers’ parents. Yet there were key differences between the two units in this study that pursued a prospector mode of adaptation; while University A’s School of Information Technology had a flat matrix network type structure with an informal culture and methods of communication, University D’s Law Faculty maintained a traditional vertical hierarchical structure and the power dynamics implicit in such a structure and their culture was more conservative, this was a manifestation of the unit’s discipline and its institutional type. Law faculties are often conservative and those situated in old elite university even more so than others. The contrast between the two prospector units’ structures and cultures are interesting to note because they suggest that academic units can undertake similar strategies and processes for a prospecting mode of adaptation within diverse organisational structural and cultural frameworks. Or to put it more crudely there is no single template that an academic unit needs to follow in order to adopt a prospector mode of adaptation.

Notes 1. This academic unit had a unique name, so a pseudonym has been adopted so that the unit’s identity remains confidential and the participants in the study remain anonymous. 2. In its 2008 budget the Australian federal government announced in its budget that Australian public universities could no longer charge domestic undergraduates tuition fees removing a lucrative revenue stream for these institutions.

Chapter 6

Analysers

University A, Department of Civil Engineering The case study of University A’s Department of Civil Engineering was undertaken in 1999. At this time, the main environmental pressure that this department encountered was reduced public funding. The head of department stated that prior to 1996 the department received 90% of its funding for teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students from the federal government. By 1999, federal government funding for teaching comprised only 40% of the department’s revenue. The department experienced some other pressures as well; details follow. When academics were asked to identify the department’s current priorities, several stated that the department’s key priority was ‘simply to survive’, ‘to still be in existence in 5 years’ time (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). Engineering is going through a tough time and Civil Engineering is going through an even tougher time because our undergraduate numbers are decreasing, therefore our budget is decreasing, we have lost several academics over the last three to four years and that trend is likely to continue if we don’t find some way of finding some more non government funded money to support them, we are in survival mode . . . (senior academic, University A’s Department of Civil Engineering).

A senior academic provided details on the contraction of student enrolments and its consequences for staff: From 1996 to 1999 we have lost 10 academics we have gone from 33 to 23. In 1996 we took in about 80 to 100 students into second year, this year we only had about 60. We closed down a lot of our Masters coursework subjects because we only had a few students in each one. We basically lost 50 or 60 EFSTU (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A).

The resource manager said that his greatest challenge ‘was remaining buoyant and positive while you are planning staff reductions, that sense of yes we are going somewhere and motivating staff’. University A’s Department of Civil Engineering also had reduced levels of income as a consequence of the privatisation of government infrastructure organisations for water and electricity. When these organisations were government owned D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_6, 

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and operated they worked with the department as sponsors and partners on research projects and paid tuition fees for their employees to undertake masters coursework degrees. However when these infrastructure utilities were sold to commercial firms, these firms were not interested in undertaking research and development projects nor were they willing to pay tuition fees for their employees to undertake masters courses. Several staff offered reflections on how this situation was affecting them. A senior academic commented that there were high levels of anxiety and fear amongst academics and administrators ‘because of the uncertainty of our position’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). When asked to elaborate on this point, he added ‘the uncertainty revolves around our funding and what our competitors are going to do and whether or not the department will exist in the future, whether we will have a job’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). In a similar vein another senior academic said ‘morale among the academics is very low, we are being asked to work harder and smarter by our head of department and by the vice chancellor’s men but we are already working beyond our capacity’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). A further challenge for University A’s Department of Civil Engineering that arose as a result of its financial difficulties was that it had traditionally operated on two campuses of the university. Staff reported that there was a different culture and set of values amongst the academics at these two locations. Academics at one location focused on teaching while academics at the department’s other campus focused on research. University executives had recently forced an amalgamation of these two parts of the department. An associate professor noted that this forced merger had exacerbated tensions between the staff, adding that it was an impractical decision because lectures and laboratory classes were still held at both locations; staff and some students had to travel between the two locations. A senior academic identified another issue for the department: undergraduate students did a common first year engineering course and then specialised in their second year selecting between chemical, mechanical, electrical and civil engineering. According to this senior academic ‘this turned some potential students off, they were annoyed that they had to waste their time doing irrelevant subjects so they would rather go to University X or University Y where they could go straight into first year civil engineering’. An associate professor noted that a consequence of this structural arrangement was that our department ‘did not devote much time or money to marketing to attract potential first year students because they could go off and do mechanical engineering anyway’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). University A’s Department of Civil Engineering responded to these environmental pressures by adopting an analyser mode of adaptation. The decision to pursue an analyser mode of adaptation was made by the head of the department and a senior management team comprised of academics and administrators; academics were consulted as part of the decision-making process. The head of this department, academics and administrators reported that strategic planning played a key part in

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the department’s decision to pursue an analyser mode of adaptation. The head of department described the department’s approach to strategic planning: Last year we started to move towards the development of our quality manual and we developed a teaching strategy. This year we went through a formal process. First we developed a mission, vision and direction statement that took several months to do and all of the staff were involved in that. Then we set up an industrial advice committee and that committee had input into our vision, mission and objectives statements. Once we got our vision, mission and objective statements down we already had our teaching strategy so we incorporated that. Presently we are working on our research strategy and that is essentially a funding strategy because that is the problem that we have got in terms of maintaining our laboratories and the staff are all involved in that (Head of Department of Civil Engineering, University A).

A senior academic offered further insights into the department’s decision-making processes for strategic planning. He said that a key part of this process was environmental scanning and monitoring of how other departments of civil engineering in Australian universities were operating: we wanted to find out how they were structured, the types of courses they offered, who their students were, the types of research projects they undertook and where they obtained funding for research. ‘At various times we are all on the look out at what others are doing and thinking about whether we can do something like that’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). This statement indicates that this academic unit’s decision-making process for adaptation involved mimetic isomorphism: modelling its adaptation strategies on those of other organisations that it considered to be performing well (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983, p. 151). This point is explored further in Chapter 8. As a consequence of its environmental scanning and monitoring activities University A’s Department of Civil Engineering was restructured. The resource manager explained that the department decided to employ a ‘planetary like structure with a core nucleus and then various specialist research centres orbiting around the nucleus’ (Resource Manager, University A’s, Department of Civil Engineering). The department adopted this structure because it was considered to be the optimal structure for pursuing its chosen mode of adaptation to its environmental pressures, an analyser mode of adaptation. Miles and Snow stated that: A true Analyzer is an organization that minimizes risk while maximizing the opportunity for profits, that is, an experienced Analyzer combines the strength of both the Prospector and the Defender into a single system. Thus, the word that best describes the Analyzer’s adaptive approach is balance (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 68).

This department’s approach to adaptation closely matched Miles and Snow’s archetype of an analyser organisation. It combined the defender and prospector modes of adaptation. As previous chapters noted, organisations pursuing a prospector mode of adaptation and the defender mode of adaptation have opposing goals and employ divergent actions. The prospector mode of adaptation is expansionist; it is entrepreneurial and involves risk taking, while the defender mode of adaptation involves a narrow domain of operations. Defenders seek stability, focusing on

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enhancing the efficiency of their operations. The department’s diversified structure enabled it to simultaneously pursue these contradictory goals of prospecting and defending. The department’s ‘nucleus’ pursued a defender mode of adaptation, continuing to service its core undergraduate and postgraduate student markets. Whilst its ‘satellite’ research centres in catchment hydrology, transport studies, maritime research and timber engineering adopted a prospector mode of adaptation, operating as entrepreneurial commercially oriented research organisations competing against other research centres for funding for projects, taking risks developing new technologies and products in competitive markets. However, University A’s Department of Civil Engineering had one key difference from Miles and Snow’s archetypal analyser organisation. Miles and Snow suggest that most organisations using an analyser mode of adaptation obtain the major portion of their revenue from their stable market and obtain only a minor portion of their funding from their more volatile markets (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 70). This situation was reversed for University A’s Department of Civil Engineering. In 1999, the year of the case study University A’s Department of Civil Engineering had a total budget of slightly over AU$10 million; AU$3.7 million of this amount came from government funding for teaching and research, with the remaining AU$6.5 million generated by its satellite research centres (Resource Manager and Head of Department of Civil Engineering, University A). Whilst this was a healthy financial position in the short term, the head of department and the resource manager expressed concern that the department may not be able to sustain this revenue over the long term, because the revenue from the research centres was obtained for projects with fixed completion dates (commonly 3 years). Departmental managers also expressed concern that it was likely that public funding for teaching could decline even further. Under these circumstances fiscal prudence was the key priority for this department. Expenditure on equipment was reduced, staff numbers were reduced and fewer laboratory classes were conducted. The head of the department stated the university planned to start charging the department for using space for teaching and offices, electricity, water, telephones and computers. The head reported that they hoped to generate additional revenue by attracting full-feepaying international students (the department had few international students at the time of the case study) and by placing more of its courses online. Academics were encouraged to be more productive and to generate more revenue. According to a senior academic the head of department had advised academics that they ‘needed to earn twice their salary from their teaching and research otherwise they would no longer be in the department’ (senior academic, Department of Civil Engineering, University A). This senior academic commented that this new focus on ‘making money’ was changing the culture and upsetting people. A junior academic said the managers in the department operated like ‘school yard bullies threatening people to do what they wanted or else they would beat them up’. Another senior academic remarked that he had left the engineering firm where he had worked because he wanted to teach and do research he did not want to be in an environment that was driven by the dollar, and now that is exactly what the department had become.

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University A’s Department of Civil Engineering faced a difficult situation. While its current fiscal position was sound there was concern amongst management and staff about the unit’s future viability. It was at a pivotal point of transition, moving from being a publicly funded entity to a financially self-reliant organisation. It was evident that while academics in the department were aware of the need to generate revenue for the department’s future viability some academics did not want to undertake entrepreneurial activities to generate revenue, preferring to carry on with their teaching and traditional areas of research much as they always had. The head of the department and his senior management team tried to force academics who were resistant to marketisation and entrepreneurialism to pursue these goals through the use of coercive power, threatening them that if they did not ‘bring in twice their salary then they would lose their job’. Although this directive was intended to enhance ‘the resistant academics’ productivity and motivate them to earn more independent income it did not have the desired effect for all members of this group.

University B, School of Life Sciences The case study of University B’s School of Life Sciences was conducted in 2000. This University did not have a department or school of biology or biological sciences, so the School of Life Sciences was selected as the case study because it was the closest match to a pure biology academic unit. University B is a University of Technology formed from the amalgamation of a college of advanced education and an institute of technology in this state. According to a senior academic in this school this amalgamation was problematic because of dissonance between these institutions’ academic cultures; academics from the institute of technology were devoted to highly specialised applied research, while academics from the former college of advanced education focused on teaching. The school had 900 EFSTU enrolled in two bachelor of applied science courses, one programme had a specialisation in medical science, it trained pathologists and radiologists and the other programme was generic with streams in biochemistry, microbiology and biotechnology. There were also 80 postgraduate EFSTU enrolled in the school. The head of school reported that the school had received less public funding, stating that it had reduced its expenditure in response to these cuts: So we have lost staff positions, both academic and general staff positions. We have lost non-salaried consumable operating money as well. What we have done in part as a response to that but not solely is that we have rationalised a lot of units (subjects) but that is not just rationalisation because of costs but also on educational grounds (Head of School of Life Sciences, University B).

Yet on further investigation it became evident that in contrast to other academic units in this study this school did not receive reduced public funding because of a contraction in student enrolments: I used to have 60 students in the second year Microbiology unit that I teach to Nursing students, now I have 380, so I am struggling. I requested some support with the marking

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and I got carpeted over the request. I was told there is no extra money. I said but we now have 380 students when we used to teach 60, surely there is extra money in this increase in EFSTU. I was told there is no extra money (junior academic, School of Life Sciences, University B).

Other academics teaching at both the undergraduate and the postgraduate levels also reported that enrolments in their courses were increasing, yet the amount of revenue the school was allocated from central administration for teaching was not increasing at levels that were commensurate with the increase in student numbers. An associate professor explained what was happening: Well basically in the Faculty of Science, Life Science is growing and meeting its performance targets but some of the other areas are not. Consequently the faculty overall loses money. We get a certain grant and then we find that we haven’t made the targets and the money is taken off us and it is due to what is going on in other departments. We are being successful but we have money taken away from us to support these unsuccessful areas. The real problem that has to be addressed is: why are some areas underperforming? The university basically does not support those areas that are not performing; it is left up to the faculty. So our money is used to cross-subsidise these weak areas, it is a large amount of money about half a million dollars (senior academic, School of Life Sciences, University B).

Not surprisingly academics in this school were annoyed about this situation; several reported that staff morale was very low. Another issue that the school had to contend with was that there had been little consistency in the school’s leadership and management (there had been three heads of school in 3 years and three operations managers (the most senior administrative role) during this period as well). A technical officer commented that this high turnover in the school’s management had resulted in the school having no clear direction, ‘each new set of managers has tried a different set of ideas’. A junior academic said ‘everything was in a holding pattern, you can’t get anything approved because people have been acting in their roles, nobody knows what is going on’. According to a senior administrator ‘there had been very low levels of trust and respect between the former head of school and the academics in the school’. A junior academic said that the former head of school ‘played favourites he came from a particular research group and so staff from this group always got the grant funding, if there were positions on a committee they always got those jobs, it was the same set of people on every committee’. Academics reported that they were very pleased that the new head of school ‘was very open, he listens to people, he consults people before making a decision, maybe he is just in his honeymoon period (he had only been head of school for 2 months) we will have to wait and see’ (junior academic, School of Life Sciences, University B). Yet school staff did not nominate reduced public funding, factional differences between academics, or ineffective management as their prime environmental concern; instead they said that their major concern was increasing competition from other biology units in other universities in their state. University B’s School of Life Sciences had held a monopoly in its state on the training of pathologists and radiologists. Yet over the last few years another university in this state had started a pathology course, while another was trying to attract potential pathology students

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to its biomedical degree. Staff at University B’s School of Life Sciences were concerned that one of these universities was engaging in an intensive marketing campaign ‘with advertisements on television, radio, newspapers, billboards on the highways, on the back of buses, on trains, these advertisements are everywhere, they are really encroaching on our market’ (senior administrator, School of Life Sciences, University B). University B’s School of Life Sciences responded to this situation by adopting an analyser mode of adaptation. Like University A’s Department of Civil Engineering it combined a prospector mode of adaptation in its specialist applied research centres with a defensive mode of adaptation in its core area of undergraduate teaching. However these two academic units employed different processes to choose an analyser mode of adaptation. While University A’s Department of Civil Engineering chose an analyser mode of adaptation through a formal decision-making process conducted by the head of department and his senior management team in consultation with staff, this decision-making process was informed by detailed strategic planning, environmental scanning and monitoring of the activities of academic units competing in the same markets. In contrast University B’s School of Life Sciences took the analyser option because it was the default position. It was the way the school was currently structured and the way that it was currently operating. The new head of school wanted to stick with the current arrangements because he was new in his role and was reluctant to make any decisions that would change the status quo that academics were content with: . . . because I am aware of the culture (he was an internal appointment), I am very aware of how all the individuals behave and react to various things. If I look as if I am straining in terms of the way the academics would like me to perform or make decisions, some one will tell me (he laughs) and allow me the opportunity to rethink it. I know whether I am getting into trouble or not. Whether something I decide is likely to cause problems or not, so I have been very careful about making decisions in light of that (Head of School of Life Sciences, University B).

This quote from the head of school reveals insights into the locus of power and authority within this academic unit, the head of school held positional power within the academic unit, yet he was reluctant to exercise the authority associated with his role, to make a decision that contravened the academic’s wishes. This indicates that power and authority within this academic unit resided with the academics. This situation suggests that normative, institutional pressures were at work in determining the unit’s chosen mode of adaptation; this issue is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8. As mentioned above University B’s School of Life Sciences adopted an organisational structure that was typical of Miles and Snow’s analyser organisation. It had a core nucleus of staff and programmes devoted to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. Situated around this core nucleus were two specialist research centres: a Centre for Molecular Biotechnology which was a university funded research centre and a Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) in Diagnostic Technologies; University B’s School of Life Sciences was the lead agency in this CRC, other members came from the CSIRO, another Australian university’s biochemistry department,

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the Child Health Research Institute and commercial biotechnology firms, Pan Bio and AMRAD Biotech. A senior academic affiliated with the Centre for Molecular Biotechnology explained that there was an overlap between the core nucleus and these satellite research centres in terms of activities, staffing and funding: Not only do we do research but we teach as well, we run first year courses in cellular biology and general biology. It is all mixed up there is a lot of bad blood, people fighting over money. The more students you have the more money you get. The other school that teaches biodiversity, population genetics, ecology etc accused us of poaching their students. So we all end up fighting over this very limited budget and if you don’t meet your enrollment targets then you get penalised by the university. This year we lost $200,000. We thought we had made our (student enrollment) targets but it turned out that they (university administrators) had changed the target and they had not told us, so we work under very difficult circumstances (senior academic, School of Life Sciences, University B).

The CRC for Diagnostic Technologies operated as an entrepreneurial research organisation, it was keen to commercialise its intellectual property and to engage in knowledge transfer projects. It had licensed patents for DNA-based diagnostic testing kits for dengue fever, Ross River virus and chlamydia. It had an active research programme into banana bungy top virus and other plant and animal diseases and gene technology. According to University B’s pro-vice-chancellor of Resources and Planning the CRC in Diagnostic Technologies ‘has just got 8 million dollars from flogging something off to the United States’. At the time of interview this school and its research centres did not have any spin-off companies ‘because the rules don’t allow that at the moment’ ‘but we want to get into spin offs in the future and let researchers take an equity position in them’ (pro-vice–chancellor, Resources and Planning, University B). According to the head of School of Life Sciences at University B, the school currently earned AU$8.5 million per year with AU$3.5 million coming from government funding for research grants and industry funding for research projects indicating that the school relied on its undergraduate teaching as its major revenue source. Despite the success that University B’s School of Life Sciences enjoyed with its biotechnology research centres it encountered significant competition in the biotechnology research funding market in its state, at a national level and at a global level. At the state level the sandstone university in this state dominated biotechnology research; it had just opened an Institute for Molecular Bioscience with more than AU$105 million dollars in funding, it also had a critical mass of more than 300 Biotechnology researchers. This significant level of funding, the critical mass of research expertise including contributions from commercial firms such as CSL enabled this Institute to license several patents and develop drugs in animal genomics, plant molecular biology, agricultural biotechnology and biopharmaceuticals. University B’s School of Life Sciences responded to the strong competition offered by its sandstone rival in its state in biotechnology research by employing a promotions officer and allocating more resources towards marketing its research capacities to potential government and industry sponsors. Yet academics in the school were aware that they had a long way to go before they posed any serious challenge to the scale and depth of biotechnology research emanating from this

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sandstone institution: ‘we can’t compete directly with them, they are just too far in front’ (senior academic, School of Life Sciences, University B). The school was seeking ways to attract more students to its courses and to develop innovative courses that would attract new student cohorts. In addition to the standard open days and school visits that most academic units conduct to attract potential students, academics from this school visited shopping centres with displays depicting the research work conducted in the school and the school occupied a carriage on a train that travelled around the state promoting the university. Some academics were modifying their courses so that they could be put online. A senior academic said ‘we have an advantage over University X (the sandstone in this state) because students know our courses are hands-on, they know that industry likes to hire our graduates, they know that they will get a job at the end of their degree so they are happy to come and study with us; if they want theory, then they go to University X’ (senior academic, School of Life Sciences, University B). A senior academic said that the school needed to develop niche areas, he spoke of how he had visited Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York and learnt that they had developed a new course: an undergraduate degree in biotechnology immediately followed by an MBA (Master of Business Administration); this programme was successfully attracting fee-paying international students. On return to the school, he developed a similar programme and was in the process of getting this approved at the time of interview, although he commented that ‘central administration was slow to respond to this idea’. A junior administrator said ‘we are developing a new medical laboratory course to be delivered in Malaysia, we do get a lot of Asian students doing that course but we will need to get more internationals and the academics will need to do more consultancy to bring in more money and we will need to develop companies from the research that we are doing here’ (junior administrator, School of Life Sciences, University B). With the exception of the research of the CRC for Diagnostic Technologies, each of these adaptation processes (strategies and actions) that University B’s School of Life Sciences was pursuing were not especially innovative. Other academic units were already generating independent revenue from international students, putting courses online, developing patents, forming spin-off companies and doing consultancy. So when University B’s School of Life Sciences started copying these adaptation processes (another case of mimetic isomorphism, typical of how analysers operate according to Miles and Snow) they had to compete with other academic units (prospectors who had first mover advantages in each of these markets). Yet if University B’s School of Life Sciences had approached adaptation in a more analytic fashion, closely observing and monitoring prospectors’ actions in markets, ensuring that when they imitated prospectors’ strategies and actions, they did so with enhanced efficiency and effectiveness, then they would have gained competitive advantages over these prospectors. Yet it seemed that University B’s School of Life Sciences approach to adaptation was not that considered or planned. They pursued an analyser mode of adaptation more by happenstance than decision and it would seem likely that other academic units that were taking a more proactive, analytical approach to adaptation would continue to enjoy competitive advantages

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over this academic unit, it would constantly be stuck in a pattern of playing catch up, the gap between it and the leading academic units in this discipline would grow deeper and wider.

University B, School of Information Systems The case study of the School of Information Systems at University B was undertaken in 2000. It was the largest of three schools in University B’s Faculty of Information Technology; the others were the School of Telecommunications and the School of Computing Science. It had an undergraduate teaching load of 750 EFSTUs and approximately 300 postgraduates. The head of school noted that a third of its undergraduate and postgraduate students were full-fee-paying internationals from Singapore and India. The school employed 25 full-time academics and 30 part-time academics. In contrast to other academic units in this study University B’s School of Information Systems did not experience reduced levels of public funding. In fact its principal environmental pressure was quite the reverse. At this time, as a consequence of a skills shortage of information technology professionals in Australia and around the globe, demand for student places was at a record high. This skills shortage also made it difficult for information technology units in Australian universities to attract and retain academics. According to a senior academic, ‘we used to have 150 first year students now we have 600’ (senior academic, School of Information Systems, University B). The head of school stated that this rapid growth in student numbers had resulted in staff shortages; poor student/staff ratios and increased workloads for staff: We are plagued by our success our student numbers are going up and at the same time a recent edict that just came down last week (from chancellery) is that we have to separate our postgraduate classes. Because of our staffing shortage we had combined our postgraduate and undergraduate units so we get these absurd situations where you have got two different student populations but one lecturer to save money. So I said right any class with a postgraduate enrollment over 40 will have to run separately now. I haven’t got any more staff but I have just virtually doubled the number of units (subjects) that we have got to present, so who has got to do that, the current staff. We had Business saying that if we don’t separate them then they we are not going to let our students do any more of your units. I am in the business of trying to increase student numbers, or maintain them at the very least so I came up with this proposal (Head of School of Information Systems, University B). Of course we have another impediment and that is trying to attract staff to fill vacancies and the reality is that you simply cannot present a viable case to attract people into the organisation, so as a result we have this high student/staff ratio of 30 to 1. I have been trying to fill a professorial chair for three years and only just filled it last week at the Associate Professor level. When you have got staff who are over worked and under paid it is extremely challenging. They know they can go outside and earn two and half times what they earn here (Head of School of Information Systems, University B). The crazy thing is that I have got funding coming out of my ears at the moment, we will carry forward a 1 million dollar surplus at the end of this year. But up until now human

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resources would not let me use this surplus to get more staff. They had this traditional view that each establishment is only entitled to three professors, three associate professors, twenty lecturers and twenty associate lecturers. I told HR these positions are all filled and I have still got a student to staff ratio of 30 to 1, I want more staff and they said sorry you are only entitled to these establishment positions. Some of those people are teaching five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred people, now the administration of that is a heavy task, marking 500 examinations (Head of School of Information Systems, University B).

When the head of school was asked how the school was going to deal with this issue of trying to attract and retain staff he said that he had ‘finally convinced the Vice Chancellor that we need to pay market loadings to stop some of these people being poached but this is a band-aid sort of approach, it might work in the short to medium term, it gives these people a sense that they are valued but it won’t work over the long term the gap in pay and conditions is just too big’ (Head of School of Information Systems, University B). Exacerbating the ‘problems’ caused by this rapid expansion in student enrolments was the issue that the funding model used by the university to allocate public funding per EFSTU to faculties did not cover actual costs of delivery of programmes to students: . . . ten years ago a relative funding model was generated which is in total disrepair now. Information Technology is a laboratory-based discipline there is an absolute need for students to enjoy state of the art equipment. Historically we have been funded at the same level as Business and Law. But we should be funded at a level of twice the bottom line of Business (Head of School of Information Systems, University B).

So in contrast with other academic units in this study, University B’s School of Information Systems was in a relatively strong position. The school adopted an analyser mode of adaptation simultaneously operating in two markets: its core stable market teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students where it pursued a conservative defensive strategy, details follow. It also had entrepreneurial research centres that adopted a prospector mode of adaptation taking greater risks on innovative ideas forming network partnerships with industry, discussed later. As was the case with University B’s School of Life Sciences, University B’s School of Information Systems pursued an analyser mode of adaptation because it was the default position of the school (its current operational mode). The head of school did not make a strategic management choice of how the school should adapt, instead there was consensus amongst the academic staff that the current situation was working so why change a successful formula? This school had the largest number of undergraduate students in information technology of the five universities teaching information technology in this state and a healthy postgraduate enrolment as well. Its focus was on defending its position in its current teaching markets rather than developing new products (courses) or student markets. Staff said that the school was the first preference for many students seeking a degree in information technology because the school enjoyed a strong reputation with industry; graduate employment rates were high. The school fostered links with industry by inviting industry representatives to participate in curriculum development to ensure that its courses were relevant to employers’ needs, that its

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graduates had appropriate skills. The school also customised some of its masters coursework programmes, delivering these on site, at firms. The curriculum for these programmes was modularised so that content, activities and assessment tasks could be modified to meet particular client’s needs. The school’s established reputation amongst employers and large share of the undergraduate student market meant that it did not engage in marketing initiatives: ‘why should we spend money and effort on marketing when we are getting an excellent ENTER cut off with our intake, this is because we have a good reputation and there is tremendous demand out there’ (senior academic, School of Information Systems, University B). Instead the school focused on sustaining and building the strength of its undergraduate teaching by increasing its full-fee-paying international student numbers. Here the school used a typical analyser strategy in its approach to its international student market. While prospectors (first movers) such as ‘University X’ decided to develop new markets, providing offshore delivery to international students in Malaysia and South Africa, University B’s School of Information Systems monitored and evaluated the success of these initiatives and then decided not to imitate this strategy because it was not confident that the risks were warranted: ‘I question the return on investment, I question the return that ‘University X’ is getting in their arrangements in Malaysia and South Africa and for my part let them go for it. It is a high-cost, high-risk endeavour and we are achieving success and I can’t see any strategic value in going down that path’ (head, School of Information Systems, University B). As Miles and Snow noted this defensive approach had an inherent danger, concentration on one market made the organisation vulnerable if conditions in that market changed, such as a competitor entering the market with a cheaper product: ‘Our international programmes with Singapore (students are brought onshore) have been tried and proven to be very successful to the extent that the bulk of our international students come from Singapore and we are extremely exposed as far as I am concerned we should be developing new markets’ (head, School of Information Systems, University B). The school had two entrepreneurial research centres closely aligned with industry: the Information Systems Management Research Centre (ISMRC) and a Co-operative Research Centre for Information Systems (CRCIS). Both of these research centres adopted a prospector mode of adaptation, operating as quasi-commercial research firms, they focused on innovative, high-risk projects for commercial clients. The ISMRC was a large research centre; it had 18 academics, 12 research assistants, 30 PhD and masters research students and produced 40 publications per year (Head of ISMRC, School of Information Systems, University B). The head of the ISMRC said that he and a few other professors realised that enterprise systems was an emerging area of research a few years ago, so they gathered a critical mass of experts in this area enabling them to dominate this niche of the research market: ‘University B’ is pretty good in responding to a complex, changing world.1 Here in our school we realised that the best way that we could do that was to focus our research on something that was applied, something that was relevant to industry, they want intellectual property that can be commercialised quickly providing a rapid return on investment (senior researcher, ISMRC, School of Information Systems, University B).

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The ISMRC had won a contract as the . . . application hosting centre for Enterprise Systems South East Asia which attracted 1 million dollars worth of hardware from Sun Microsystems and seven million dollars worth of software from SAP. We put ourselves up as a centre of excellence in Enterprise Systems. So we offer support services to state government departments for their enterprise system applications, we identify problems with their systems and provide consultancy advice on these systems (senior researcher, ISMRC, School of Information Systems, University B).

A senior researcher from the ISMRC offered a critical reflection on the school’s ‘success’ at adapting to its environmental pressures: I think the school’s administration is out of step with the more contemporary strategic directions of the university. You have systems in place at the school and faculty level that are hang over’s from years gone by. When asked to elaborate he said: Bureaucratic types of things policies and procedures for everything, inappropriate sorts of things. Such as? Purchasing supplies and equipment for instance. Certain things need to happen quickly when you work with industry. I think the university is trying to be more responsive and creative in the way that it interacts with its environment and the market, you need to be adaptable and flexible (senior researcher, ISMRC, School of Information Systems, University B).

When asked to identify the keys required for the school to become ‘adaptable and flexible’ this senior researcher said Well you need to empower people, which is the term that is used exclusively. What do you mean by ‘empower people’? It means allowing individuals the authority and responsibility to make decisions themselves without having to revert all the time to someone higher up the hierarchy, giving people the appropriate amount of freedom, flexibility and support to function autonomously. This is how we operate in this research centre and it works, look at our productivity . . . (senior researcher, ISMRC, School of Information Systems, University B).

This comment offers great insights into our inquiry; yet it also contrasts markedly with the views of the head of school and ‘teaching’ academics in the school who each complained that the school lacked autonomy in choosing how it would adapt to its environmental pressures: ‘everything is driven top-down here, we are given KPIs (key performance indicators) which largely revolve around our EFTSU load and generating non government income, we are doing okay there we get about 50% of our income from non government sources but we can’t choose our strategic directions they are set from on high (chancellery)’ (head, School of Information Systems, University B). These comments by the head of school reveal the juxtaposition in the situation of the ‘core’ teaching part of this academic unit which was tightly managed and controlled in a traditional command and control style strictly adhering to a conservative defensive mode of adaptation and the ‘periphery’ the entrepreneurial research centres given high levels of autonomy and flexibility, operating as prospectors, pursuing innovative, entrepreneurial commercial research. This juxtaposition made University B’s School of Information Systems a very close fit to Miles and Snow’s analyser archetype, the only significant variation related to ‘who and how’ the decision to pursue an analyser mode of adaptation was made.

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University C, School of Information Technology The case study of the School of Information Technology at University C was undertaken in 2001. At this time it was a relatively small academic unit with 21 academics, only one of whom was a professor and two administrative staff, one full-time and one part-time, both at junior levels. A senior lecturer stated that the school was reasonably new and that it had a broad range of computer science and information technology programmes that enabled it to attract students with diverse interests: We have been running the information systems program for about nine or ten years. When I first started here we were working very hard because every course that we did was a new course. We are unusual because we are a School of Information Technology that includes Computer Science and Systems; this is extremely rare. Normally you would find a Computer Science department in a Science faculty and Information Systems in a Business faculty but here we have both streams. We also have a program that explores the human and social factors associated with information systems. So we have a very diverse range of students. Our degree structures are quite flexible; students can do double majors so we have students from Business and Arts also doing a major with us (senior academic, School of Information Systems, University C).

This case study was distinctive because none of the seven members of school’s staff that were interviewed including the head of school and the administrator that prepared the school’s budget were prepared to reveal any details about the school’s financial position or the number of students that were enrolled in the school’s courses. When enquiries about the school’s financial position were made each interviewee avoided responding to these questions. All that was gleaned about the school’s financial position were these statements: ‘university management has asked the school to manage its budget better’ (senior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). When one junior academic was asked what the current priorities of the school were he said: ‘survival we are over-enrolled and underfunded’ (junior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). A senior lecturer said that the school had previously cross-subsidised other academic units with reduced income as a consequence of declining student enrolments. A junior academic offered more details: ‘We moved divisions (faculties) we were previously in science but when we were there we had to cross-subsidise physics who only had six students. So we have moved to the division of business and law to strengthen our financial position’ (junior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). Another unusual characteristic of this case study was that neither the head of school nor any of the academics gave any details about the research activities of the school. Information was sought about the school’s number and type of research centres, grants, publications, etc.; yet responses were not forthcoming. Because publicly accessible finance, student enrolment and research performance data is not disaggregated to base-level academic units, it was not possible to obtain this information. Yet this absence of data is itself revealing. It gives the impression that this academic unit ‘had something to hide’; whilst this may seem a rather far-fetched assertion to make support for, this hypothesis emerges as this case study unfolds.

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When a senior academic was asked whether the school encountered challenges in its operating environment and what these challenges were he said that the school was aware of intensified competition from information technology departments in other universities in the state for students and staff ‘ a couple of universities in xxxx (Australian state) are more broke than we are hence they are getting more desperate’; yet ‘the major challenge we face is internal’ (senior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). When asked to elaborate he said, ‘we have had major battles with university management. They (university management) struck a deal with Taylor’s College (a private provider) to teach some of our courses in the city (University C is located approximately 20 km out of this state’s Central Business District) thereby undermining our student market’ (senior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). A junior academic spoke about another dispute between the school and university management, stating that in response to increasing competition from other university’s information technology departments in this state the school had developed six new undergraduate courses in computer science and information systems with a focus on new and emerging areas such as multimedia and the Internet, ‘things that are industry relevant that will get these kids jobs’ but the Academic Planning and Policy Committee (central university committee) has ‘made us go through the hoops’ trying to get these courses approved; ‘they put up all sorts of obstacles because they were concerned about duplication of programmes in other departments’ (junior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). Cultural dissonance between university managers and this school’s staff over marketisation and entrepreneurialism was strong. While university executives were taking the university down the path towards marketisation and entrepreneurialism at a rapid pace, opening three high schools, a retirement village, a technology park with plans for a shopping centre and housing estate on the drawing board. Each project designed with the intention of generating independent revenue for the university, thereby reducing its reliance on public funding. Academics in this school were not comfortable with the university’s wholesale embracing of commercial values: ‘I am here because I am passionate about teaching if I wanted to make bucket loads of cash I would walk out the door tomorrow, I know my colleagues feel the same way, we are an educational institution not a business. We know that if there wasn’t a shortage of IT academics they would fire the lot of us’ (junior academic, School of Information Systems, University C). An administrator offered further insights into the school’s situation; she explained that ‘Our division has a new executive dean and she announced when she was appointed that there would be changes made. This afternoon we are going to have a divisional level meeting there is going to be another restructure, mergers, amalgamations, some schools could get the chop, who knows, its never good news’ (administrator, School of Information Systems, University C). Taken together this information could explain why school staff were reluctant to reveal details about their financial position, student enrolments and research performance; if the administrators’ statement was correct and some academic units’ viability was under question and hence the continued employment of some academics, this would seem

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to offer a plausible explanation of why ‘this cone of silence’ re: the revelation of ‘hard data’ had emerged. Yet we must remain cautious in developing hypotheses and interpretations, while the administrators’ statement about the potential effects of the divisional restructure could explain the ‘cone of silence’ when any organisation undergoes significant environmental challenges and decides to respond to these challenges by restructuring and rethinking its products and markets, these changes often destabilise the organisation; when people become uncertain about the future of their job, rumours and misinformation can spread like a bushfire throughout an organisation. The absence of ‘quantifiable data’ on the school’s finances, student enrolments and research performance means that only a tentative evaluation of the unit’s responses to its changing environment can be offered. The absence of information about the school’s research performance, coupled with the fact that there was only one professor in the school and he was the head of school with the administrative responsibilities that this role entails, lends support to the view that there was minimal research activity in the school. There was no evidence of entrepreneurial research centres of the kind found in academic units employing a prospector mode of adaptation. Yet the school was developing new courses, it was also seeking accreditation for these new programmes from the Australian Computer Society so that the programmes would be more attractive to students, enhancing their employment prospects and that it was actively marketing means that the unit was not using a defensive mode of adaptation. Taken together these factors suggest that this school was adopting an analyser mode of adaptation. It was cautiously trying to develop new student markets whilst simultaneously seeking to protect its position in its existing student markets. Yet this school’s ‘analyser mode of adaptation’ differed markedly from that of the other academic units in this study; it lacked the dual prospector/defender pattern of the others. Perhaps it might be accurate to create a new analytical category for this unit to label it a hybrid analyser/defender. It is also unclear how the unit made this choice of mode of adaptation. The head of school described his approach to management as consultative, yet the staff in the unit did not state that there were open discussions and decisions on the unit’s environmental pressures and how it related to its environment. This case study raises the question was this dysfunctional situation between this academic unit and university management the norm in this university or was this situation atypical. Further insights into the issue are revealed in the next case study.

University C, School of Engineering The School of Engineering was selected as the case study because University C did not have a civil engineering unit; this was the closest match. This case study was undertaken in 2001, at this time it was a small academic unit with ten academics and three junior administrators, two full-time and one part-time. It had 100 students enrolled in its five undergraduate courses and a handful of masters coursework and PhD students. It had five international students. This school had some

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characteristics that distinguished it from other academic units in this study and which meant that it faced a slightly different set of environmental pressures from other academic units in this study. First, its location – the School of Engineering was located at a regional campus approximately 45 km away from this university’s main campus where other academic units were situated. The federal government had provided University C with a grant of AU$21 million to establish a campus in this regional area. The local community also contributed funds and support to establish this satellite campus. This was an industrial working class area populated by mining companies, steelworks, a power plant and an oil refinery. Prior to University C establishing its campus here few people in the area had the opportunity of obtaining a university degree; many did not complete secondary school. As with many such working class industrial communities throughout the world, middleclass suburbanites stigmatised the area as a ‘ghetto’, considering it best avoided because of its reputation for poverty, alcohol and substance abuse, violence and crime. Staff had different views on the impacts of the school’s separation from the remainder of the university. A senior lecturer suggested that the social stigma attached to the area posed challenges for attracting middle-class students from the state’s capital city: ‘I get so many prospective students on the line and as soon as I mention xxxxx (the area) well over half the people drop the line, so there is no question that if we were at xxxxxx (the main campus) engineering would be a much stronger school, we would have more staff and more students across the board, there is no question about that’ (senior academic, School of Engineering, University C). Academics suggested that the physical distance between the School of Engineering and the rest of the university made the relationship between the school and institutional executives and other academic units problematic, ‘sometimes we can be forgotten’ (junior academic, School of Engineering, University C). ‘Our needs are not considered when the university is making decisions, so we have had to become extremely proactive and maybe a bit offensive at certain times’ (senior academic, School of Engineering, University C). ‘This campus is neither close enough, nor far away enough. I have an independent attitude toward Engineering, I believe in devolution of authority and that goes a little against the grain of the university’s ethos at the moment. We are in fact pretty independent because of the way that we happen to be funded and because of the geography so that has been a pleasant outcome’ (head, School of Engineering, University C). A senior lecturer remarked that a key reason why the School of Engineering was located here was because the site was in close proximity to firms such as Rio Tinto, BHP, Alcoa and Western Power, so this would make it easier to form research partnerships and networks with these firms: Being here is a great for our research activities. It took a few years to establish the relationship between ourselves and the firms, initially I started talking to some of the industries around here such as Alcoa, sending our third and fourth year students out on internships and vacation employment. Now because of that involvement other staff started looking at their own areas and building relationships. Now they have confidence in us, this has enabled

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us to establish a network, they come back to us asking us to act as consultants on a number of projects, we are making linkage grant bids together . . . (senior academic, School of Engineering, University C).

Second, this regional campus and the School of Engineering were new, they were established in 1997, so the School of Engineering had only been operating for 5 years when the case study was undertaken. University C’s School of Engineering adopted an analyser mode of adaptation by strategically positioning itself in its regional undergraduate student market. Both the sandstone university and the university of technology in this state had well-established engineering faculties teaching traditional engineering courses in civil, chemical, mechanical and electrical engineering. So when this school of engineering was established it was decided not to offer these traditional engineering courses but to offer programmes in niche areas such as renewable energy, instrumentation and control, software engineering, engineering chemistry, industrial computer systems engineering. This decision was made by the head of school in consultation with academics in the school and with external stakeholders, the institute of engineers and local firms; costs associated with developing and delivering the renewable energy course were met by Western Power, a private firm. A senior lecturer said that there were two other reasons why these niche areas of engineering were selected: first staff had monitored the activities of engineering units in other Australian universities delivering these niche programmes, they had observed that there was a strong demand for these programmes. Second, consultations with industry suggested that there would be employment available for students graduating with expertise in these fields because these courses equipped students with an interdisciplinary knowledge base that was relevant to the applied engineering problems these firms had to address. Third, in contrast to many of the other academic units in this study University C’s School of Engineering was in the relatively fortunate position that it had guaranteed funding from the federal government up until 2003. Even though its funding was guaranteed in the short term, academics were quite anxious about the long-term viability of the school. An associate professor noted that university executives had given the school a target of 160 EFSTU, yet at the time of the case study (2001) the school had only managed to attract 100 students. When academics were asked why it was proving difficult to attract students staff identified three reasons: first, as noted that the regional location of the campus did not appeal to school leavers from the city; second, that local people did not understand what these niche engineering programmes were about and were uncertain whether these courses would provide employment for their children; third, engineering courses at the sandstone university and the university of technology had established reputations and appeal for potential students and employers which gave these academic units a competitive advantage in the school leaver student market over University C’s School of Engineering. Academics were asked what they thought the consequences of this situation could be; several suggested that the future of the school could be in jeopardy: Getting to that point where we know that we can survive where we have sufficient resources and income to keep us afloat. At other institutions they wouldn’t even think about the

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idea of Engineering disappearing, in an established institution, the idea would not even be entertained, maybe the programs might change but Engineering would not disappear but this is not necessarily going to happen here (senior academic, School of Engineering, University C).

Staff were asked how the unit had responded to this situation. The administrators, literally shrugged their shoulders, the academics offered these suggestions. A junior academic said that the school was putting a lot of effort into marketing its programmes: ‘we must market like crazy to grab students that is the only thing that will save our skin, that is why we have just sent out 201,000 pamphlets and why we have these expo days where we get school kids to come along and spend time in the labs and we go up to the main campus to have a presence for open day’ (junior academic, School of Engineering, University C). A senior academic said that ‘in the current climate I don’t think you can play the hero here if the government keeps cutting the university budget then we only have two options, industry and international students’ (senior academic, School of Engineering, University C). So the school was working hard on these two objectives, cultivating network alliances with firms for sponsorship for research and teaching and trying to attract more international students. The head of school stated that the school had commenced negotiations with four polytechnics in Singapore to recruit more international students but that they had to postpone these initiatives until their new courses were accredited by the Institute of Engineers. Even though the head of school and academics identified these strategies and actions for adaptation to expected environmental pressures, it seemed that the school was pursuing these options because they had observed that other academic units (prospectors) had successfully pursued these initiatives, this was an archetypal analyser trait according to Miles and Snow. Yet contrary to Miles and Snow’s views on organisational adaptation, University C’s School of Engineering did not use formal strategic and scenario-planning processes to choose these strategies and course of action; instead these decisions emerged through the day-to-day activities of the school. This was probably because like many academics in academic units in universities throughout the world academics at this school of engineering had too many pressing teaching and research demands to have the time or energy to develop formal strategic plans. Further evidence that this unit and its academics were ‘flying by the seat of their pants’ was that when queried about what the unit would do if their chosen strategies and actions did not work, neither the head of school nor the academics had a clue; they did not have a contingency plan, ‘a plan B’ if the avenues they had chosen did not work. So in adopting an analyser mode of adaptation to its environmental pressures, University C’s School of Engineering combined establishing and maintaining stable operations in its core markets (primarily teaching undergraduate students) with greater risk taking in its entrepreneurial research markets. Yet it differed from Miles and Snow’s archetypal analyser organisation and indeed from other academic units in this study that chose an analyser mode of adaptation in that University C’s School of Engineering was an emerging academic unit, it was tentatively feeling its way, trying to ‘carve out its territory’, establish its reputation, determine its identity and publicise its existence both within its institutional domain and amongst potential

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students, parents, engineering firms and other potential research partners. Its infant status meant that it did not have a well- established stronghold (reputation or fiscal share) of its core market that it was trying to defend, as other analyser units had. This ‘newness’ was a double-edged sword; on the one hand it meant that this unit was very much a ‘tabula rasa’ – it had the potential to shape its identity, reputation, fiscal and academic capital. It also meant that the unit could exercise more flexibility in its choice of teaching and research operations than other academic units in this study. In contrast to other academic units in this study that had long-established academics wedded to a given set of cultural norms, this unit had the potential to shape its own destiny within the limits imposed by its fiscal resources and its current academic capital and its position vis-à-vis its competitors in its teaching and research funding markets. By way of postscript it is interesting to note that from 2006 onwards University C’s School of Engineering started to deliver its programmes on the university’s main campus as well as its satellite campus. And that at the time of writing, June 2009, the school seems to be experiencing contraction of its operations, it has six academics now. In 2001 the school had structural autonomy; now it is situated within a large division of science and technology disciplines. This situation suggests that the school encountered less success in pursuing its chosen adaptation strategies than it anticipated. Yet without access to the school’s financial data2 no conclusive statements can be drawn, as taking a longitudinal perspective an academic unit’s size, resource base and academic capital (research reputation) will ebb and flow in a dynamic cycle.

Notes 1. Thanks to this research fellow for providing the title of this book. 2. Interviewees from University C’s School of Engineering declined to provide the school’s financial data at the time of the case study, nor was this data publicly accessible, it remains commercial in-confidence.

Chapter 7

Reactors/Resistants

University A, Department of Biology The case study of University A’s department of biology was conducted in 1999. It was one of five departments in this University’s Faculty of Science. University A’s biology department was formed in 1997 from the merger of the department of genetics and developmental biology with the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. The formation of this new department coincided with significant changes in its external environment that placed considerable pressure on the department. The dean of science stated that between 1997 and 1999 the science faculty received AU$3.6 million less public funding than it had the previous year, resulting in the loss of 18% of recurrent staff. The dean said that he had been advised by the vice-chancellor that the Science faculty would lose a further AU$3.2 million in public funding between 1999 and 2001 requiring staff reductions of a further 18–20%. The dean was asked ‘How will these funding cuts occur? Will they be evenly distributed throughout the departments in the faculty?’ He responded ‘Cuts are never implemented evenly. I mean even the cuts we have already had between 1997 and 1999 three of our (academic) units took much larger hits’ (dean, Faculty of Science, University A). Which units? ‘Mathematics and Statistics, Physics and the School of Applied Sciences. Now all of the other units lost staff but these were often by voluntary redundancies, natural attrition; it was only in these three that we had to take some positive action to come down to what was a reasonable size’ (dean, Faculty of Science, University A). Why were these three particular academic units selected? ‘That reflects primarily EFSTU and student demand for places in programmes’ (dean, Faculty of Science, University A). As a consequence of the reduction in public funding for the faculty of science, the biology department received 9% less public funding in 1999 than it had obtained the previous year. The head of department said: For the last seven to ten years we have been struggling with tightening budgets. This has meant that it is extremely difficult to plan well because we are in a situation where the budget has declined. Because of the obvious constraints on staffing we have very limited room to move in new directions and establish new initiatives. This is an organisational weakness; it is not something within my power to rectify (head, Department of Biology, University A).

D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_7, 

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The head of department was asked: How has your department been affected by the reduction in public funding? The head’s response to this question revealed another significant environmental pressure for this department: a strategic decision made by institutional managers to remove EFSTU (funded student load) from the science faculty, including the biology department and reallocate this load to other faculties in the university: Well it is not just that the university has received declining public funding; probably in the last few years the most difficult thing to cope with has been the university’s strategic decision to move EFSTU, to take EFSTU off certain parts of the university. One of those parts has been the Science faculty it has been impacted more than other parts of the university. As part of the Science faculty we have been impacted also. We have serious restrictions on enrolments that constrain our potential to do anything (head, Department of Biology, University A).

Together these two environmental pressures had a significant affect on this department; not only did it have to contend with a substantial reduction in its revenue base, this situation was made even more challenging by an internal institutional policy decision constraining one of the key ways that the department had of generating revenue (teaching publicly funded students). These quotes from the head of department indicate that she perceived this situation as a problem that was beyond her capacity to rectify as opposed to a challenge that she and her staff could address. Staff also articulated similar concerns. A senior academic was asked: What are the current priorities and objectives of the biology department? His response was: Survival. He was asked: Is the future of the department under threat? What is the nature of this threat? He said: Science is vulnerable. From time to time we certainly get the feeling that the powers that be, the purse holders (institutional managers) are not supportive of Science as it stands at the moment. Our on going concern in the department is budgetary; we are not alone in this, the faculty feels somewhat threatened and I suspect that other faculties do as well. How do we make the budget stretch providing the sorts of things that we believe ought to be given in terms of teaching support for the students. In terms of our research capacity, we are finding this harder and harder (senior academic, Department of Biology, University A).

This senior academic added that the department’s financial viability was also insecure because it was heavily reliant on revenue generated from service teaching that it provided for the faculty of medicine: We are dependent on our first years for a large part of our funding. It is a big class about six or seven hundred students a large part of this first year cohort are students from the Faculty of Medicine. But of course Medicine has its own agenda, from time to time they have talked about bringing in their own first year courses and of course if that happened it would decimate the Biology department (senior academic, Department of Biology, University A).

Comments from the resource manager confirmed that projections of the department’s future financial position were grim: I have just gone through the exercise of doing five-year financial projections for the department. I forget what the specific number was1 but a long way into the red. This year we are just going to break even but what will kill us is that we have got a number of academic retirements coming up,2 those people have got long service and annual leave entitlements

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and there is just no provision that has been made for these pay outs in the budget, so we are definitely in a financial crisis (resource manager, Department of Biology, University A).

A laboratory assistant detailed some of the affects of the funding cuts: I have been really shocked at the amount of money that they (institutional managers) have pulled out of here. When I went through, when I was in second year we had six-hour pracs in Botany and Zoology, you learnt such a lot in that space of time, now they are only doing two-hour pracs. A lot of staff are put on contracts not permanent because they don’t know from one year to the next what the cuts are going to be like. A lot of the equipment isn’t maintained, like the autoclave, when it breaks we can only fix it, once that is gone, it’s gone, we can’t replace it (laboratory assistant, Department of Biology, University A).

Each of the seven staff members interviewed from the head of department to the laboratory assistant were aware that the department’s financial position was in dire straits and that this threatened the future of the department, yet they had few ideas to address these problems and as we shall see some academics directed their energy towards apportioning blame for the department’s predicament rather than thinking of means to alleviate its problems. This response, or more accurately this lack of response, inertia, was exactly how Miles and Snow’s reactor organisations responded to environmental pressures: Reactors are organizations in which top managers frequently perceive change and uncertainty occurring in their organizational environments but are unable to respond effectively. Because this type of organization lacks a consistent strategy-structure relationship, it seldom makes adjustment of any sort until forced to do so by environmental pressures (R. Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 29).

As the comments made by the laboratory assistant indicate the department made some adjustments to try to adapt to its weaker financial position but it was a case of too little too late. The department was trying to adopt a defensive mode of adaptation but the rate and extent of change in its operating environment was too vast and too rapid. The key reason why University A’s biology department failed to make appropriate adjustments to its new environmental conditions was because both the management (head of department and senior administrators) thought that they lacked the power to devise strategies or take actions that would help the department to adjust to its new situation: ‘it is not something within my power to rectify’ (head, Department of Biology, University A). University managers wanted academic units to accept and pursue the marketisation of higher education to become financially self-reliant by using entrepreneurial activities to generate independent (non-government) revenue, to obtain commercial sponsorship and grants for research, to commercialise intellectual property, to develop patents and to increase revenue from teaching. However this department did not go down this path; it continued to rely on public funding for the major proportion of its revenue and to spend up 80% of its income on staff salaries. Some academics in the department did not think that the department should be responsible for devising solutions for its funding shortfall. They found university executives’ espousal of marketisation and entrepreneurialism and its attendant practices of new public management (business and strategic planning, performance

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appraisals and quality assurance mechanisms) repugnant as they challenged their core values of what a university is and the purposes that a university should serve. For these staff the relationship between university chancellery and the science faculty and biology department was an entrenched conflict, a ‘them versus us situation’: We no longer feel that this is a place of learning and scholarship. We feel very much part of a business run by administrators for administrators (institutional managers). Their priority is making money. They would get rid of us (academics) if they could but then they would have nothing to sell. All of these overseas developments. . . what a waste of money. We are cutting back on things, we can’t do this and we can’t do that because our budgets are so low. We are just the pawns in their game. There was a big action group within the university five years ago, we had meetings, but our views were just ignored (senior academic, Department of Biology, University A).

A junior academic stated that: ‘the only belt tightening that is going on in this place is within the faculties not within administration. They don’t care about us; we are just this little grey building on the edge of the campus’ (junior academic, Department of Biology, University A). This group of academics were passionate devotees of the ancient regime. They went beyond displaying a reactive response to environmental pressures. Their opposition to marketisation, entrepreneurialism and new public management was a deeply held cultural and political position, they were actively trying to resist the values, norms and actions that institutional managers sought to impose upon them; this issue of resistance is explored in more depth in Chapter 8. Other academics in this department did not oppose marketisation and entrepreneurialism on ideological grounds, they argued that their department was not capable of securing industry funding for its research because their research was pure rather than applied, it was not commercially viable, it would not lead to patents or new technologies. So University A’s department of biology was left struggling to keep its balance on a high wire whose tension was progressively being increased by university managers. The head of department appealed to the dean of the Science Faculty for additional funding; whilst the dean empathised with the department’s plight, his cupboard was bare,3 so a collective appeal was made to institutional managers, an appeal which fell on deaf ears. Meantime the department tried to make do as best as it could. Yet it seemed certain that the department was virtually being starved/coerced into complying with the agenda of institutional managers, there would come a time when they could no longer sustain this reactive/resistant response.

University B, School of Civil Engineering The case study of University B’s School of Civil Engineering was undertaken in 2000. It was one of six units in its faculty. According to staff up until 5 years ago it had more students and a healthier financial position than any of the other academic units in the faculty. Yet staff reported that at this time the school’s fortunes went into

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decline with a cyclical set of factors combining to send the school on a downward spiral. A key problem for this school was that it was heavily reliant on a single revenue stream, publicly funded undergraduate students. When the school experienced a substantial reduction in student demand for its undergraduate courses, they tried to defend their position in this market; yet they were unable to arrest this decline in demand nor were they able to develop alternative revenue streams. This forced the school to adopt a reactive mode of adaptation and eventually led to intervention from institutional managers to try to rebuild the school and ensure its survival. One of the reasons why this school found itself in a state of decline was because the head of school and its academics did not monitor changes in their external environment, they did not predict the decline in undergraduate student demand before it occurred. As a junior lecturer commented ‘I have a big beef, we have no leadership, no strategic plan, no strategic direction, we don’t know where we are going, how can we make decisions or anything. All the schools in the faculty are competing against each other; we should be utilising resources in a shared way, things like labs’ (junior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B). A second reason for the school’s decline was the path-dependency, inertia and passivity displayed by the head of school and its academics; they believed that they were powerless to rectify their declining position – as Miles and Snow noted, this was a typical characteristic of a reactive organisation. The head of school was asked: Why has civil engineering become a less popular option? He said ‘Civil Engineering is not popular because Civil Engineers build things that already exist, bridges, roads, dams and buildings and there is not a lot of high end technology in it therefore there are no really wealthy civil engineers around whereas you have got wealthy doctors, lawyers and Bill Gates’ (head, School of Civil Engineering, University B). A senior lecturer asserted that other civil engineering academic units in this state and around the country had also experienced similar reductions in enrolments: There are three civil engineering schools in this state, we are competing for the same territory; our programs are virtually identical. We are all suffering a reduced intake of school leavers. There is a down turn in what we might call the older style flavours of engineering (civil, mechanical and chemical) in favour of the newer styles of engineering that have a computer orientation, biomedical, electrical, information technology (senior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B).

The deputy vice-chancellor of this university was asked: Do you think that academic units should choose how they respond to challenges in their environments? Or should university executives make these strategic directions and choices? The deputy vice-chancellor said: Fundamentally I believe that academic units should manage their own affairs, they have the expertise, they know their markets. The role of the central part of the university is to shape the policy direction and direct policy traffic, to steer and monitor what is going on not be diverted by stuff ups. There is a difference between stuff ups and problems you know what I mean. A stuff up is something that happens every day a problem is something that goes in the wrong direction and isn’t corrected. The role of the faculties and academic units is to get on with it and operationalise the policy framework. Of course if I see that an academic unit is not managing its affairs effectively then I am all over them like a rash (deputy vice-chancellor, University B).

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The deputy vice-chancellor and fellow university executives were dissatisfied with how the School of Civil Engineering was managed so they intervened. Institutional managers along with the Institute of Engineers directed the school to modify its curriculum in an effort to arrest the decline in undergraduate student demand. The Institute of Engineers wanted a curriculum that emphasised problembased learning and generic communication skills and project management as these were attributes that employers wanted graduates to have. Institutional managers wanted to reduce teaching costs, gaining efficiencies so they directed the school to condense its courses, reduce student/staff contact hours, especially the number of laboratory classes and place courses online. Yet these initiatives were not effective, enrolments continued to decline. The year the case study was undertaken the school had 318 undergraduate EFSTU and 60 postgraduate EFTSU. The head of school was reluctant to answer questions about the school’s operations. At one stage in his interview the head requested that the tape be turned off; then he stated that he was prepared to answer questions about the Australian higher education sector but not about his academic unit. Neither the head of school nor the resource manager was prepared to reveal details about the school’s budget. All that the resource manager stated was that the reduction in student demand had resulted in a corresponding reduction in revenue from publicly funded student places. The school’s deficit also increased because institutional managers redirected 50 EFSTU from the school to a new campus that was being established in a regional area and reduced the level of funding that the school received per EFTSU. With continually diminishing public funding and without significant independent revenue streams from research, consultancy, international or domestic fee-paying students, the school’s deficit continued to increase. University finance executives directed the school to reduce its expenditure to avert its deficit becoming greater. The school responded by contracting its operations, the number of academics was reduced from 25 to 12; general staff numbers (administrators, laboratory and technical staff) were reduced from 15 to 9. The resource manager stated that ‘staff reductions were obtained by voluntary early retirements and non contract renewals yet the school had to pay all of the redundancy payments from the school budget and that took us further into the red’ (resource manager, School of Civil Engineering, University B). Expenditure on teaching was also reduced by course rationalisation, discontinuing Masters coursework programmes with low enrolments, not hiring sessional academics, reducing contact hours for undergraduate courses, closing laboratories, reducing equipment maintenance, discontinuing funding for conferences and professional development for academics. The technical manager said that ‘staff morale has hit rockbottom, they (institutional managers) have gutted this place, those who survived are exhausted, now workloads have doubled, they have to do the work of their former colleagues plus their own jobs. There is no trust between them (institutional managers) and us now, no one is sure if their head is next on the chopping block’ (technical manager, School of Civil Engineering, University B). The technical manager also noted that although institutional managers pushed for staff reductions to save costs, this

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initiative was myopic because the school no longer had a sufficient critical mass of academics to generate revenue from ARC grants, undertake commercial consultancies or entrepreneurial research work. He added that ‘5 years ago just about every academic in this school was doing consulting in industry and entrepreneurship but now that doesn’t happen. It is just not worth their while to do it now because the school loses more than 33% of the profit that it makes from commercial tender bids to central administration and the faculty, others win those bids now because they can do the job for a lower price’ (resource manager, School of Civil Engineering, University B). The technical manager said that the school’s main source of independent revenue was its structures laboratory where materials were tested for strength and load-bearing capacities for commercial clients and government departments. The resource manager said the structures lab generates about $250,000 revenue per year but we must pay operating costs including staff salaries and equipment maintenance from that sum. Staff were asked to identify what strategies and actions the school was taking to deal with this set of environmental pressures, responses included ‘previously we used to rely on the faculty to do our marketing for us now we do our own marketing, school visits, open days, brochures’ (senior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B). Another senior academic said ‘we are trying to get more fee-paying international students but so far the only ones we have been able to attract are the ones that can’t get into courses in their home countries and they are actually more expensive to teach because their English is weak and they can’t cope with selfdirected problem based learning’ (senior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B). Yet at the time of interview neither of these approaches seemed to have attained much success, they did little to differentiate the school from other academic units competing in the same markets. The key question is why did the head of school and the dominant group of academics in this school display path-dependence, inertia and resistance to institutional managers’ efforts to force the unit to adopt marketisation and entrepreneurialism? There were several reasons why this occurred. First was dissonance in culture and norms between institutional managers and academics: ‘I think the hierarchy are going in one direction, their focus is only on making money, there are messages coming from the top to the academics you need to be entrepreneurial, you should be doing consultancy but these messages are hitting a brick wall’ (technical manager, School of Civil Engineering, University B). A group of academics in the school resisted institutional managers’ push towards marketisation and entrepreneurialism because of ideological objections to these norms and values: The government is forcing us to run like a business, to make a profit if we want to survive and university managers have bought into this agenda hook, line and sinker. We don’t have to do this. They have no appreciation of the role of the university in society; we provide a service to the community. The only way we can survive is by prostituting ourselves, essentially everything that we do has to have a dollar sign attached to it, if something doesn’t bring in a dollar out it goes. University managers run this university as if it is a multinational conglomerate, the same way that BHP operates, if the steel division is not making a profit out it goes, Civil Engineering is not making a profit, so we better close it down (junior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B).

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Another group of academics in the unit displayed resistance to institutional managers’ efforts to install marketisation and entrepreneurialism as the dominant institutional ethos; because of self-interest, they would not benefit from the additional work required to attain these objectives, so they would not bother undertaking these initiatives. A junior lecturer gave an apt description of this sclerotic contingent of academics: ‘we have too much deadwood, they are stuck in a time-warp, they still think it is the 1970s when the government provided 90% of our funding, these people are just sitting in a corner moulding away, winding down the clock until their retirement’ (junior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B). A senior lecturer who had been in the school for 25 years commented: ‘I know that I am not going to get promoted, I have risen as far as I can go, so why should I bother with trying to do entrepreneurial research or consultancy. I’m not the only one that feels this way, the average age of our academics is in the late 50 s, so the carrot and stick approach which can be used with junior staff is simply not effective’ (senior academic, School of Civil Engineering, University B). University B’s School of Civil Engineering’s decline had a reflexive effect, feeding back upon itself, sending it spiralling ever deeper into its vortex of decline: as its reputation diminished it became more difficult to recruit students, staff, commercial sponsors, industry research partners, which in turn weakened its reputation even further; this pattern is discussed in Chapter 8. In an effort to transform the unit towards marketisation and entrepreneurialism and fiscal independence, institutional managers had already intervened in the school’s operations ordering the restructuring of curriculum and the large-scale cost efficiencies, the retrenchment of nearly 50% of the school’s academics. It was apparent that institutional managers would not tolerate the unit’s resistance towards these objectives; whether by coercion or starvation of resources, their aim was to gain the unit’s compliance with their agenda. This remark from the technical manager illustrates that at least one member of the general staff had capitulated: ‘well we have to adapt to the new environment with what money we have got, we are not likely to get any more money from the federal government, so we will have to find ways of generating our own money’ (technical manager, School of Civil Engineering, University B). Whilst the support of unit administrators was helpful to the institutional managers cause it was not as vital as that of the academics in the unit because in the end it was the academics’ labour, their teaching and research that generated the entrepreneurial revenue that was the crux of marketisation. So the ‘war’ between recalcitrant academics and institutional managers continued. One of the tactics deployed by institutional managers was cultural transformation, simply replacing the old order with a new generation of academics who knew nothing of the halcyon days of full public funding and accepted competition, marketisation and entrepreneurialism as given norms.

University C, School of Biological Sciences The case study of University C’s School of Biological Sciences was conducted in 2001. At this time the school was situated in the Division of Science

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and Engineering along with the Schools of Physical and Chemical Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering. The school employed 21 academics, 5 administrative and technical staff and had 400 undergraduate EFSTU and 80 postgraduate EFSTU. From its inception the school differed from other biology academic units in Australian universities in that it comprised academics with different specialisations: physiologists, biochemists, microbiologists, botanists and zoologists. The head of school identified the interdisciplinary nature of the school as one of its strengths: ‘It enabled us to collaborate together much more easily than if we had opted for the conventional departmental model. We were able to cross disciplinary boundaries, to forge research links that enabled us to obtain ARC and NHMRC grants’ (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C). An associate professor stated that the school’s interdisciplinary nature had been an advantage in attracting undergraduate students: ‘It keeps students options open, especially if they are not sure whether they want to specialise in botany, zoology or microbiology; our integrated program gives students foundations in all of these areas, then they can specialise any one of these directions later (senior academic, School of Biological Sciences). The school faced a similar set of environmental pressures to other academic units in this study including the need for constant curriculum developments to ensure that the courses they offered were appealing to key stakeholders; potential students and employers: ‘We need to keep reinventing ourselves to make ourselves appealing to the market, so we have changed from just teaching biology to teaching conservation biology, marine science, molecular biology and biotechnology’ (senior academic, School of Biological Sciences, University C). Along with many other academic units in this study, this school experienced rapid and substantial massification in student cohorts and reduced levels of public funding. The head of school was not prepared to reveal details about the school’s budget but he did state that ‘I think that from the point of view of research it is probably fair to say that with the downturn of federal government funding to universities we are struggling and finding it harder and harder and I think that we would have to admit that our research is actually on the slide’ (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C). He was asked: Have reduced levels of public funding had any other affects on the school? The obvious one is that teaching loads have increased dramatically. We used to have a student/staff ratio of 12 to 1; we are now operating at 20 to 1. If you go back 23 years ago when I first came here then I was teaching a Cell Biology class with 99 students and a Biochemistry class with 28 students. Now my Cell Biology class has 350 students, next year it will have 400 and my Biochemistry class has gone up to 100 and now I also teach and an advanced Biochemistry class with 60 students. So we have had rapid student growth and there has been no additional staff appointed (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C).

The head of school continued that further consequences of reduced levels of public funding coupled with the growth in student numbers was that staff had been forced to reduce their contact with students: ‘We have cut back our tutorials and student consultations, we used to have an open door policy where students could just drop in and ask for help but we can’t do that any more, there are simply too many

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students for that to work now and the demands on our time are too great’ (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C). In addition to this standard set of environmental pressures, University C’s School of Biological Sciences also experienced specific institutional environmental pressures as well. A senior academic explained that: The last time university executives restructured the university creating the Division of Science and Engineering, Biological Sciences and Environmental Science objected because we were financially very sound. We had been saving for future developments but we were forced to amalgamate with Maths and Physical Sciences and Engineering both of whom are very shaky financially and our savings suddenly vanished and our developments were constrained by the fact that their budget does not even cover their salaries so we had to subsidise them (senior academic, School of Biological Sciences, University C).

An administrator offered further details on the level of cross-subsidisation that the School of Biological Sciences had been asked to provide to other academic units in the division: ‘We are in a division where one of the schools is an under-performer. It is not pulling its weight so this year we are being dragged down by this school to the tune of about $300,000’. This administrator added This is why the school is looking at whether we are actually situated in the correct division for our needs. Within the School of Biological Sciences we have four disciplines, two of which Molecular Biology and Biotechnology have a closer affinity with the Veterinary School and the other two have a closer affinity with Environmental Science. So we think we would be better off if we were in the division with the Veterinary School because they are the jewel in the crown, they get the money first and the rest of us fight over what is left over. So the perception is that if we amalgamate with Vet that we would be in a much better financial position but I don’t know that that is necessarily true. We could take ourselves down to Vet and we could become the under performing school’ (junior administrator, School of Biological Sciences, University C).

Another institutional pressure experienced by the School of Biological Sciences that constrained its efforts to adapt to its external environmental pressures was institutional managers’ restrictions on student load allocations that made it difficult for the school to offer new courses to attract additional students: If we were to put on a new program for instance we would have to indicate where we were going to get that load from because the university hasn’t been given any additional load and we are already saturated. So either we have got to go out and give some of our own load up in some other area saying this area of development is so important we are prepared to reduce the quota on some other areas to provide the load or we have got to negotiate with the university to try and free up some load from some where else and that is always quite hard (head School of Biological Sciences, University C).

While the head’s comments illustrate that the school faced genuine difficulties in trying to find public funded load for its proposed new courses, the comments also suggest that the head of school had a limited frame of reference for solutions to this problem; he had not considered that the school could alter its course profile, seeking alternative independent sources of revenue, such as commercial sponsorship, for funding new courses. Or that the school could deliver different types of courses, courses that they could seek full cost recovery from, such as masters coursework, continuing education courses for companies.

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The head of school identified a further institutional pressure for the school: ‘the other issue for us is that we have got an aging academic staff, quite a lot of staff were appointed about the same time I was, I am now in my late 50 s’ (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C). The head was asked: Why is the fact that the staff is mature an issue for the school? The head responded: ‘people are stuck in their ways; many of them have spent their entire career here in this school in this university, 23 or 25 years. They are used to the old rules when we were fully funded and it was easy to get research grants, they don’t have the energy or enthusiasm for the new game, to go out and find their own funding’ (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C). Others agreed with the head’s view that the aging staff profile was a problem for the school. An administrator was asked: What do you think the keys to the school’s survival in the future are? Her response was blunt: ‘We need to get rid of the older staff, they are not productive researchers and they have no new ideas about how to manage this place, the young guys have ideas but they don’t get any chance to be involved in the management of this place’ (junior administrator, School of Biological Sciences, University C). Comments made by a junior academic identified a problem that the school had in attaining the loyalty and commitment to the school’s efforts to adapt to its environmental challenges: Most of the junior members of the staff, lecturers and research fellows have tenuous appointments, they are on short-term contracts. Our funding is so insecure nobody knows whether or not they are going to have their contract renewed from one year to the next. Most people have families and mortgages, so they have to put their time and energy into protecting their own future they can’t really worry about the school because they know the school won’t look after them, if there is another funding cut then they won’t have their contract renewed (research fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University C).

University C’s School of Biological Sciences responded to this set of environmental pressures by attempting to use a defensive mode of adaptation. A junior academic described the school’s approach to its environmental challenges as: ‘hanging on for grim death and hoping that we will get through’ (junior academic, School of Biological Sciences, University C). The school was passive and path-dependent in its approach to adaptation. It did not try new strategies and actions for adaptation: develop new markets for its existing teaching or research activities, nor devise new courses or research projects or seek new independent revenue streams. The head and academics were asked: How has the school responded to environmental pressures such as reduced levels of public funding and enhanced competition for students from rival academic units in other universities in this state? The only proactive strategy that they mentioned was trying to attract fee-paying international students to their existing courses, the head and another academic had visited Singapore to sign agreements with polytechnics there for articulation arrangements so that students with associate diplomas from these institutions could enter the final year of the school’s biotechnology degree. Yet this strategy was yet to yield tangible results, to return revenue and even if the strategy earned income, it was a strategy that had already been deployed by rival academic units from other universities in this state and other states. In fact the head stated: ‘we were the first to establish a biotechnology program at the undergraduate level now there is a large number of universities in that

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market, we used to be a leader in attracting Asian students but now we have fallen behind University X, University Y and University Z’ (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C). So University C’s School of Biological Sciences adopted a reactive mode of adaptation because it was not able to defend its existing position in its student and research markets. A key reason why this happened is that neither the head nor the academics took responsibility for the problems the school faced. The head of school was asked: Have you or the academics in the school tried to obtain revenue for teaching and research from independent sources, from firms, alumni, government departments, consultancies, etc.? It shouldn’t necessarily rely on people at my level to be doing that, it should be coming from the top (institutional managers). They should be looking strategically and saying these are the areas that we think that we can get outside funding. I mean we have to do it, rather than they doing it (head, School of Biological Sciences, University C).

Yet this view was not shared by university executives, the vice-chancellor said, ‘there has been a cultural shift in terms of units being autonomous, looking after themselves, paying their own way, using their own assets but some academics from some schools are still parked out under the trees declaring the place a peace park remonstrating about corporatisation ruining the university’ (vice-chancellor, University C). Interviews with academics in the school suggested that the dominant view amongst them was that they were not responsible for, nor should they be involved in devising strategies or actions to assist the school to adapt to its environmental pressures, that this role should be undertaken by the head of school, ‘the leadership at the moment is weak, the head is conservative in his approach to improving conditions within the school, the management should be more proactive, we are under a lot of pressure, we have to teach and publish, we can’t be expected to go out there, knocking on company doors trying to find money’ (junior academic, School of Biological Sciences, University C). Another junior academic said: I can understand why the university is telling us that we need to look after ourselves, it is their response to the cut backs in government funding. So they tell us to go out and get some money from outside but there is a limit to what we can achieve and still be productive academics and I guess believable academics, there comes a point where our research is going to be compromised both in its quality and integrity because we have to go out and get external funding (junior academic, School of Biological Sciences).

A senior academic said: ‘I think that because we haven’t had an effective chair for a while, someone that can think strategically we have been floundering, we have had no direction’ (senior academic, School of Biological Sciences, University C). This situation where both the head of school and its academics abrogated responsibility for assisting the school to adapt to its environmental challenges could not continue over the long term. In fact during his interview the vice-chancellor indicated that he had already put a proposal to the university senate (governing body) to re-profile the university, to close academic units that were in a state of decline with deficits, low levels of research outputs and declining enrolments. The vice-chancellor was asked: How do you go about re-profiling the university?

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I have tried several ways (he laughs). One way is to confront it directly; this is the kind you read about in the newspaper. So you go to your governing council or senate or whatever it is called and you say we can’t afford these units anymore they are draining the rest of us and we need money for x, y and z. If you get the go ahead, then you have the NTEU (the academics union) objecting, the academics go on strike, there are lots of newspaper stories about how awful you are and how essential they are and how the university couldn’t possibly exist without them. So then you have to go back to the Senate to ask them for a plan to work it out. I tried this way, with similar results. So this time I have decided to use an economic model. We have certain incentives in the economic model. (Are they key performance indicators for academic units?). Yes that is right. So what you do is let the economic clockwork wind away, some academic units will succeed some won’t. So as long as you have got the incentives right and the formula rewards what you want it to reward, you don’t actually have to say I am closing this academic unit down. (Is this a much slower process?) Yes, it is a slower process but it is more able to be accomplished. (Is there less resistance to this sort of process?) Well it is not anybody making a decision to close them down, it is just God working in mysterious ways, well they seem to prefer it (vice-chancellor, University C).

The vice-chancellor’s remarks echo the story of the tortoise and the hare. Perhaps the vice-chancellor had done a cost/benefit analysis of ‘the direct approach’ versus the ‘long road’ to re-profiling the university and decided that the costs and risks associated with ‘the direct approach’ were too great: a fight between himself and the academics’ union played out in the media that could damage the university’s reputation amongst stakeholders, potential students and firms and perhaps damage his own standing as the institution’s leader (not helpful when seeking your next appointment and head hunters are reviewing track records). So the vice-chancellor had decided that the wiser path was the slow road, allowing natural selection to occur. It is also possible that the vice-chancellor never actually intended to close down particular academic units but to ‘shock them into action’, rid them of their inertia and resistance towards the university’s goals of marketisation and entrepreneurialism; a high stakes poker game where a vice-chancellor holding two pairs tries to bluff academic units into thinking that he holds a royal flush.

Notes 1. Others including the head of department were asked to provide details about the department’s budget position yet they declined this request. 2. There were 19 permanent full-time academics in the department 12 of these 19 were Associate/full Professors, senior people close to retirement. 3. The dean stated that other departments in the faculty had larger deficits than the biology department so their needs had a higher priority.

Part III

Conceptual and Practical Reflections

Chapter 8

Discussion and Conclusions

This chapter discusses several propositions about why and how academic units adapt to or resist changes in their external environments drawn from the empirical work presented in Part II of the book. These propositions are a step towards tentative and preliminary conclusions. However a caveat is required because these propositions are derived from an exploratory empirical study, a small sample of case study academic units drawn from a single nation’s universities. In order to produce substantive and definitive conclusions about academic units’ adaptation and resistance to changing environments, empirical work of greater scope and depth is required, work that draws on a broader range of academic units representing more academic disciplines and types of universities situated in different nations. The current study investigated academic units’ adaptation and resistance to changing environments using a ‘freeze-frame approach’; case studies of academic units were conducted at a given point of time. This approach was used because the empirical work was self-funded. The optimum research method for this type of research problem is a longitudinal global comparative empirical study; however this type of research is expensive so it was not feasible in this instance. Notwithstanding these caveats, this small-scale empirical work has produced some important findings. To facilitate the clarity of my argument I present these propositions as discrete points yet many of these propositions are interrelated.

Interaction Between Academic Units’ Exogenous Environment and Endogenous Environment The first proposition that the case studies illustrate is that there is a process of interaction between academic units’ exogenous environment (external environmental factors) and its endogenous environment (internal environmental factors). Each case study academic unit’s exogenous environment comprised multiple factors such as their resource dependencies: public funding for research, teaching and administration, income from international students, consultancies, stakeholder relationships – regulatory relationships with the state, normative relationships with professional associations, research partners and students – and market relationships – D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_8, 

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competition and/or collaboration with other universities’ academic units, research centres and research organisations for research funding, staff and technology, competition for students with other universities’ academic units and private education providers (including online providers). While case study academic units held some of these exogenous factors in common (many relied on public funding as their primary source of operational revenue, so when this revenue stream declined they experienced difficulties). Some academic units encountered exogenous factors that other units did not, for example law and engineering academic units needed to have their undergraduate courses accredited by their respective professional associations. Biology academic units competed with commercial biotech firms for research staff and in races to make discoveries, develop intellectual property, such as patents for new technologies and pharmaceutical products. Academic units’ endogenous environments also comprised multiple factors such as their organisational structure: whether they adopted a unitary model or departments, leadership and management roles and decision-making patterns: single leader, executive group, committees, organisational functions: research programmes, projects, teaching and administration and socio-cultural factors: history, relationships between academics and unit’s managers and between the unit and other academic units in the university. Again while case study academic units shared some of these endogenous factors, others were specific to particular case study academic units. Much of this is self-evident. Yet this work suggests two key propositions about the nature of case study academic units’ interactions between their exogenous and their endogenous environments.

Academic Units Display Heterogeneous Interactions with Their Exogenous Environments Academic units had different interactions with their exogenous environments. Defenders viewed changes in their exogenous environments as constraints, threats to their stability and status quo, as such the focus of their time, energy and resources was on trying to control and stabilise these changes. In contrast prospectors actively sought to change their exogenous environment; they were prepared to take risks on innovative research projects or develop new courses, attract new student cohorts even though some of these activities may not have succeeded or yielded a profit, while resistant academic units tried to avoid institutional pressures in their exogenous environment that attempted to mandate changes in units’ teaching and research activities that counter-veiled the units’ traditional norms and values. The fact that these case study academic units displayed heterogeneous patterns of interaction with their exogenous environments is significant because it challenges the foundational assumption of institutional theory that organisations display homogenous, isomorphic responses in adapting to changes in their external environments (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148; Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 345). The heterogeneity of the case study findings supports Gidden’s structuration theory, although there are institutional pressures emanating from stakeholders in the exogenous environment (the

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state) and university managers pushing academic units towards adopting a given set of norms (marketisation, entrepreneurialism and new public management), individual agents (heads of academic units, academics and administrators) within academic units still exercised power and authority over how the unit responded to these pressures, whether they resisted them, adopted them or modified them selecting some aspects of these norms and not others (Giddens, 1984; Oliver, 1991, pp. 152–159; Scott, 2008, p. 77).

Purposes of Adaptation Vary, Some Academic Units Seek Equilibrium with Their Exogenous Environment Others Seek Disequilibrium Traditional definitions of organisational adaptation define adaptation as a process that occurs when there is a change in an organisation’s exogenous environment that sparks a response from the organisation. For example Cameron states that: Adaptation refers to modifications and alterations in the organization or its components in order to adjust to changes in the external environment. Its purpose is to restore equilibrium to an imbalanced condition. . . Adaptation does not necessarily imply reactivity on the part of the organization (adaptation is not just waiting for the environment to change and reacting to it) because proactive or anticipatory adaptation is possible as well). But the emphasis is on responding to some discontinuity or lack of fit that arises between the organization and its environment (Cameron, 1984, p. 123).

While Cameron’s conception of adaptation acknowledges that adaptation does not necessarily have to be reactive, it can be proactive or anticipatory Cameron perceives the purpose of the process of adaptation to be an organisation seeking to realign itself with its exogenous environment to redress disequilibrium between the organisation and its environment. This view depicts an organisation’s adaptation to changes in its exogenous environment as a linear, unidirectional stimulus/response. Yet these case studies illustrate that this is not always the case. Academic units that chose a defensive or analyser mode of adaptation were seeking to restore equilibrium between themselves and their exogenous environments, to regain stable supplies of resources that were essential for the units’ survival (resource dependency theory, RDT) (Pfeffer & Salanick, 1978, p. 2). For prospector academic units, the purpose of adaptation was not to restore equilibrium between themselves and their environment. Prospector units sought disequilibrium between themselves and their exogenous environments (Miller & Page, 2007, pp. 222–223; Stacey, 1996, pp. 14–15, 99). For prospectors, adaptation was about aggressive, expansionist entrepreneurial growth, not about survival. Prospectors’ innovative actions redefined and re-configured their exogenous environments. Prospectors sought new research markets, funding markets and student markets, they adopted new organisational structures (network clusters) and new operating processes (informal flexible decision making as contrasted with conventional academic units’ norm of decision making via bureaucratic committees governed by codified policies and procedures

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and precedent). These actions by prospectors not only re-configured prospectors’ exogenous environments, they also altered their competitor’s environments as well, and as Chapter 5 noted, because prospectors had the first mover advantage in these new markets and used new structures and means of operating, they derived competitive advantages over other academic units.

Some Academic Units Resisted Changes in Their Exogenous Environments The second proposition derived from the case study findings is that academic units can resist environmental changes, they do not necessarily adapt to them. Conceptualising resistance is a difficult task, organisations have different reasons for resistance, in different organisational contexts, resistance can take different forms; it can be manifest or latent (Fleming & Spicer, 2007, p. 29). Workers may not consciously articulate their behaviour as resistant (Fleming & Spicer, 2007, p. 29), yet the effects of workers’ behaviour can challenge hegemonic agents and their efforts to control workers’ norms and actions through coercion or subtle construction of workers’ subjectivities whereby they internalise identities, norms and values of dominant agents (the state and institutional managers) (Foucault, 1980; Mumby, 2005). Three of the sixteen case study academic units displayed resistance to changes in their exogenous environments. Of course the intriguing question is why do some academic units choose to resist environmental changes and others choose adaptation. It seems there is no straightforward answer to this question; there is no single variable whose presence or absence indicates whether an academic unit will choose adaptation or resistance. There was no association or causal link between the type of university an academic unit was situated in and whether it chose adaptation or resistance. In addition the study found no clear association between an academic unit’s academic discipline and whether it chose adaptation or resistance. Case study academic units had different reasons for resisting changes in their environments and their resistance took different forms. Two forms or patterns of resistance were evident: passive/apolitical and active/ideological. Each of the resistant case study academic units had academics that displayed both forms of resistance. Passive/apolitical resistance occurred when an academic unit head and a key coalition of academics attempted to implement a defensive adaptation strategy but when this strategy was no longer effective, these people then turned to institutional managers expecting that they would ‘fix the problem’ reversing the unit’s deficit and its decline, yet in each case this did not occur. A group of academics at University B’s School of Civil Engineering displayed a variant of this passive form of resistance. This group resisted institutional managers’ pressure to be entrepreneurial because of self-interest. They had determined that the ‘costs’ of being entrepreneurial were not balanced by the ‘benefits available’; they believed that they would not be promoted, so they were not prepared to be entrepreneurial. In each of the resistant academic units there was also a group of academics that

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displayed active/ideological resistance to the state’s and institutional executive’s attempts to promulgate the new ethos of marketisation and entrepreneurialism on grounds that this paradigm was an affront to their core values as academics and to their perception of the raison d’être for a university. This study’s finding that some academic units displayed resistance to their environmental changes is significant because several theories on organisation/environment relations proceed from the a priori assumption that organisations must adapt to changes in their environment (RDT) (Pfeffer & Salanick, 1978), strategic choice theory (Child, 1972; Oliver, 1991), contingency theory (Chandler, 1962; L. Donaldson, 2001; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1986) and population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977). In contrast institutional theory acknowledges that organisations can respond to environmental changes by seeking to resist or ignore these changes. There are two types of institutional theory, an older and a newer form. Classical institutional theorists take a single organisation as their unit of analysis (Selznick, 1957). Neo-institutional theorists take organisational fields (groups of organisations) as their unit of analysis (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983; Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002; Hargrave & Van de Ven, 2006; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Scott, 2008). Classical institutional theorists argue that when organisations encounter changing environments, many organisations experience difficulty changing their structures (how they are organised) and their functions (how they operate) because their core norms and values emphasise stasis (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). Neo-institutionalists argue that when organisations experience changes in their exogenous environments, organisations reproduce and imitate organisational structures, activities and routines of other organisations that they perceive are successfully adapting to these environmental changes (mimetic isomorphism) (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983, p. 152).

Delineating Causation and Processes of Adaptation and Resistance The third proposition suggested by the case studies is that it is helpful to distinguish between causes, ‘the why question’ and processes of academic units adaptation and resistance to their changing environments, ‘the how question’. Distinguishing between causes and processes of adaptation and resistance is not a semantic game. I think that RDT, institutional theory and strategic choice theory have tended to conflate causation and processes of adaptation. Whilst for some organisations the boundaries between causes and processes of adaptation and resistance to environmental changes may overlap, this is not necessarily the case, so it is worthwhile trying to disentangle these concepts to deepen our understanding of adaptation and resistance. This is why this study distinguishes between academic units’ modes of adaptation/resistance and processes of adaptation. The modes of adaptation academic units chose reveal insights about why they adapted or resisted and the processes of adaptation which include the strategies and actions that units used for

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adaptation or resistance reveal how units intended to adapt to or resist environmental changes. The study found no single explanation of why academic units chose to adapt to their environmental pressures. Instead two theoretical frameworks seem to work in tandem to provide insights into why case study academic units responded to changes in their environment by adapting while other units resisted these changes. Resource Dependency Theory (RDT) offers the first set of explanations about why some of the case study academic units adapted to changes in their environments (Pfeffer & Salanick, 1978). Yet RDT alone is not sufficient to explain the subtle socio-cultural and political nuances at play in the case study academic units. These sociocultural characteristics influenced whether units chose to adapt or resist changes in their exogenous environments and influenced how units approached adaptation or resistance. I suggest that we can employ classical institutional theory and neoinstitutional theory to explain why and how these socio-cultural characteristics affected academic units’ adaptation or resistance. RDT posits that organisations are embedded in an environment in which they are dependent upon other organisations for the provision of resources (fiscal and human capital and technology), yet the supply of these essential resources is not stable, so adaptation involves trying to ensure a steady supply of resources (Pfeffer & Salanick, 1978, pp. 2–3). These case studies support RDT’s proposition that organisations are embedded in an environment of other organisations. RDT explains why defenders and analyser academic units chose adaptation; these academic units were dependent on public funding from the Australian federal government as their major revenue stream, when this declined these units needed to replace this funding with revenue obtained from independent (non-government sources). However the case study findings challenge RDT’s basic proposition that all organisations are dependent on other organisations for essential resources and that this is why organisations adapt. As noted, prospectors were not ‘resource dependent’ in the classic sense proposed by RDT. Both of the prospector units generated significant proportions of their revenue from independent sources. Significantly, prospectors had a different mindset to other academic units in the study. Prospectors perceived themselves and operated as independent ‘network enterprises’; they were not dependent or reliant on any other agent for funding, for research, for teaching ideas or to form network partnerships and alliances with firms and other research centres; prospectors were masters of their own destiny. Prospectors proactively used marketisation and entrepreneurialism to expand into new research and teaching markets and develop new revenue streams. In contrast defenders and analysers were passive, and they were constrained by their dependency on a single source of revenue. The case studies of the analyser academic units stand as textbook cases of neo-institutional theory’s concept of mimetic isomorphism. Each of the analyser academic units monitored the strategies and actions of other academic units in teaching, research and commercial activities, evaluating which of these strategies and actions seemed to be successful, subsequently imitating those that were deemed to be successful. The most obvious example of this was the strategy of recruiting

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full-fee-paying international students primarily from Southeast Asian nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and India. Prospector academic units were first movers in international student markets opening new markets through offshore provision or twinning arrangements with local offshore providers or oncampus provision (Mazzarol & Soutar, 2008). Analyser academic units watched prospector’s activities in international student markets and quickly ascertained that this was a lucrative revenue stream, providing substantial amounts of revenue that could replace public funding. So they adopted exactly the same strategies often trying to recruit the same types of international student cohorts from the same offshore markets. Yet after a market had been ‘mined’ by a prospector with first mover advantage (brand recognition, established network relationships with providers such as polytechnics in Singapore and offshore student recruitment agents and government bureaucrats), it was difficult for analyser academic units to establish a foothold in these markets, in some cases they were left with the bones of the carcass after the prospectors had gorged themselves. The case studies of the resistant academic units display how and why RDT and classical institutional theory interact to move academic units from resistance towards adaptation. As with the other units in this study the resistant units faced pressure from the state and institutional executives to adopt the ‘new’ normative paradigm of marketisation, entrepreneurialism and new public management. Yet these external pressures for change were rejected by the dominant coalition of academics in each of these units and by the heads of these units because they were contrary to their core academic values and conception of a university. These units displayed resistance to the new ethos of marketisation and entrepreneurialism by inertia and path-dependency, they ignored efforts of institutional managers to adopt the new paradigm and steadfastly continued to operate much as they always had, teaching the same courses to the same types of student cohorts and undertaking the same type of research projects. These were archetypal examples of classical institutional theories’ explanation of how organisations respond to changing environments. However even though each of these units attempted to continue to operate as they traditionally had done, they were not able to do so indefinitely. Each of these academic units reached a point of financial crisis where reduced public funding forced these units into deficit and in each case institutional managers then intervened in the management of each of these units, restructuring the staffing profile through redundancies and contract non-renewals and exerting coercive pressures on these units to implement a more entrepreneurial approach to teaching (more full-fee-paying students: internationals, post graduates, continuing and professional education programmes) and a more entrepreneurial approach to research: forming partnerships with firms or quasi-government agencies that would fund research projects. This was a textbook case of resource dependency theory’s explanation of organisational adaptation to changing environments. This scenario is interesting because it demonstrates that there is no single theory that offers a complete explanation of the causes or process of adaptation or resistance. These cases of the resistant academic units demonstrate how RDT and institutional theory are interwoven in a reflexive pattern, a feedback loop.

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Resistance Cannot Be Sustained Over the Long Term The fourth proposition suggested by the case study findings is that although academic units may resist environmental pressures to adopt marketisation, entrepreneurialism and new public management because of endogenous institutionalised norms, their resistance cannot be sustained over the long term. This is because these resistant academic units have a resource dependency on public funding and a weaker political position within their universities that eventually forces these units to comply with the market-oriented norms of dominant exogenous agents (the state and institutional managers). In other words units are forced to adapt. So the case studies of the resistant academic units illustrate the neo-institutionalists’ explanation of organisational adaptation. The case studies of the resistant academic units supports Miles and Snow’s view that reactor organisations are unstable and could prove inevitably unsuccessful (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 93). Yet an important difference between these case studies of resistant academic units and Miles and Snow’s work is that according to Miles and Snow, reactor organisations have ‘an inconsistent response to their environmental changes’ for one of three reasons, ‘management fails to articulate a viable organisational strategy’, a strategy is articulated but technology, structure and process are not linked to it in an appropriate manner’ or management adheres to a particular strategy–structure relationship even though it is no longer relevant to environmental conditions’ (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 82). Here Miles and Snow’s reactor organisations’ lack of adaptation is not volitional, it is passive; it is the result of the ineptitude of management. In contrast the current work finds that while there was some evidence of this ‘passive/apolitical’ resistance for each of the resistant case study academic units, each of these also had a dominant coalition of academics and management that had an ‘active/ideological’ resistance to the dominant agents’ attempts to mandate a new set of norms and values, structures and processes as the orthodox paradigm.

Decisions About Academic Units’ Adaptation or Resistance Are Made by Consultative Processes Between Heads of Units and Senior Academics and Administrators The fifth proposition derived from these case studies is that heads of academic units, deans, heads of schools or departments do not determine whether their academic units will adapt to their environmental changes or resist these changes in isolation. In each of the case studies of academic units that pursued a defensive, analyser or prospector mode of adaptation the decision on which mode of adaptation to adopt and which processes (strategies and actions) to adopt for this mode of adaptation was a joint decision made by the head of the unit in consultation with senior academics and administrators in the unit. While in those academic units that chose resistance, this decision was made by the head of unit and senior academics,

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as administrators rarely challenged institutional managers’ views so they did not advocate active/ideological resistance. This finding is important because it provides insights about the leadership and management and locus of power and authority for key decisions within academic units in Australian universities. Even though exogenous agents such as the state have promulgated the corporatisation of universities, with marketisation and entrepreneurialism as guiding norms, directing institutional managers to devise strategies, plans, policies and procedures to implement these norms, this new regime does not seem to have penetrated so far as to re-configure how academic units in Australian universities are led and managed, or the locus of power and authority within these units. Traditionally deans of faculties and heads of schools or departments in Australian universities were elected to their leadership roles by their academic colleagues for a short-term period of 3–5 years (Harman, 2002). In many instances heads resumed their ‘normal’ academic position after completing their term as leader of the academic unit. In this situation heads of academic units were seen as ‘the first amongst equals’, their leadership role and the power and authority that they held in this position was attributed to them by their ‘followers’, the colleagues that had voted for them to have this leadership role, as such it was largely symbolic and notional (Bolden et al., 2009; Gronn, 2002). As several interviewees in this study pointed out, under these circumstances heads of academic units were loathe to do anything too radical, to make decisions that contravened the norms and values of the dominant coalition of academics within the unit because after their tenure as leader expired they would need to resume their role as ordinary academics, they could face reprisals from those that felt slighted by their leadership decisions. It is now commonplace for heads of academic units in Australian universities, especially deans of faculties to be appointed by institutional executives or through authority delegated to institutional-level human resource departments (Harman, 2002, p. 54; Sarros, 1998). These appointments are usually 5-year contracts with renewal subject to performance appraisal and meeting designated key performance indicators (usually skewed towards fiscal targets). Deans of faculties in Australian universities occupy a particularly challenging position. Caught between the demands of institutional executives to implement the state’s new ethos of marketisation and performativity and some academics’ vociferous objections to these norms (de Zilwa, 2008; Harman, 2006; Lyotard, 1984, p. 46). Deans have to skilfully negotiate this minefield and avoid alienating either party. In addition, deans and other heads of academic units must contend with the pressures derived from diminishing resources, rising operating costs and massification of student cohorts. Under these circumstances one may assume that deans and heads of academic units would be inclined to adopt a corporate leadership style, an executive style where they made key decisions for the unit (such as determining whether the unit would adapt to its changing environment or resist these changes) in isolation. Yet these case studies illustrate that this is not the case. As University B’s head of School of Life Sciences said: ‘I am very aware of how all the individuals [academics] behave and react to various things. If I look as if I am straining in terms of the way the

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academics would like me to perform or make decisions, some one will tell me. . .’ While some deans and heads of academic units may be less obsequious towards the academics in their unit, few would mount a head on challenge to the power, authority, norms and values of the dominant coalition of academics in their unit. This is not just a matter of self-preservation; it is also an acknowledgement of the fact that even though the leader of the academic unit can make a strategic choice about the unit’s adaptation or resistance, ultimately the power and responsibility to enact that strategic choice resides with the academics. This does not mean that resistance towards marketisation, entrepreneurialism and new public management is de rigueur; the case studies of the prospector units illustrate that. Instead these case studies suggest that the dominant coalition of academics in the academic unit maintains substantive agency (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). They have the power and authority within academic units to determine whether units adapt to or resist their changing environments. A consequence of this finding is that the academic unit’s decision to adapt or resist its environmental changes can vary over time, if a new clique of academics emerges as the dominant coalition within an academic unit, established decisions and long-held norms and values can potentially be overturned. This study’s finding that heads of academic units make decisions about their units’ adaptation or resistance in consultation with academics and senior administrators (defenders, analysers and prospectors) is significant because it contrasts with Miles and Snow’s view that managers make strategic choices of which mode of adaptation an organisation will follow (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 7, 18–20).

Academic Units Do not Use Strategic Planning or Strategic Management to Determine Processes for Adaptation The sixth proposition indicated by the case studies is that few Australian academic units undertake strategic planning or strategic management to choose a mode of adaptation or to select the processes that they will use for adaptation. Strategic planning refers to a formal process by management and staff of an organisation to identify the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses threats and opportunities, commonly known as a SWOT analysis. As part of a strategic planning process, organisations identify their objectives and assign resources, timelines and tasks to individuals or subunits and review performance against previously determined key performance indicators (Rowley & Sherman, 2004). From the late 1980s onwards, some academics, consultants and practitioners challenged traditional conceptions of strategic planning. Mintzberg said that ‘strategic planning is an attempt to programme and control how organisations respond to environmental pressures which is doomed to fail because environmental pressures are constantly changing and cannot be predicted in advance’ (Mintzberg, 1994, p. 210). So traditional strategic planning fell out of vogue and was replaced by more flexible, emergent approaches to strategy such as strategic management and strategic positioning using processes such as

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environmental scanning and scenario planning (Elfring & Volberda, 2001, pp. 1–25; Heracleous, 2003, pp. 3–22). Yet only one of the case study academic units, University A’s department of civil engineering used strategic planning or strategic management to adapt to its changing environment; this finding may surprise some. Although (Bastedo, 2007, pp. 302–303) comments that whilst higher education literature endorses strategic planning, in practice its implementation is problematic because of institutionalised resistance. Also other empirical studies conducted in Australian universities have found resistance to strategic planning and negative consequences associated with the introduction of key performance indicators (Crebert, 2000; Taylor, 2001). Those familiar with this study’s empirical context know that strategic planning is a key tenet of the Australian federal government’s higher education policy framework. Australian universities are required to submit institutional-level strategic plans to the federal government’s higher education department (currently known as DEEWR) to demonstrate accountability and prudent management of public funding. In turn institutional managers often require academic units especially faculties or schools (meso-level organisational units) to prepare and submit strategic plans. In addition strategic planning is a core component of Miles and Snow’s model of organisational adaptation. As noted, Miles and Snow depict organisational adaptation as an adaptive cycle, arguing that adaptation involves an organisation’s manager making sequential strategic choices to solve its entrepreneurial problem (choosing product/market domains), its engineering problem (choosing technologies for production and distribution) and its administrative problem (changing structures and processes so that they suit new products and markets) (Miles & Snow, 1978, pp. 24–28). This finding raises two questions: why do academic units in Australian universities not use strategic planning or strategic management for adaptation? And how do academic units in Australian universities undertake adaptation, what processes do they use? The answer to the first question is that with the exception of University A’s Department of Civil Engineering there was widespread scepticism amongst academics and heads of academic units about the value and relevance of strategic planning as a tool that would assist academic units to adapt to changes in their environment. As noted, when University D’s dean of law was asked whether his academic unit engaged in strategic planning or strategic management to assist it to adapt to its changing environment, the dean yelled into the microphone ‘true strategic planning is doing something, it is an outcome, not a process. . .’. Other heads of academic units were also critical of strategic planning, the head of University A’s biology department said ‘the very word strategic plan has a terrible effect on most people, their eyes glaze over and they lose concentration, so I try to avoid using it’. When asked why academics had this response to strategic planning, the head of University A’s biology department said, ‘it is because strategic planning is seen as something that is imposed on us, top-down by institutional managers. It is too remote from academics’ day-to-day concerns, their teaching and research. Academics also don’t like the sense that they are losing control over their own

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work, that we [the academic unit] must demonstrate that what we do aligns with the strategic directions determined by university managers’. The answer to the second question is that even though organisational theorists such as Miles and Snow advocate that organisations should use formal, rational, planned processes to make decisions about how they will adapt to changes in their environments; this study shows that the processes some academic units in Australian universities use to make decisions about adaptation are messy and emergent. Many units focus on short-term immediate issues rather than thinking about the unit’s future survival. Defenders display strong path-dependence, continuing to use the same strategies and actions that they have always used, teaching the same courses, to the same types of students, and undertaking similar types of research funded from the same sources. For analysers adaptation involves mimetic isomorphism (monitoring the adaptation strategies and actions) of prospector academic units and then imitating those strategies and actions that are deemed to be successful. Why does this pattern of adaptation occur? The data suggests several reasons why some academic units’ decision-making processes for adaptation are messy and emergent rather than rational and planned as Miles and Snow and other organisational theorists suggest (Child, 1972; Oliver, 1991). The first is the dissonance between theory and empiricism, theoretical models by their essence are often more elegant and refined than empirical contexts. Second theoretical models such as Miles and Snow’s articulate an ideal type or archetype of adaptation; even though their archetype was created by analysing empirical data, Miles and Snow acknowledge that many organisations’ approach to adaptation will not match the archetype they present. Other reasons why these case study units adopted messy, emergent decision-making processes for adaptation relate to the specific empirical context. It is difficult for academic units in Australian universities to undertake strategic planning even over the short term (2–3 years), because academic units’ budget allocation from public funding is only provided 1 year in advance. This is because institutional public funding is provided on an annual basis. In addition some academics in the case study academic units had become alienated from their unit because of the erosion of their working conditions (increasing work loads, lack of job security). The primary concern of these academics was ensuring that they had continuing employment; they would not expend their time or energy undertaking work for the academic unit when there was no guarantee that they would have continued employment within the unit. Yet the paradox was that these academics would be more likely to retain their positions if they invested their time, energy and resources to assist their unit to adapt to its environment: to attain a healthy financial position, research grants, produce research outputs, attract students and satisfy their needs for quality education provision. Why did some of the case study academic units (defenders and analysers) lack originality in how they approached the problem of adapting to environmental pressures? Why did analyser units use mimetic isomorphism, imitating the strategies and actions of prospector units? Why did defender units display path-dependency repeating previous strategies and actions used by the unit? As indicated the answer to these questions is provided by neo-institutional theory. Defenders opted for

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path-dependency when the dominant coalition of academics in units was opposed to the new norms of marketisation and entrepreneurialism. Or when the dominant coalition of academics in the unit were risk averse, they made the pragmatic decision that their unit did not have the slack resources available to try new strategies and processes for adaptation when there was no guarantee that they would work, or that these ideas would take too long to yield revenue. Yet given that academic units’ exogenous environments were constantly changing with new challenges and competitors, emerging path-dependency was not the optimum means of adapting, as adaptation strategies and processes devised for previous environmental conditions could no longer be appropriate for the prevailing environment. While as mentioned mimetic isomorphism could also be unsuccessful for analysers copying prospectors’ strategies or entering their markets when prospectors had first mover advantage.

Academic Units Need to Enhance Their Adaptive Capacity and Develop Entrepreneurial Self-Reliance to Overcome Their Resource Dependency No doubt some readers will find the case study academic units’ focus on resource issues disturbing and distasteful. Why do these case studies of academic units’ interactions with their exogenous environments not tell a story of academic units’ struggle with issues of ontological, epistemological and pedagogical substance? Why are they not about the role of universities, academic units and academics in society? Surely these are the key questions of our era? Why have these units focused so myopically on the fiscal almost to the exclusion of these matters of academic substance? In another era or perhaps in another empirical context, academic units’ interactions with their exogenous environments may have been about such matters. Yet it is clear that over the decade from 1999 to 2009 the core challenge for most of the case study academic units was their resource dependency – acquiring sufficient resources to continue their research, teaching and community service. This situation was unavoidable. It does not debase the significance of these matters of academic substance. Instead it points to a pragmatically driven prioritisation. This was a decade that saw a fundamental transformation in the funding of Australian universities. As Chapter 1 noted, during the 1970s until the 1980s Australian universities received 90% of their total operating revenue from the state (Marginson, 2001). In this earlier era the Australian federal government’s funding policy reflected a view that Australian universities were core institutions building the fabric of Australian society. They were institutions ‘creating the common wealth’ of the nation, they were a resource that served the public good and as such they were funded from the public purse (Marginson, 2002b). Yet fast-forward to 20071 and observe that federal government funding for Australian universities has been scaled back to 40% (DEEWR, 2009a). Australian universities are now expected to be fiscally selfreliant. This decision reflects a policy paradigm that views these institutions as

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enhancing private fiscal and social capital rather than as nation-building institutions (Marginson, 2002, p. 112; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, pp. 20–22). Chapter 10 notes that since 2008 the federal government has begun to reinvest in Australian universities. Yet the trend is clear and probably irreversible. It is unlikely that Australian universities will ever return to the halcyon days where they could rest assured that they would receive 90% of their operating revenue from the state. The reduction in state funding of public universities has been more severe in Australia than is the case in some European nations such as Finland, Poland and Spain (Williams, 2009, p. 11, 13). Of course systemic variations in legislative and regulatory frameworks governing the acquisition and allocation of funding for universities in different nations and unique historically determined structural configurations mean that we must be cautious when attempting to make global comparisons (Clark, 2004b, p. 173; Liefner, 2003, pp. 472–473; Shattock, 2009, p. 5–6). Yet a new pattern of funding for public universities is emerging in many nations’ public universities such as Japan (Yokoama, 2006, p. 524), Poland and Finland (Williams, 2009, p. 13), the United States (Geiger, 2004, pp. 67–69) and Thailand (Schiller & Leifner, 2007, p. 550). This is a trend for public universities to receive reduced levels of public funding and therefore increase their reliance on independent (non-government or third-stream) revenue; revenue from entrepreneurial activities such as consultancy, commercialisation of intellectual property, full-fee tuition, endowments, investments and bequests (Clark, 1998b, 2003; de Zilwa, 2005). The global financial crisis that emerged in late 2007 has made state funding of public universities more problematic; this is evident in two ways. First, both public and private universities throughout the globe have lost revenue from investments in equity and capital markets. In the United States, Ivy League universities have endured significant losses in their endowment funds: Harvard University’s endowment fund was valued at US$36.9 billion prior to the stock market crash and collapse of major banks in September and October 2008, when it lost US$8 billion or 22% of its value (Wolinsky, 2009, p. 209). Yet US Ivy League institutions are in a relatively fortunate fiscal position, as their capital reserves should see them through the current crisis relatively unscathed. Not so publicly funded universities. For example, the University of Melbourne, an elite sandstone Australian university announced in July 2009 that ‘the global financial crisis has impacted on the University’s financial position through ‘a net loss in value of around AU$191 million in investment income for 2008 with further reductions projected for 2009 . . .’ (The University of Melbourne, 2009, p. 1). At the time of writing, late July 2009, the University of Melbourne plans to address this loss of revenue by reducing academic and administrative staff numbers by 220, approximately 3% of its 7,325 full-time equivalent staff, in an effort to save AU$30 million this financial year (Davis, 2009, p. 2; The University of Melbourne, 2009). The University of Melbourne intends to employ three strategies to save revenue: placing a freeze on external hiring of professional staff [administrators], contract non-renewals of administrators on fixed-term contracts, reducing expenditure on staffing costs by expanding flexible leave and working arrangements (The University of Melbourne, 2009, pp. 4–9). The University of Melbourne is one of the wealthiest public universities in Australia; its investment portfolio comprising

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cash, stocks, property and bonds was valued at AU$1.4 billion at the end of 2007, dividends from these investments had been used to fund scholarships, professorial chairs, research and services for staff and students (Slattery & Lane, 2009). The loss of revenue will certainly place greater pressure on the University of Melbourne’s academic units to enhance their entrepreneurial activities to provide an alternative revenue stream to fund its teaching, research and student services. The second impact of the global financial crisis for public universities is that they will now have to compete with many other public and private institutions for funding from the state. As Chapter 1 noted, many nations’ governments have made substantial payments to bailout banks and other industries significantly affected by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, stock market crash, reduced demand for products and services, currency devaluations and increases in oil prices. For example, in the United States in May 2009, two prominent car manufacturing companies, General Motors and Chrysler, received more than US$30 billion in federal aid (The New York Times, 2009). It is probable that many other banks and firms in many nations will need financial assistance before global capital and equity markets recover, returning to a more stable pattern. Clearly it is now imperative that the first item on the agenda for Australian universities and their academic units is ensuring their fiscal viability, addressing the issue of their resource dependency. They are not alone; many other academic units in publicly funded universities around the globe will have experienced similar or perhaps even more substantial losses in their investment portfolios as a consequence of the global financial crisis and will now face similar challenges and constraints on their research, teaching and student services. Under these circumstances, when universities have endured a significant challenge from such a core element of their exogenous environment they have no alternative but to make ensuring their fiscal viability their first priority. Academic matters of substance are important, yet attention can only be turned to these issues once an academic unit has ensured its fiscal viability, ensuring that it has sufficient resources to undertake its academic work. Some may argue that the global financial crisis is an aberrant event, that once global capital and equity markets stabilise academic units can return to normalcy and once again academic issues can regain their ascendancy over fiscal matters. Yet in my view the new pattern of public universities needing to attain a significant proportion of their operating revenue from independent sources will endure over the medium term at least. Maybe some time in the future, governments may return to fully funding public universities’ operations; however this is unlikely to occur in our lifetime. Yet even if public universities return to being fully funded by the state, their academic units will still have to operate in exogenous environments that are characterised by dynamism and complexity rather than stasis and simplicity, this point is explored further in Chapter 9. As a preface to Chapter 9 I need to acknowledge readers’ divergent motivations. Higher education scholars privilege explorations of theoretical frameworks, critiquing the cogency and robustness of these frameworks as well they should, as this is their bread and butter. Higher education scholars and other social scientists hold the maxim that scholarship should not be normative as given. The paradox inherent

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in the normative prescription that scholarship should not be normative seems to have eluded these scholars. The debate surrounding normativity is the site of an enormous chasm between higher education scholars and practitioners of university management (vice-chancellors and their deputies, rectors, provosts, deans, heads of academic units). While higher education scholars assiduously recoil from normativity, practitioners of university management can embrace and pursue normative prescriptions for adaptation even when they may not be suitable for the current set of environmental conditions that their academic units are situated in, or appropriate for the academics in their unit. Higher education scholars quickly become spellbound by abstract conceptual debates. Like children with shiny new Lego sets on Christmas morning, higher education scholars can become absorbed by questions surrounding academic units’ resistance and adaptation. Yet higher education scholars can prove fickle lovers, when new more enticing questions emerge, questions that served as constant companions over many long nights can be discarded without hesitation. Not so for practitioners, for them questions about academic units adaptation and resistance to environmental pressures are immediate concrete problems that need immediate concrete solutions. They need to understand what makes some academic units adapt to environmental pressures and others resist environmental pressures? What strategies and actions can units adopt to overcome resistance, inertia and path-dependency? These are the issues that are paramount for practitioners of university management. If academic units fail to develop strategies and processes to adapt to their environmental pressures this can potentially spell the end of an academic unit’s existence. This does not mean that all academic units need to adhere to a formulaic recipe for adaptation. If academic units are to adapt to turbulent, complex exogenous environments, it is vitally important that units adopt heterogeneous structures, strategies and processes for adaptation. As the case studies of the academic units using an analyser mode of adaptation illustrated, units that use mimetic isomorphism, copying the strategies and processes of adaptation of prospector units that they deem are successfully adapting to their changing environments can encounter difficulties as they attempt to compete in saturated markets where prospectors have first mover advantages. That said, as noted the most urgent item for many academic units in public universities around the globe is ensuring their fiscal viability. I think that there are two keys to ensuring an academic unit’s fiscal viability: first, academic units need to enhance their adaptive capacity and second, academic units need to use entrepreneurial activities to develop fiscal self-reliance. So Chapter 9 explores some strategies and actions that academic units could adopt to enhance their adaptive capacity and develop entrepreneurial self-reliance.

Note 1. 2007 is the most recent year that data is available from DEEWR, the federal government department responsible for higher education

Chapter 9

Exploring Conceptual and Practical Implications of This Work

The first part of this chapter is addressed to higher education scholars; it explores some conceptual insights that emerge from this work. The second section of this chapter discusses key practical issues that arise from this work; it offers practitioners: university managers, heads of academic units and administrators some recommendations on how academic units can enhance their adaptive and entrepreneurial capacities, diminish resistance to change and use entrepreneurial activities to develop fiscal self-reliance. Practitioners need this sort of advice because for them enhancing academic units adaptive capacities and diminishing resistance to change are pressing problems that need solutions. I acknowledge that higher education scholars may find this advice normative, yet I do not apologise for this normativity as practitioners need real-world solutions and by definition any solution can seem normative.

Conceptual Implications Defining Adaptive Capacity At first the concept of organisational adaptation and the concept of an organisation’s adaptive capacity may seem synonymous; there is a subtle yet significant distinction between the two concepts. As noted, organisational adaptation is conventionally defined as a process whereby an organisation seeks equilibrium with its exogenous environment (Cameron, 1984, p. 123). We have also noted that organisational theorists have different views on how organisations adapt to these environmental changes. This work has discussed three key adaptation theories: Miles and Snow’s strategic choice theory, Pfeffer and Salanick’s resource dependency theory and Di Maggio and Powell’s neo-institutional theory. While there are significant points of difference between these three conceptual frameworks of organisational adaptation, each of them share the basic tenet that organisational adaptation involves organisations altering their structures, functions and strategies to attain a better fit with the prevailing exogenous environmental conditions. The issue of concern here is that if academic units focus on attaining fit with the current set of exogenous environmental conditions that the unit faces this is a D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_9, 

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short-term rather than a long-term strategy. An academic unit’s objective in undertaking adaptation is to ensure its future survival, growth and prosperity, not just that it adapts to its prevailing set of exogenous environmental pressures. Therefore it is important for academic units to develop an adaptive capacity, the capacity to survive exogenous environments that are complex, dynamic and emergent. The complexity of these exogenous environments stems from the fact that they comprise multiple facets that can operate in a paradoxical fashion, pushing and pulling academic units in different directions. For example academic units encounter pressure from governments and institutional managers to focus on efficient and effective use of resources; yet at the same time they are expected to spend resources to provide access to students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and provide services for the benefit of local, regional, national and global communities. The dynamism of academic units’ exogenous environments occurs because academic units interact with a diverse range of stakeholders and agents, each with different agendas and different regulatory or normative powers over the academic unit. Academic units are also dynamic because units’ core functions, their teaching and research work involves competing with other academic units, educational providers and commercial research firms in volatile student, staff and research funding markets. The emergent nature of academic units’ exogenous environments refers to their uncertain nature. Three years ago few would have predicted that the world would encounter a global financial crisis of such scale and scope, the affects of this crisis for academic units are still unfolding and no doubt there will be future events such as technological innovations, global health scares or natural disasters that affect academic units. Staber and Sydow (2002, p. 410) argue that ‘organizations with adaptive capacity can re-configure themselves quickly in changing environments rather than merely identify existing demands and then exploit the available resources’. The heart of the concept of adaptive capacity is nimbleness, alacrity and adroitness. Organisations with an adaptive capacity are flexible, quick and fluid; they can re-configure their structures, strategies and use their human and fiscal resources in different ways, ways that suit the prevailing set of exogenous environmental conditions the unit experiences and that also provide scope and flexibility to be changed to suit future yet unknown exogenous environmental conditions. Organisations with adaptive capacity actively engage with, affect and shape their exogenous environments such as the prospector academic units in this study. In contrast organisations with a weaker adaptive capacity interact with their exogenous environments in a passive, reactive manner, they wait for a change to occur in their environments and then respond to it, such as the academic units that used a defensive or analyser mode of adaptation. So how do academic units develop, enhance and sustain their adaptive capacity? Do academic units with an adaptive capacity possess particular characteristics, cultures or means of operating? First, I discuss a conceptual model of organisational adaptive capacity developed by Staber and Sydow, organisational theorists (Staber & Sydow, 2002). Then I present some of my thoughts on how academic units could enhance their adaptive capacity. Staber and Sydow employ Giddens’

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structuration theory as the platform for their conceptual model of adaptive capacity. Staber and Sydow ‘identify three important structural dimensions of adaptive capacity: multiplexity, redundancy, and loose coupling’ (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 414). ‘Multiplexity refers to the number and diversity of relations between actors in organizations or inter-organizational networks’ (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 414). According to Staber and Sydow multiplexity enhances an organisation’s adaptive capacity because it provides background knowledge and enhances the flow and sharing of information and knowledge (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 415). ‘Redundancy is usually viewed as resource slack reflected in the presence of surplus employees, unused productive capacity, overlapping jurisdictions, broad job descriptions, tolerance of mistakes, parallel communication channels, or idle information’ (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 416). Staber and Sydow contend that in some cases redundancy can enhance adaptive capacity by creating conditions that facilitate innovation; yet they acknowledge that ‘in some cases redundancy may increase competition above an acceptable level, stifling the willingness of actors to take risks. . . or limit the variability within organizations, making communication repetitive . . .without adding value’ (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 417). Staber and Sydow suggest that ‘a third structural property of adaptive capacity is the strength of linkages between system elements. A system is loosely coupled if its elements share few variables in common or if common variables are weak relative to other factors influencing the elements . . .Loose coupling enables units and activities to operate or occur independently and to adjust to changing [environmental] demands in different ways and at varying rates’ (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 417). According to Staber and Sydow ‘Giddens structuration theory suggests that multiplexity, redundancy, and loose coupling do not create adaptive capacity automatically but must be managed with respect to the signification, domination and legitimation aspects of structural adaptability’ (Staber & Sydow, 2002, p. 419). While identifying and conceptualising the dimensions that constitute an organisation’s adaptive capacity and how these dimensions operate to generate and enhance an organisation’s adaptive capacity is important work, I do not concur with the way Staber and Sydow conceptualise the dimensions of adaptive capacity. First, Staber and Sydow’s model of organisational adaptive capacity suggests that organisational managers are the agents responsible for creating and sustaining an organisation’s adaptive capacity. I think that this is not always the case; in some organisations, such as the case study academic units, decisions about whether units chose to adapt or resist environmental changes and the processes that units used to adapt or resist these pressures were made by ‘managers’ in consultative processes with ‘workers’, academics and senior administrators. Second, whilst Staber and Sydow have deployed Giddens’ structuration theory as a conceptual framework to identify what they view as the distinctive dimensions of adaptive capacity (multiplexity, redundancy and loose coupling), I think that there is some ambiguity surrounding their explanation of how Giddens’ notions of signification, domination, legitimation and institutional reflexivity facilitate or sustain multiplexity, redundancy and loose coupling. This is not to say that Giddens’ structuration theory is not relevant to our understanding of academic units’ adaptation and resistance. As noted in the previous chapter

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I think Giddens’ structuration theory offers valuable insights about the causes and processes of academic units’ adaptation and resistance because it considers the role of agency, power and authority in these events. Third, I accept Staber and Sydow’s view that ‘multiplexity’ assists organisational adaptation. Indeed findings from this empirical study show that for prospector academic units strong network connections with multiple agents like research partners, government bureaucrats, international student recruitment agents, commercial firms assisted these units to develop their adaptive capacity by sharing information and knowledge. Yet this was not the only means by which these network ties with agents assisted these units to build their adaptive capacity, these stakeholders also provided resources to undertake research and teaching and sometimes acted as clients purchasing research and teaching, or in the case of government bureaucrats and international student recruitment agents used their relationships to assist academic units to gain access to particular markets. Fourth, I concur with Staber and Sydow’s view that loose coupling facilitates an organisation’s adaptive capacity as it allows organisational redesign to occur quickly. As the case studies of the units that used a prospector mode of adaptation illustrated loose coupling enabled these units to launch new activities quickly, thereby obtaining first mover advantage in their markets, such as obtaining commercial sponsorship for undergraduate students. However for these prospector units their adaptive capacity involved more than just structural flexibility; it also involved a ‘socio-cultural’ flexibility that enabled new ideas to be tried, a tolerance of ambiguity and risk and a willingness to overturn established hierarchies of power and authority, to break from path-dependency. Fifth, I do not agree with Staber and Sydow’s view that redundancy assists organisations to develop or sustain adaptive capacity. Essentially they define redundancy as slack resources, including both fiscal and human capital resources. Data from these case studies indicate that when academic units experienced fiscal duress, the first strategy that defender and analyser units adopted was trying to enhance the efficiency of resource utilisation, spend less revenue and increase academic productivity by increasing academics workload (teaching and research output production and revenue generation). Evidence from firms’ actions during the global financial crisis support my empirical findings, firms affected by the global financial crisis were more likely to reduce staff rather than hire new staff. While Staber and Sydow’s work makes a valuable contribution to the task of identifying how organisations can enhance their adaptive capacity by identifying some structural dimensions of organisations’ adaptive capacity, this work is still ongoing. My empirical work indicates that academic units need more than certain structural dimensions to attain adaptive capacity; they also need socio-cultural and institutional transformations and changes in how academic units are led and managed.

CAS Principles Could Enhance Academic Units’ Adaptive Capacity I propose that some of the core principles of complex adaptive systems theory (CAS) could assist academic units to enhance their adaptive capacity. First

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a working definition of CAS theory is provided; then I discuss how some of its principles could strengthen academic units’ adaptive capacity. Complex adaptive systems CAS theory is nascent. In fact there is ‘no single unified complexity theory’ but several theories that emphasise different core principles (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, p. 23). Complexity theories were developed by biologists, chemists, mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists studying complex systems in these disciplines (Miller & Page, 2007; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, p. 23; Norberg & Cumming, 2008; Shan & Yang, 2008). CAS theory has also been applied to the study of organisations and ‘managing change’ (Gemmill & Smith, 1985; Haeckel, 1999; Introna, 2003; McMillan, 2004; Stacey, 1996; Stacey & Griffin, 2005). Complexity theories try to be explicit about how and why change occurs. A CAS is complex because the system is open, dynamic and multi-dimensional (Gemmill & Smith, 1985, pp. 751– 752). A CAS is adaptive because the system has the capacity to change and evolve in such a way that it maintains the integrity of the system as a whole (Complex Adaptive Systems Research Group, 2002). Many readers will be familiar with systems theory and perhaps infer that CAS theory is simply systems theory ‘re-badged’; this is not the case. A systems theory view of organisation–environment relations depicts the relationship between organisations and their environments as linear: comprising single elements, environments affect organisations. Systems theory proposes that an organisation’s primary goal is to seek equilibrium with its environment, hence management implements interventions that emphasise control, order and regulation in an effort to restore equilibrium between the organisation and its environment (von Bertalanffly, 1956; Weiner, 1948). In contrast CAS theory suggests that the relationship between an organisation and its environment is non-linear, dynamic and emergent, comprising multiple layers of interactions between people within the organisation and agents, actors and entities within the environment (Haeckel, 1999; Kauffmann, 1995; McMillan, 2004, pp. 94–95; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, pp. 26–46; Stacey, 1996; Stacey & Griffin, 2005; Stacey, Griffin, & Shaw, 2000; Waldrop, 1992). CAS theorists contend that if organisations want to enhance their adaptive capacity to environmental changes then they need to deliberately create a sense of disequilibrium between the organisation and its environment. CAS theorists refer to this state as ‘the edge of chaos’: the mid-point, or ‘tipping point’ balancing the organisation between chaos, anarchy and dysfunction on the one hand and bureaucratisation, hierarchy, rigidity and ossification on the other. The CAS approach to organisations and ‘managing change’ has two core premises. First, that organisation–environment relations are dynamic, emergent and complex (comprising multiple factors, agents and stakeholders that sometimes operate with paradoxical effects). Second, that when organisations are situated in turbulent and complex environments, organisations cannot ‘manage change’ or control organisational change by implementing linear, static, unidirectional interventions using traditional top-down command and control modes of power and authority. The core principles of the CAS approach to organisations and ‘managing change’ reflect these two key premises of CAS theory. I propose that the following core principles of the CAS approach to organisations and ‘managing change’ could enhance academic units’ adaptive capacity because

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they recognise that units’ environments are dynamic and complex, and create the conditions that enable academics to be creative, innovative, entrepreneurial and take risks. Each CAS principle is noted here and subsequently discussed in further detail. The principles include enhancing understanding of environments especially notions of connectivity, non-linear feedback loops and emergence (MacLean & MacIntosh, 2003; McMillan, 2004; Miller & Page, 2007, pp. 213–226). Taking units to the ‘edge of chaos’ creating disequilibrium to enable organisations to operate with greater levels of flexibility and variety in structures, processes, technologies and markets breaking cycles of path-dependence, resistance, inertia and mimetic isomorphism and enabling risk-taking, innovation and entrepreneurialism (Goldstein, 1988; MacLean & MacIntosh, 2003, pp. 151–152; McMillan, 2004, pp. 94–98). Management relinquishing control over units’ strategic positioning and operational functions of teaching and research. This enables academics to form self-organising teams that empower them as professional knowledge workers, thereby creating conditions for them to be entrepreneurial and innovative. Some of the principles associated with the CAS approach to organisations and management, such as empowering workers, are found in other organisational theories and approaches to managing change, such as organisational development and strategic management. However these approaches to managing change can fail to foster an organisation’s adaptive capacity because they attempt to create cultural transformations such as empowering workers without altering the organisation’s traditional hierarchical power structures and approach to management. In contrast the CAS approach to organisations and management seems better suited to enhancing an organisation’s adaptive capacity because it is an integrated approach to change that advocates creating awareness and understanding of the organisation’s connectivity to its environment, altering the organisation’s structure, modes of management, locus of power and authority and its cultural norms.

Enhancing Understanding of and Interaction with Environments: Strategic Thinking and Strategic Positioning Academics (faculty) working in Australian public universities like their colleagues in other universities throughout the world have heavy workloads and immediate pressures that demand their attention including teaching, obtaining research funding, generating research outputs and contributing to their communities. Each activity is monitored, measured and evaluated by performance review. Hence there is a natural tendency for academics to become myopic and insular, to focus on ensuring continuation of their tenure and perhaps if ambitious to work towards promotion. Under these circumstances, academics’ degree of affiliation with and concern for their academic unit can diminish. Heads of academic units are also encumbered with heavy workloads. They can find themselves thrust into their roles with little formal training or knowledge about management, leadership and budgeting. Not only do heads need to manage, motivate and retain academic and administrative staff

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in their units; they must also attend to the demands placed on them by stakeholders, higher level administrators, students, governments, regulatory authorities and professional associations. Frequently these constituencies’ views and needs conflict and the head of the academic unit must broker some form of consensus between the parties. As a consequence of this situation academic units can postpone or ignore external issues and long-term changes in their environments that could potentially affect their academic unit. This study illustrates that academic units in Australian universities are situated in turbulent operating environments, as is the case for academic units in other nations’ universities. This study and others have shown that academic units have high degrees of functional complexity. Several units in this study had budgets of several million dollars, some employed more than a hundred staff, taught thousands of students sometimes spread over several continents, their researchers were engaged in multiple projects and consultancies with a diverse range of research and commercial partners spread around the globe. Given the degree of environmental turbulence and the functional complexity of Australian academic units it is important for staff in academic units (academics, administrators and managers) to develop greater understandings of and connections with their environments. Few Australian commercial firms of comparable size, resources and functional complexity to the academic units in this study do not engage in continuous detailed strategic thinking about their operating environments and develop strategic positions within those environments. I suggest that if academic units’ staff developed an understanding of the CAS principles of dynamism, connectivity, interdependence, co-evolution and non-linear feedback loops, this could assist them to understand and engage with their environments and enhance their capacity to adapt to environmental changes (Haeckel, 1999, pp. 75–78; McMillan, 2004, pp. 77–105; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, pp. 26–38; Stacey, 1996, pp. 19–34; Stacey & Griffin, 2005, pp. 14–20). I have already discussed how academic units’ environments are dynamic and I have also discussed the concept of non-linear feedback loops; so there is no need to reiterate these points. But it is worthwhile saying something about the principles of connectivity, interdependence and co-evolution. Connectivity and interdependence refer to the idea that an organisation’s operations and the actions of agents in its environment continuously interact; that they form networks. Co-evolution is the idea that the actions of one agent or set of organisations in a system, or changes in one aspect of an organisation’s environment can influence other agents and organisations in the system. At the heart of these concepts is the view that organisations are actively engaged with their environments, they are not passive recipients affected by agents and events in their environments. The obvious question is how are these CAS principles relevant to the task at hand, enhancing academic units’ adaptive capacities? I offer the following answer. I propose that in the light of these multiple layers of organisational and environmental complexities it would be useful for academic unit staff (management, academics and administrators) to undertake strategic analysis of their environments and to actively develop strategic positions in each of their core markets. Data from

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this study showed that the only case study academic unit that used strategic planning as part of its approach to adaptation was University A’s Department of Civil Engineering. The study found that some units viewed strategy as something that is divorced from the units’ day-to-day work, its administration, teaching and research. I suggest that this view is now outmoded. Even the unit in this study that did undertake strategic planning used a static, cyclical freeze-frame approach to strategy. Such an approach to strategy seems ill advised given the dynamism of Australian academic units’ environments and their functional complexity. I suggest that Australian academic units could enhance their adaptive capacity if they devoted more time and resources to strategic thinking and positioning – developing understandings of their environment and identifying the most advantageous ways of engaging with agents and stakeholders in this environment. I recommend that the units’ staff and management continuously explore their connectivity with their environments, identify key stakeholders and devise ways of reconciling their competing priorities, constantly monitoring and evaluating the activities of competitors in their various student, research funding and staff markets. I think that it would be advantageous if all academic staff were engaged in these strategic thinking and positioning activities, not just senior managers because it is often newer and younger staff that bring new ideas and can clearly identify issues and problems in units that more senior or longer-term members of staff simply do not see, or have no idea of how to change. I also suggest that an integral element of units’ strategic positioning is developing, sustaining and strengthening networks with agents and stakeholders who could assist the units to obtain clients, resources, contracts, knowledge, new technologies and provide ‘market intelligence’ about potential changes or events that could affect the units’ operations such as changes in government policies, changes in professional associations’ policies or economic conditions in global markets. In order for academic units to ensure that they have adequate capacities to respond to impending changes in their environments it may be useful for units to undertake some scenario-planning activities, predictions of key changes in courses, student demand, demographics of international and domestic student cohorts, budget modelling factoring in shifts in its income from teaching and research and planning possible courses of actions to meet these challenges.

Creating Disequilibrium to Overcome Resistance and Encourage Flexibility, Risk Taking, Entrepreneurialism and Innovation Another way that CAS theory could be used to enhance an academic units’ adaptive capacity and reduce its resistance to change is by disrupting its auotpoietic processes (Goldstein, 1988; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, pp. 32–35). Autopoiesis is a concept developed bythe biologists Maturana and Valera (Bakken & Hernes, 2003; David Seidl, 2005). They sought an answer to the question what does it mean to be alive? Their answer was that living systems reproduce themselves, they developed the concept of

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autopoiesis to explain that living systems are self-referential, ‘that different components of the system interact in such a way as to produce and reproduce components of the system’ (Seidl, 2005, p. 3). Luhmann, a sociologist modified the concept of autopoiesis and applied it to social systems and in particular to the study of organisations (Kickert, 1993; Luhmann, 1988, 1995; Seidl, 2005; Seidl & Becker, 2006; Hernes & Bakken, 2003; Bakken & Hernes, 2003). Luhmann argued that organisations are autopoietic because they make decisions about how they interact with their environments that are self-referential,1 that is these decisions are intended to seek homoeostasis and equilibrium in the organisation’s interactions with its environment and in the organisation’s pattern of operations, to maintain the status quo of their organisation’s operational processes, structure, technology, identity, culture and values (Goldstein, 1988, pp. 151–152; Hernes & Bakken, 2003; Kickert, 1993; MacLean & MacIntosh, 2003; Morgan, 2006; Seidl & Becker, 2006). CAS theorists contend that autopoiesis explains why workers in organisations areresistant to change and display inertia and path-dependence (Goldstein, 1988; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, pp. 32–35). CAS theorists argue that in order for organisations to adapt to environmental changes it is important for autopoiesis to be disturbed and a state of disequilibrium to be created, breaking the traditional organisational structures, patterns of decision making, operational processes, culture and values (Goldstein, 1988; Haeckel, 1999; Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, p. 35; Stacey, 1996; Stacey et al., 2000). As noted earlier CAS theorists refer to this process as taking the ‘organisation to the edge of chaos’ (Goldstein, 1988; Lewin, 1992; Lewin & Regine, 1999, 2003; McMillan, 2004, pp. 94–98; Stacey, 1996; Stacey & Griffin, 2005). There is some debate amongst CAS theorists about how this process of disequilibrium should occur. Some CAS theorists suggest that managers should disturb the organisations’ traditional operations with sudden jolts and shocks (MacLean & MacIntosh, 2003). Other theorists such as (McMillan, 2004; Morgan, 2006) suggest that this state of disequilibrium occurs naturally or through environmental changes that are beyond the organisations’ control. Once again the obvious question is how these concepts from complexity theory are relevant to the task at hand, to enhancing academic units’ adaptive capacities. I offer this answer. I propose that if staff and managers in academic units applied these ideas from CAS theory, disturbing units’ autopoietic processes by creating disequilibrium and taking units to the edge of chaos this could be a very useful way for academic units to enhance their adaptive capacity and diminish resistance to change and tendencies towards path-dependency. There are three key ways academic unit staff could apply these concepts from CAS theory. Before I elaborate on these points it is important to reiterate that when CAS theorists use the term ‘the edge of chaos’ they are not suggesting that organisations become anarchic. The edge of chaos simply means disturbing an organisation’s path-dependency, its tendency to adhere to traditional structures, patterns of decision making and operating processes. First, if academic unit staff and managers adopted a flexible approach to all facets of their operations from teaching, research, administration to marketing, networking this would provide them with the opportunity to modify those aspects of their teaching, research or administration that no longer seem suitable for the prevailing set

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of operating conditions. The case studies of the resistant units in this study showed that forces of inertia can be deeply entrenched; yet, as argued it does seem likely that resistance is not a viable option over the long term. Adopting flexibility means risk taking; staff and management in units will need to accept and accommodate the reality that not every entrepreneurial or innovative venture will succeed. As clichéd as it sounds, academic units can learn valuable lessons even if entrepreneurial ventures fail as long as timely decisions are made on when to abandon entrepreneurial ventures that are not providing adequate returns on their investments. I suggest that one of the crucial tasks in this endeavour is to ensure that the unit has an ‘external spatial orientation’; what I mean by this is that the unit is actively observing and engaging with its environments as opposed to an ‘internal spatial orientation’ where staff within units become pre-occupied with internal issues such as the allocation of resources, workloads and promotions. Second, if academic unit staff and managers adopted a variety of different approaches to teaching, research and administration actively seeking to differentiate themselves from other units competing in the same student, research funding and staff markets this could provide them with a competitive advantage in these markets. In turn this could enable units to acquire more revenue and strengthen their adaptive capacity by providing a strong resource base from which to develop further entrepreneurial and innovative teaching and research. As indicated case study units that adopted the analyser and defensive modes of adaptation sometimes relied too heavily on mimetic isomorphism. Given that both the Australian domestic and global markets for students are increasingly heavily contested it seems to make sense that academic units that cannot readily command strong market share on the basis of established academic reputation and social capital/prestige would enhance their adaptive capacity if they employed diverse strategies, products (course content), price or modes of delivery. Third, I suggest that academic units’ adaptive capacity could be enhanced if university executives and central administrators were prepared to tolerate academic units moving to ‘the edge of chaos’ – disturbing established decision-making patterns and breaking away from conventional bureaucratic policies and procedures that have made units path-dependent. I suggest that if units were to move towards ‘the edge of chaos’ then there would need to be a shift in the locus of power and authority in Australian universities. I think that the core ingredients of an academic unit’s adaptive capacity: its flexibility, innovativeness, entrepreneurial activities, academics’ motivation, affiliation and goal alignment with their unit and engagement with their environment would all be enhanced if various levels of management were less directive and controlling. I acknowledge that this task will not be easy, devolution of power and authority never is. But right from the top-down I suggest that each tier of management should weaken their control of the layers below. Australian public universities currently have to contend with a paradoxical government policy paradigm. On the one hand public funding of Australian universities has been significantly reduced and these institutions have been advised to pursue marketisation and entrepreneurialism. Yet at the same time Australian public universities must provide annual reports to relevant state governments and have restrictions

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on the acquisition and dispersal of capital assets and the formation of commercial entities2 (DETYA, 2001). These steering mechanisms and accountability regimes were designed with the intention of ensuring that Australian public universities were governed and managed efficiently and effectively and that the public is obtaining an adequate rate of return on its investments in higher education. Yet Australian public universities do not enjoy the same degree of strategic and operational flexibility and the same latitude in entrepreneurial activities that is typically enjoyed by commercial firms: The discussion paper notes the widespread concern within the sector at the perceived increasing ‘red tape’ and micromanagement of universities by government, particularly the Commonwealth as the sector’s largest public funder. This trend is contradictory to State and Federal government initiatives to reduce regulatory burden on business (Regulation Taskforce, 2006, Department of Treasury & Finance, 2006) and not-for-profit sector (State Services Authority, 2007) and internationally on the Higher Education sector (Better Regulation Task Force, 2002). It is also perceived as contradictory to a policy of institutional diversity in the sector when regulatory forces drive conformity and homogeneity. The discussion paper also notes that Commonwealth regulation is not consistent with the proportionality principle of good regulation (Better Regulation Task Force, 2003), given the sitting of Higher Education Providers in a complex environment of national and international markets (National Institute of Governance, 2009, p. 2).

I suggest that academic units’ adaptation initiatives could be enhanced if steering from government under the auspices of DEEWR and various state governments was relaxed. This would provide institutional managers with more discretion over strategic and operational matters that would flow on to academic units below. Then academic units could enjoy greater flexibility and choice in their operations that would enable greater levels of differentiation between academic units’ strategic goals and create the conditions that would enable individual academics to be innovative and entrepreneurial, hence strengthening unit’s adaptive capacities. I also suggest that units’ adaptive capacity could be enhanced if university executives and central administrators weakened control mechanisms over academic units’ strategic and operational activities. At the academic unit level, heads of academic units could reverse the current trend towards managerialism evident in several units in this study. I have chosen not to name the academic units where academics made negative comments about their academic units’ management or university management to protect individual anonymity. Institutional managers have directed heads of academic units to implement management interventions such as performance review systems to measure, monitor and evaluate academics’ research and teaching productivity and implemented quality control systems for teaching. In addition Australian universities have been directed by the ARC (Australian Research Council3 ) to implement a new system for evaluating the quality of academic units’ research outputs, known as ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative). These management interventions are well intentioned. Their objective is to improve the quality of teaching and research undertaken in Australian universities and in so doing enhance academic units’ adaptive capacities. Yet this study’s findings suggest that their implementation

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has had a negative impact on many academics and their academic units; the initiatives have been counter-productive. These management interventions have become managerialist. How and why this has occurred is discussed shortly. In the meantime I propose that CAS theory offers a viable alternative to managerialism.

Self-organising Teams Using Collegial Participative Decision-Making Processes I suggest that academic units could enhance their adaptive capacity if they adopted the CAS principle of self-organisation. Self-organisation refers to the process whereby groups of individuals co-operate with each other and co-ordinate their own work, forming network collaborations as needed, developing their own projects and problem-solving activities. At first glance the concept of self-organising teams bears some resemblance to traditional notions of collegial management, so it is important to identify the key differences between the concepts. Self-organising teams are flat, matrix-type structures; they are task focused and accountable for their own performance, productivity and resource management (McMillan, 2004; Morgan, 2006; Stacey, 1996; Stacey et al., 2000). In contrast more traditional forms of collegial management structures and their attendant decision-making processes privilege norms of hierarchy, historical precedent and control (Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 83; Bergquist & Pawlak, 2008, p. 40; Marginson & Considine, 2000, pp. 64–65). Self-organising teams could enhance academic units’ adaptive capacity because they would re-invigorate academics by giving them greater freedom and control over their teaching and research work. If university executives, deans and heads of units allowed self-organising teams to operate, this would display that they trusted and respected academics’ professionalism and capacity to ‘manage’ prudently. I suggest that the key to enhancing an academic unit’s adaptive capacity is creating conditions that strengthen individual academics commitment to and engagement with his/her academic unit. Academics need to feel motivated and be rewarded for working diligently and creatively towards innovative and entrepreneurial research and high calibre teaching that enhances academic units’ reputations (builds academic capital) and also generates revenue (fiscal capital). Self-organising teams would provide academics with greater control over their own work; this would motivate them and encourage them to find ways that align their personal career goals with their academic units’ goals. It is important that synergies between an individual academic career advancement goals and the academic unit’s goals are found; that alignments are made. Otherwise academics will display cursory efforts towards the units’ goals while devoting most of their time, energy and resources (creative thinking) towards their individual career advancement goals. Data from this study supports the view that academic units that used collegial, participative decision making enhanced the units’ adaptive capacity. Both prospector units in this study shared the characteristic that the heads of these units did not use a traditional authoritarian command and control management style where they

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made every decision about the strategies and actions for teaching and research pursued by the units. In fact in both of the prospector units academics, even junior ones had high levels of autonomy, they were given the freedom to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives, whilst managers took on the role of boundary riders, creating conditions to facilitate the entrepreneurial initiatives of staff, shielding staff from bureaucratic administrative requirements that would impede their projects and actively seeking revenue for teaching and research projects and network sponsors and partners. In contrast, case study units that adopted more passive modes of adaptation, the analysers and defenders and those that chose resistance were managed in a traditional authoritarian command and control way, they were essentially hierarchical bureaucracies and as such academics had minimal input into decision-making processes about how their units would adapt to environmental pressures.

Practical Implications I propose that there are five key strategies that academic units can employ to enhance their capacity to adapt to the challenges posed by complex, dynamic external environments. First, transforming academic unit’s organisational culture and values. Second, implementing distributed leadership, management and decision-making practices. Third, undertaking strategic thinking and positioning for differentiation in core markets. Fourth, enhancing flexibility and risk taking to develop the capacity for innovation. Fifth, developing units’ entrepreneurial capacities and using entrepreneurial activities to attain fiscal self-reliance. In practice these strategies are interconnected; however, to enhance the clarity of my argument each is discussed separately.

Transforming Academic Unit’s Organisational Culture and Values It is important to commence this discussion on transforming academic unit’s organisational culture and values with two points of clarification. First, each academic working in an academic unit has his/her own set of values derived from the interaction of each person’s life experiences, psychological make-up, age, gender, race, political allegiances and affiliations with a given academic discipline. Yet in all academic units as with most organisations, individuals who share similar sets of values form sub-cultural groups and in turn these sub-cultural groups subscribe to a set of norms. In any given academic unit there are usually several of these subcultural groups ‘variously, competing, clashing, co-operating and overlapping’ often over resources, or control of territory (de Zilwa, 2007, p. 562). In many academic units there is a dominant coalition of academics who subscribe to the norms and values of a particular sub-culture and so the norms and values attendant to that subculture hold sway. So when I use the term academic unit’s organisational culture

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and values, I am referring to the norms and values of this dominant coalition or sub-cultural group of academics. Second, my call for the transformation of academic unit’s organisational culture and values should not be interpreted as a call for the end of debate, dissent and ‘the rise of the values of hegemonic agents of neo-liberalism’(Giroux, 2002; Hummel, 2009). It is not. In order for academic units to develop and sustain an adaptive capacity it is essential that individual academics have sufficient confidence to articulate views that differ from those of the dominant sub-culture without fear of denigration, ostracism or reprisal, as it is often through dissent that innovative ideas emerge. Yet we must remain mindful that debates between sub-cultures do not breach the tipping point, that point where academics expend all of their creative time and energy on factional warfare between sub-cultural groups. If this tipping point is breached then the unit becomes a toxic, dysfunctional organisation and its adaptive capacity is dissipated, compromised or nullified. The following discussion builds on the conceptual framework identifying the dimensions of academic units’ organisational culture and values that I presented in (de Zilwa, 2007). My conceptual framework on academic units’ organisational culture and values has been employed in other empirical contexts; researchers from the Higher Education Academy used it in their study on developing the research, teaching nexus in UK universities (Lucas, Healey, Jenkins, & Short, 2008, p. 19).

Academics Affiliation with Their Academic Unit Should Be Strengthened Neophyte academics undergo an enculturation process that ensures that as they become mature scholars they adhere to the dominant norms, values, theoretical paradigms and methodological strategies of their academic discipline. As Becher and Trowler (2001, p. 47) note, academic tribal bonds are powerful and enduring, many academics’ primary affiliation is to their academic discipline and its global network of scholars rather than to their academic unit or university. Academics’ weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; Weick, 1976) to their academic unit and institution can benefit academic units, as academics’ affiliations with networks of scholars, research centres, funding agencies, policy organisations and commercial firms can provide expertise and resources that enhance the calibre of research and teaching that occurs within academic units. Yet when academic units are situated in operating environments that provide a constant barrage of challenges for units to contend with, then academics’ weak ties and affiliations to their academic unit can hinder the academic unit’s capacity to adapt to these environmental challenges. The case studies provided evidence suggesting that some academics have become increasingly alienated from their academic units, that their weak ties have become extremely frayed. There were three reasons why this occurred. First, increasing work intensity for academics (Ogbonna & Harris, 2004); this has occurred for several reasons, globalisation has expanded the horizons of academic work to the global stage: research partners, competitors, funding agencies and students are drawn from many nations, whereas previously they were concentrated in local, national

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or regional domains. Developments in information communication technology have increased the pace of academic work. Massification of student cohorts now means that academics must teach more students, many with weak educational foundations and language skills. Reduced levels of public funding has meant that academics are now expected to generate independent (non-government) revenue from teaching, research, consultancy and the sale of intellectual property, patents and technologies. Second, pressure from governments on university managers to demonstrate that public funding for universities has been deployed efficiently and effectively has seen new performative regimes implemented for monitoring, measuring and evaluating academic teaching, research outputs and revenue earned. Academics have experienced coercive pressures to comply with these performative regimes. These performative regimes were designed with the intention of enhancing academics’ productivity and, in so doing, improving the academic units’ performance, strengthening its adaptive capacity. Yet these performative regimes have often not accomplished these goals. Many academics viewed these performance management schemes as indicative of a lack of trust from institutional and unit managers (Tierney, 2006), diminishing their identity as autonomous self-managing professionals; they did their best to ignore these initiatives or displayed token compliance with them. In this regard performance management schemes and other tools of the era of new public management such as quality assurance metrics for teaching and research have created a schism within academic units between academics and managers that had not existed prior to the implementation of these regimes. These performance management schemes also enhance competition between academics within academic units. Whilst enhanced levels of competition between workers can improve individuals’ performance outcomes, performance management schemes can also create hyper-competitiveness that fragments and atomises academic units. Strong performers focus on enhancing their own performance outcomes rather than devoting their time and talents towards activities that strengthen the academic unit’s adaptive capacity, while weak performers get discouraged and increasingly alienated from the unit. Third, there has been an increase in the number of academics with tenuous employment contracts, either short-term research or teaching contracts, sessional/casual lecturers. I propose that academic units can enhance their adaptive capacity if they strengthen their academics’ affiliations with their academic unit. If this occurs then academics will be more likely to view their career goals as being aligned with the future of the academic unit and more likely to undertake work that accomplishes mutually beneficial goals. I suggest that academic units can strengthen academics’ affiliations with their academic unit if they implement these strategies: First, return to the days of valuing, respecting and celebrating academics work, as essentially it is academics’ work: their teaching, research, consultancy and creation of intellectual property that determines whether units adapt to their environmental challenges or whether they are engulfed by them. A basic principle of human motivation, yet one that seems to have recently been ignored in this empirical context is that happy workers are productive workers. A second related issue, performance management regimes

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and micro-management techniques imported from the corporate sector are experiments that did not work; they are not an effective means of increasing academics’ productivity or of encouraging academics to work towards their unit’s adaptation. Forged on the premise that workers cannot be trusted, they are inappropriate tools to manage knowledge workers and should be abandoned. Again a rudimentary understanding of human motivation suggests that workers will deliver enhanced performance with incentives rather than coercion, to put it more colloquially, the carrot is more effective than the stick. Third, enable academics to actively participate in the units’ decision-making processes. It is a cliché but academics need to be empowered, engaged and involved in academic units’ leadership and management decision-making processes. Again, it is a fundamental principle of human resource management that when workers are actively involved in the decision-making processes for their work, when they have some ownership of, or investment in these decisions, then they are more likely to work towards attaining the organisation’s goals, in this instance assisting academic unit’s adaptation initiatives; this issue is explored further later. Fourth, academic units could assist their adaptation efforts if they do not employ large numbers of sessional academics and academics on short-term contracts as it is self-evident that if academics are assured that they have continuing employment within an academic unit then they will be more likely to work towards the unit’s goals rather than focusing their time and energy on attaining ongoing employment. Obviously this recommendation has resource implications, given that for many academic units their greatest cost is staff, (in the case of Australian academic units around 70–80% of their budget), it would be advisable to attain savings in this area, perhaps by reducing administrative staff numbers as there is often replication in these roles, or perhaps by reducing expenditure on non-productive, expensive senior academics.

Reconfiguring Academic Units’ Spatio-Temporal Orientation: Looking Outwards, Moving Quickly Over the Long Term Academic units’ relationship to space and time are crucial factors influencing their adaptive capacity. In (de Zilwa, 2007) I suggested that academic units either have an internal spatial orientation where they focus on day-to-day operational issues, micro-level political tensions and territorial power conflicts over academics’ workload allocations, resource allocations, who sits on which committee, who gets leave when. Or academic units have an external spatial orientation; they are attuned to, monitoring, evaluating and engaging with the world outside their academic unit, identifying problems and future opportunities. They are aware of broad sociopolitical changes, such as the rise of social networking sites and their affects on units’ reputations, economic trends and events that affect student and research funding markets and activities of other academic units competing for students, research funding or academics. The case studies suggest that academic units with an internal spatial orientation, those that are pre-occupied with internal and institutional

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power conflicts expose themselves to the risk that they could fail to recognise, or take too long to recognise key shifts in their external environment that could have a profound impact on their academic unit, such as another academic unit at the same university, or another university developing a new programme that targeted the same fee-paying student cohort attracting a large share of that cohort through brand reputation or cheaper pricing. Academic units with an internal spatial orientation are as vulnerable as a deaf–blind surfer without the capacity to see or hear the next wave coming; they could easily be wiped out. There are two aspects to an academic unit’s temporal orientation and both aspects affect an academic units adaptive capacity. The first is whether the unit’s culture, values organisational structure and decision-making patterns are oriented towards the past, present or future external environmental challenges. This aspect of an academic unit’s temporal orientation works in tandem with its orientation towards change, so this is discussed shortly. The second dimension of an academic unit’s temporal orientation is whether the academic unit’s ‘clock’ is set ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ refers to whether the unit’s structures, decision-making patterns and academic work patterns are undertaken at pre-twenty-first century speeds or at the faster speeds mandated by marketisation, entrepreneurialism, globalisation and new and emerging information communication technologies. In a bygone era, universities were ivory tower enclaves where scholars could ponder the realms of abstract critical reflection and enquiry at their leisure, unfettered by the demands of competitive markets, student/customers and producing research outputs on time and budget. Academic units could take their time to make decisions about curriculum matters, research agendas, hiring staff, views could be canvassed, position papers drafted and circulated for comment, debates staged in cycles of meetings. This was the era of 3-hour lunches at the staff club, public debates, there was time to attend concerts and orchestra recitals, to cheer on the university’s first eleven (cricket team), its footballers and rowers. That era is dead and buried. The marketisation of higher education has demolished the university’s walls and confronted it with the brutal realities of the commercial world; time is money and every second counts. The marketisation of higher education is like a ‘Biggest Loser’, trainer increasing the speed and incline of the treadmill; those academics and academic units who fail to keep up with the intensified pace will be eliminated from the competition by fitter, stronger, quicker players.

Orientation Towards Change: Letting Go of the Past, Developing Openness Towards Change Change invokes diametrically opposite responses in people. Some enthusiastically embrace change as an opportunity to try something new, an opportunity for growth and development. For others change instils fear and uncertainty. For these people change disturbs established routines, hierarchies, boundaries, ways of being and experiencing the world; it can signify a loss of power and control. These folks

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assume that conditions in the unknown realm will necessarily be worse than those that they currently know. These responses to change seem to be hardwired psychological traits. What happens when academic units are comprised of people with either predisposition towards change? Is it inevitable that some units can only respond to changing environments with inertia and resistance towards these changes because this is their staffs’ predisposition towards change? Is it possible to alter peoples’ deeply ingrained views towards change? If so, how? These case studies reveal that academic units’ responses to environmental changes were determined by the dominant coalition of academics’ predisposition towards change. Units that chose a prospector mode of adaptation had a dominant coalition of academics that viewed change in a positive light, as an opportunity for growth and development. In contrast those that responded to environmental pressures with inertia or resistance had a dominant coalition of academics that viewed change in a negative light. Yet when academic units are situated in dynamic, complex environments such as that which the case study units faced and the dominant coalition of academics is resistant to change, responding to change with inertia – refusing to take any action, or path-dependency – adopting the same structures and pursuing the same set of strategies and actions that it always has, creates significant problems for the academic unit. These problems occur because turbulent, complex environments demand that academic units employ structures, strategies and actions that are relevant to the current set of environmental challenges that units face’ not those suited for a bygone era. This means that a key challenge for academic units is to encourage those academics that are wedded to the past to let go of the past and move forward. We recall that the dean of law at University D warned that for faculties in elite, older distinguished universities where some academics view themselves as the guardians of traditional values, it is very easy for academic units in this situation to fall into the trap of complacency: ‘while it is important to recognise an academic unit’s past achievements what made this faculty great was that it continues to speak to the needs of the moment and when it has ceased doing that has tended to be the times when it has got trapped in infighting and recriminations and inward-looking approaches that have been the death of its contribution rather than the heart of its contribution’ (dean, Law Faculty, University D). I suggest that sensitive and tactful leadership is required to support and encourage those academics that are reluctant to let go of the past and accept change. Some of these academics may be suffering change fatigue or burnout; like war veterans that have fought too many battles, they feel overwhelmed by the constant barrage of new challenges that affect their work and by the intensification of their work, the increasing pace and intensity of academic labour in the era of marketisation, entrepreneurialism and globalisation. Yet it is not just heads of academic units that need to take up this leadership role; younger, newer staff have a vital part to play in acknowledging the genuine fear and anxiety of ‘change resistant’ colleagues, they need to support and assist these people to let go of the past and accept change.

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Implementing Distributed Leadership, Management and Decision-Making Practices Charismatic, transformational and transactional leadership theories each suggest that organisational leadership is the preserve of the individual that occupies the designated role of head of organisation (Bass & Riggio, 2006; Jung & Sosik, 2006; Knight & Trowler, 2001; Sarros, Cooper, & Santora, 2008). These theories argue that it is the individual with this positional power that leads and drives organisational change. This individual conceives a strategic vision for the organisation and then directs followers to attain this vision through whatever means necessary to attain his goals: inspiration, persuasion, negotiation, coercion or brute force. We noted that Miles and Snow’s model of organisational adaptation suggested that managers make strategic choices about how organisations adapt to environmental pressures and were responsible for making decisions about organisation’s structures, use of resources and activities to facilitate and enable adaptation ((Miles & Snow, 1978). Yet the case studies presented in this work indicate that leading and managing academic units’ adaptation is a collaborative partnership between the head of the academic unit, senior academics and administrators in units. None of the heads of the case study academic units tried to single-handedly control and direct their unit’s adaptation initiatives, select the unit’s mode of adaptation or its processes for adaptation without consultation with their staff. This was probably because these heads made the pragmatic decision that trying to lead their troops into battle like a white knight on a charger would not work. Academics would either pledge allegiance to the head’s agenda and then blithely ignore it, or if the head’s agenda was deemed too unpalatable they would organise a coup d’état relieving the head of his power, resources or information, or if particularly aggrieved, of his role; such is the nature of academic politics. The case studies also indicated that most heads of academic units were aware that collaborative approaches between themselves and their staff to choosing modes of adaptation, and strategies and actions to attain those modes of adaptation were a more effective means of facilitating academic unit’s adaptation and enhancing unit’s adaptive capacity than coercion, threats and brute force. As noted, ultimately it is the academics’ labour, their teaching, research, consultancy work that determines whether academic units develop and sustain an adaptive capacity and adapt; so alienating academics with heavy-handed approaches to leadership and management is unlikely to attain desired goals. As suggested if academic units have a significant cohort of academics who are resistant to change then it becomes even more important that change and adaptation are handled with sensitivity and tact. In this scenario it is imperative that the head of the unit acknowledge, identify and address the reasons why this particular group of academics resist change. Is it a case of change fatigue? Do they fear that they will lose their power and authority in the new order? Do they lack the knowledge or skills to work effectively under the new modes of operating? Are they fearful that their skills are irrelevant and outdated? Do they fear that their jobs may not be secure? Yet heads should not try to reform resistant academics’ attitudes

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and behaviours by themselves. They are far more likely to attain this goal if they use a distributed approach to leadership (Gronn, 2002), encouraging change agents, academics that have developed skills in the new ways of working, who have demonstrated capacities to deal with the enhanced pace and intensity of academic work in the era of the marketisation of higher education to mentor, coach and alleviate the fears and anxieties of the resistant academics (Bryman, 2007, p. 706). This type of strategy develops cohesion within academic units, dissipating the fragmentation of academics into two sub-cultural sets along lines of age and seniority; this in turn enhances the unit’s adaptive capacity.

Undertaking Strategic Thinking and Positioning for Differentiation in Core Markets In order for academic units to ensure that they are not engulfed by current external environmental pressures and to develop and sustain the capacity to adapt to future environmental challenges it is essential for units to use strategic thinking, strategic positioning and to pursue strategies that differentiate themselves from other academic units competing in the same student, research funding, research outputs and staff markets. Strategic thinking and strategic positioning differ from traditional strategic planning, in that they are continuous processes, they do not focus on producing formal, written strategic planning documents. As many of the participants in this study noted, formalised strategic planning processes are inherently of limited benefit to academic units because they use valuable resources: time, money and thinking producing a document that is often out of date before its objectives, strategies and actions can be implemented because an academic unit’s external environment is constantly changing. So how do academic units undertake strategic thinking and strategic positioning? Strategic thinking refers to using strategic management principles to analyse an academic unit’s strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. An academic unit’s strengths and weaknesses are obvious, so there is no need to elaborate on these points. Threats refers to things such as competitors encroaching on markets by developing new courses, acquiring funding or sponsorship from a firm that had previously collaborated with the academic unit or a significant shift in federal government policy that affects the academic unit, such as the government implementing policy stating that domestic undergraduate students cannot be charged tuition fees. Opportunities refers to things such as the capacity to hire stellar researchers that develop intellectual property that can be patented, produce quality research outputs, obtain large research funding grants and attract graduate students or the capacity to attract a new fee-paying cohort of students. Strategic positioning refers to developing a unique or niche position for the academic unit in each of its markets, undergraduate students, graduate students, research programmes and consultancy activities. It is self-evident that academic units require an external spatial orientation to use strategic thinking, strategic positioning and market differentiation, identifying, monitoring and analysing key shifts in factors that affect academic units’

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core operations is essential. Hence the interconnectedness between all the factors mentioned in these recommendations for practitioners. Why is it important for academic units to differentiate themselves from other units’ strategic positions? In order for academic units to have a sustained adaptive capacity it is essential that this strategic position is different from that of other academic units operating in these markets because copying a competitors strategic position (course content, mode and style of delivery or type of research programme) is a strategy with inherent limitations; it often only works in the short term, or enables the new entrant to acquire only a small segment of the market. This is because academic units that are first movers into a market gain a competitive advantage over other academic units entering the same market later; they have established their brand’s reputation amongst customers (students purchasing qualifications, or firms purchasing research findings, technologies or consultancy expertise), developed networks, trust and respect and supply chains with customers and suppliers. In addition the first mover academic unit (the prospector) will not sit by and watch this new entrant (the analyser) acquire some of its market, it is a prospector because it has innovative, creative academics who develop new research or produce new research outputs or teach new programmes, and it uses strategic thinking and positioning; as soon as it is aware that the analyser is encroaching on its market (territory) it will develop a new strategy, modify its existing products or services, or acquire a new market. So the second mover (the analyser) is continuously playing catch up and never quite gets there. Therefore in order for the second entrant to capture some of the first entrant’s market it needs to differentiate itself from the first entrant, either offer the same product or service at a cheaper price, offer an add-on (two for one deal, industry placement, internship if it is a course, free laptop, cellphone for students) or some alternative lure for purchasers (sole rights to new technology, central business district location). In other words it is important for academic units to develop unique strategic positions because educational markets (students, staff, research funding or research outputs) quickly become saturated (when there are too many players competing for the same territory, the pie cannot be cut up into any smaller pieces without affecting revenue generated – costs will outweigh profit).

Enhancing Flexibility and Risk Taking to Develop the Capacity for Innovation If academic units are to develop and sustain an adaptive capacity they require an organisational structure, culture and values and decision-making processes that enable the unit to be flexible, to take risks, to be creative and innovative, to be entrepreneurial. Units that have these attributes have the capacity to attain their strategic positions in their core markets efficiently and effectively. We have noted that the marketisation of higher education has increased the pace and intensity of competition between academic units and other educational and research providers operating in these markets. Academic units with flexible, nimble structures, external spatial orientations, open and innovative culture and values and decision-making

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processes can take advantage of opportunities that arise in existing and emerging staff, student, research funding and research output markets. They are prepared to take calculated risks on new ideas and tolerate some uncertainty and ambiguity in outcomes (de Zilwa, 2007). They do not confine their choice of courses, research projects or staff to tried and tested options; either their own ideas, or copying successful ideas from other academic units. They develop new courses, attract new cohorts of students from domestic markets or penetrate new international student markets, deliver courses in innovative ways, or commence innovative research programmes. Academic units with flexible structures, culture and values and decision-making processes can also discontinue teaching programmes that are no longer working effectively – attracting and retaining a sufficient number of students to cover operational costs and attaining adequate quality evaluations. They also discontinue research programmes that are not working effectively – producing research outputs, generating income from sale of intellectual property and consultancy and attracting graduate research students. Yet many academic units in Australian public universities and other universities around the globe still have traditional organisational structures, typically vertical hierarchical structures with power and authority for decision making for the units’ core functions: teaching, research and administration residing with functional heads for each activity who preside over a series of boards and committees for each operation. These decision-making bodies tend to operate in a bureaucratic manner, decisions are made according to codified policies, procedures and historical precedent. These decision-making bodies are often slow and expensive (time of administrative staff in preparing agendas, minutes and reports and academics’ time reading these documents and attending meetings). This is problematic because contemporary educational and research markets move rapidly, so academic units with elaborate, slow decision-making patterns lose opportunities to competitors, other academic units, research organisations or commercial educational providers who are proactive and quicker. In addition, traditional decision-making bodies in academic units can become sites where entrenched factional power conflicts and rivalries are played out diminishing the efficiency of decision making or even immobilising the decision-making body, leading to sclerosis of the academic units’ arteries. We observed that defender academic units had a dominant coalition of staff who would only support path-dependent options for teaching, research, administration and decision making. Whilst resistant academic units displayed inertia, refusing to alter any facet of their structure and operations until forced to do so by intervention from institutional executives. However, as noted, both the defender and resistant responses are inappropriate and ineffective when academic units are situated in complex, dynamic environments. I suggest that the key challenge for academic units whose natural inclination is to adopt a defensive or resistant response to environmental pressures is to encourage them towards a prospector mode of adaptation. What characteristics do prospectors have that make them well suited to surviving and thriving in complex, dynamic environments? The two academic units that used a prospector mode of adaptation in this empirical study had a cell-like organisational structure with a nucleus of academics

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engaged in teaching and a series of network enterprise research nodes situated around the periphery of the nucleus (Castells, 2000, p. 443; 2000b). These research nodes operated as entrepreneurial research firms with academic capitalists (researchers) engaged in the production and distribution of Mode 2 knowledge, applied knowledge: products, patents, technologies and intellectual property sold in commercial markets to yield a profit for the research node and the individual academic capitalist (Burton-Jones, 1999; Etzkowitz, 2003; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000; Gibbons et al., 1994; Gibbons, Scott, & Nowotny, 2001; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). In this regard these research nodes differed from conventional research centres that focused on pure academic research and produced traditional academic research outputs: books, journal articles and conference papers, valuing the calibre of scholarship over revenue generated. The prospector academic units had an external spatial orientation, which was especially highly developed and active in their research nodes. The research nodes were aware of changes in their external environments, anticipating and shaping their environments in a proactive fashion, they identified opportunities for new projects, partners and clients and took actions to counter competitors’ activities. These research nodes were autonomous entities with power and authority over their own budgets, human resources and operational functions. These research nodes were temporary organisational structures formed to work on particular projects, once these projects were completed, if new ideas emerged then existing nodes would be disbanded and new nodes would be formed with different configurations of researchers, resources and projects. The flexible, nimble, organic, nature of these research nodes’ structures and decision-making processes made it easier for these nodes to develop innovative and entrepreneurial research projects. These attributes enabled the nodes to take risks, to cross the boundaries of traditional institutional structures to form partnerships with commercial firms and external research organisations as collaborators, funders and clients for research outputs and consultancy with the speed and efficiency appropriate for commercial markets. Some of these research nodes also had academics from other academic units and universities working on particular projects. It must be acknowledged that it may be more difficult for some academic units to become prospectors than other academic units. It may be more challenging for pure humanities and science units to become prospectors than it is for applied science and technology units and those closely affiliated to commercial markets such as business and medicine. Yet it is not impossible; the case study of University D’s Law Faculty stands as a testament that a social science unit can become a prospector. So how can academic units with a natural inclination towards cautious, conservative, defensive and resistant approaches to adaptation become prospectors? The first thing I suggest is that patience is required. Organisational transformation is more likely to develop incrementally than instantaneously. I suggest that defender and resistant academic units should initially aim to become analysers with a core nucleus continuing to operate in a defensive mode (focusing on teaching and traditional academic research projects) and a few prospector-style entrepreneurial research nodes. Once academics and administrators have adjusted to operating as analysers then they can work

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towards becoming prospectors. I suggest that defenders and resistant units could be assisted to move towards becoming prospectors if they learn about the organisational structures, decision-making patterns, culture and values, approaches to developing and sustaining competitive advantages and strategic positions in core markets from those that have acquired this skill set: academics and administrative managers from prospector units within the same university could be appointed as mentors and consultants to guide the change process for defender and resistant units. Or if this form of collaboration is not feasible because of intra-institutional competitiveness, then it might be possible for institutional executives to organise programmes whereby academics and senior administrators from defender and resistant units have overseas sabbatical appointments at other academic units that have developed prospector skills in their discipline. Another way that defenders and resistant academic units could be assisted to move towards becoming prospectors is through direct intervention, appointing external change agents (academics and senior administrators) to drive the change management process from within defender and resistant academic units. Obviously this style of change management intervention is expensive as external hires who are successful entrepreneurial researchers and lecturers tend to demand higher salaries; once again I suggest that resources for these positions could be obtained by reducing expenditure on administrative positions and processes and by removing non-productive academics, especially expensive senior academics. These change agents would need support from academic unit heads and institutional executives when they alter facets of the units’ organisational culture and values, as the resistant academics could obstruct these changes.

Developing Units’ Entrepreneurial Capacities and Using Entrepreneurial Activities to Attain Fiscal Self-reliance This work and others (Clark, 1998b, 2004b; Shattock, 2005, 2009, p. 12) suggest that public universities in some nations including Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden and Poland can no longer rely on the state to provide sufficient resources for them to continue their teaching, research and administrative work; they need to use entrepreneurial activities to develop fiscal self-reliance. For these nations’ higher education systems the marketisation of higher education is likely to intensify. As this study observed, some find this situation offensive, calling on academics, university executives and the public to resist this situation. I contend that the wheels of the juggernaut of marketisation are set in motion; that it is too late to stop this train, all we can do is try to steer its direction to ensure that its massive wheels do not destroy the integrity of our institution’s core values: the quest for knowledge, learning and wisdom. Shattock comments that entrepreneurialism in higher education should not be defined wholly in economic terms (Shattock, 2009, p. 4). Yet this often occurs. We observed that some academics and administrators in the case study academic units had a narrow conceptualisation of entrepreneurialism, they focused on the

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outcomes of entrepreneurialism, generating independent revenue rather than attending to the processes required to develop and sustain academic units’ entrepreneurial capacities. I identify two key dimensions to these processes. First, assisting individual academics to acquire entrepreneurial skills and attributes. Second, fostering the development of an organisational culture and values within academic units that creates ‘the space’ and opportunities for academics to utilise their entrepreneurial skills and attributes. Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist suggested that ‘entrepreneurs reform or revolutionise production by exploiting an invention, using technology to produce a new commodity or an old one in a new way’ (Schumpeter, 1934, p. 66; 1946). For Schumpeter, entrepreneurialism involves a process of creative destruction, disrupting established norms and values and rigid organisational structures and modes of operating (Ricketts, 2002, p. 66). Some contemporary management theorists offer conceptualisations of entrepreneurialism that focus on defining the attributes that an individual requires to become an entrepreneur, including creativity, innovativeness, flexibility, risk taking, tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity and networking capacity, (see Bhide, 2000; Mc Grath & MacMillan, 2000). While another group of contemporary management theorists focus on the decision-making processes that enable organisations to be entrepreneurial (van der Veen & Wakkee, 2004, p. 133). I suggest that academic units could enhance their entrepreneurial capacities if they attend to both facets of entrepreneurialism: enabling academics to acquire entrepreneurial skills and attributes and implementing reforms to academic units’ organisational structures and decision-making processes so as to create the conditions, ‘the space’ that provides academics with opportunities and assistance to utilise their entrepreneurial skills as individual academic entrepreneurs or as teams or nodes of entrepreneurial academics to undertake entrepreneurial activities. I offer some recommendations to academic units to assist them to pursue these dual goals. However before presenting these ideas I urge university executives and heads of academic units not to force every academic working in an academic unit to pursue entrepreneurialism, especially by employing coercive pressure. Using threats such as that employed by University A’s Department of Civil Engineering where academics were told ‘either you bring in twice your salary through entrepreneurial activities, or you are out of here’ is unlikely to convince academics with a deeply entrenched ideological resistance to entrepreneurialism to revoke their views and pursue entrepreneurial activities. Such a confrontational approach is likely to be interpreted by these resistant academics as a direct challenge to their power and autonomy and will probably only serve to strengthen their resolve to reject entrepreneurialism. As mentioned key skills of successful business entrepreneurs include creativity, innovativeness, drive, energy, perseverance, flexibility, calculated risk taking, tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty and networking capacities. While you cannot ‘train’ academics to be creative or innovative, to have original ideas, you can provide academics with advice from successful entrepreneurs to assist academics to acquire some of these other entrepreneurial skills and attributes. I suggest that it would be useful if some of these entrepreneurial mentors were business entrepreneurs and

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some successful academic entrepreneurs. Business entrepreneurs can help budding academic entrepreneurs to gain a greater understanding of the commercial world, to see how entrepreneurial ideas emerge, develop and flourish. Business entrepreneurs can also offer advice about the obstacles that entrepreneurs encounter as they take their ideas from concept to fruition. These obstacles can include difficulties obtaining seed funding to undertake initial research and development activities, difficulties obtaining patents and licensing for intellectual property, dealing with government regulations, competitors beating your research team to market with a similar product or technology. Yet business entrepreneurs have a perseverance and passion that helps them push through these obstacles. A key lesson that academic entrepreneurs can learn from business entrepreneurs is the importance of identifying a need for a given product or service, its potential market, so that the product or service can be custom-designed to meet those needs rather than wasting valuable resources, time and money developing the product and then trying to take it to market, subsequently finding that no client is interested in purchasing ideas that academics have slaved over for years. Business entrepreneurs have a precarious existence, without the safety net provided by an employing organisation should their entrepreneurial venture fail; they stand to lose all of the time, money and energy that they have invested in the project. Of course as academics many of our entrepreneurial products and services are of a conceptual rather than a material nature. In addition academic entrepreneurs need to acquire skills and capacities to enable them to take their ideas from concept to fruition within the institutional setting of the university, a setting with its own set of institutionalised obstacles, such as heavy teaching loads with ever increasing numbers of student/customers with diminished educational foundations yet high aspirations and expectations of on-demand customer service, that saps the drive and energy for entrepreneurial endeavours, to bureaucratic rigidities that can stifle, delay or derail entrepreneurial initiatives. Universities are also subject to government regulatory frameworks that impose constraints on academic entrepreneurialism. So I suggest that it would also help budding entrepreneurial academics if they were mentored by successful academic entrepreneurs, people who have trod the path before them and learned how to navigate and survive these obstacles. I also recommend that universities revisit their training of future generations of academics. I suggest that alongside academic training for PhD candidates they should receive training in business and communication skills required to be a successful academic entrepreneur. To equip these neophyte scholars with the confidence, language and acumen to negotiate deals and contracts, to market their intellectual property effectively, to approach bankers, brokers, insurance firms, etc. to understand the commercial imperatives to finish projects on time and on budget. I have already written at length about the changes that are required in academic units’ organisational structures to create conditions that enable and sustain units’ adaptive capacity; these are also the conditions necessary for creating and sustaining academic units’ entrepreneurial capacities, so there is no need to repeat this discussion at length. In essence I suggest that academic units remove restrictive, slow, bureaucratic structures and decision-making patterns because they stifle and thwart those academics that seek to be innovative and entrepreneurial.

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I strongly recommend that academic units diversify their independent (nongovernment) revenue streams, undertaking a diverse range of entrepreneurial activities. As any amateur investor will attest ‘putting all of one’s eggs into the one basket is a risky strategy’ as should anything happen to this single revenue stream it leaves the investor exposed to a potential loss of revenue. Yet several case study academic units were heavily reliant on a single independent revenue stream, international student markets. It seems unwise for academic units to rely solely on income earned from international student markets because income earned from these markets can vary according to a range of factors that are beyond an academic unit’s control. These include fluctuations in currency values affecting costs of tuition and living expenses, government regulations for visa, immigration, permanent residency and work permits, vacancy rates for employment in particular occupations and alternative options for obtaining qualifications, such as new domestic places, online providers and socio-cultural factors such as perceptions of safety and racism. It is important for academic units to develop unique niche entrepreneurial markets, products and services that provide units with a competitive advantage. Copying another unit’s entrepreneurial ideas means that your unit becomes the second, third or fourth entrant into an already congested market, your unit is unlikely to acquire a significant proportion of that market and potential revenue is limited. I offer the following suggestions of entrepreneurial activities that academic units could pursue to generate independent (non-government) revenue. Some nations may need to alter government policy and or institutional regulations to implement these recommendations. 1. Develop collaborative research partnerships (research nodes) with researchers from commercial firms, government departments and other academic units to produce intellectual property, patents and technologies to be sold in commercial markets or to earn royalties and licensing fees for using this intellectual property or technology. 2. Develop spin-off companies to undertake research and development projects to produce and sell intellectual property, patents, products and technologies. 3. Develop spin-off companies to provide services for fee-paying clients. For example, medical faculties could operate hospitals, aged care facilities and work with pharmaceutical companies on drug design. Dentistry faculties could operate dental surgeries. Business faculties could operate firms for marketing, human resource recruitment and management, accountancy, finance, strategic management and change management. Law faculties could operate legal firms. Education faculties could operate kindergartens, schools and vocational training facilities and offer professional development courses to human resource departments in commercial firms to assist them to conduct staff training and development activities. Art and design faculties could operate interior, industrial, graphic and multimedia design firms, retail shops and galleries exhibiting and selling photographs, textiles, sculpture, paintings and mixed-media design. Humanities and social science faculties could operate specialist travel and tourist consultancy firms and language schools and act as consultants for corporate

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relocation consultancy firms and design conceptual and problem-solving training packages for corporate and government clients. Information technology faculties could operate firms for enterprise management, system analysis and robotics. Each of these firms could offer internship placements for undergraduate and postgraduate students as part of their programmes. Provide expert consultancy services to commercial and government clients. Invest capital in equity, cash and bond markets and property. Donations and bequests from alumni, corporations and philanthropic foundations. Corporate sponsorship of academics (faculty) for salaries, clothes, medical and dental expenses, houses, hotels, travel, air and automobiles, cellphones, computers, electrical equipment and appliances. In addition, academic units could obtain corporate sponsorship for academic facilities and equipment – lecture theatres, laboratories, libraries, classrooms, computers, laboratory equipment and machinery used for research or teaching. Each sponsorship arrangement would provide opportunities for companies to advertise their logos and slogans on these academic facilities and academics could display sponsors’ logos on research outputs, books, journal articles and conference presentations and teaching materials, web sites, online learning sites and face-to-face lecture presentations. These corporate sponsorships could be negotiated with various levels of exclusivity of rights and at various prices, in a similar fashion to corporate sponsorship arrangements for professional sports players – sponsoring a Nobel Laureate or Fields medallist professor would cost a company more than sponsoring a junior academic. Tuition fees from international and domestic students. This list is not exhaustive. Some of its suggestions are well known, others less so. I venture that the best strategy that academic units can use to develop their entrepreneurial capacities is to heed Schumpter’s advice, create the space and opportunity for creative destruction, remove the road blocks that stifle academics creativity and innovation and entrepreneurial success will follow. Not only will this enable your academic unit to survive its current challenges but your unit will also be better equipped to deal with those challenges that are yet to be conceived.

Notes 1. Luhmann’s conception of autopoiesis in organisations and in particular his reference to organisations as being self-referential is not intended to imply that they are closed systems. For an elaboration of this argument (see Kickert, 1993; Seidl, 2005). 2. ‘The power of universities in all jurisdictions to establish companies, joint ventures and partnerships is an integral part of universities’ powers to corporatise and commercialise university services and enterprises generally. Any body corporate has the power to establish a company under the Corporations Act 2001. Universities are, in most cases, statutory bodies and therefore their powers are limited in this regard by the legislation that establishes them. The Report notes that the establishing legislation of universities in the following jurisdictions provide for an express power to establish new companies (and in some instances enter into other arrangements

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such as joint ventures and partnerships). This power is generally limited to the establishment of companies to promote the universities’ objects and interests or otherwise in connection with the performance of the universities’ functions. New South Wales universities (except the Australian Catholic University, which has no express power) have the power to participate in such trusts, companies or other incorporated bodies limited only by the need to promote the objects and interests of the universities. Victorian universities may form or participate in the formation of limited companies only if the objects of the company are ‘incidental or conducive to’ the universities’ objects (as defined). Queensland universities may only form or take part in corporations that contain objects as expressed in the legislation including any object that the Council considers appropriate. The Tasmanian university has the power to form, and participate in the formation of companies, partnerships and joint ventures that are in connection with the performance of its functions (as defined). The Northern Territory University has the power, subject to approval, to establish ‘trading, research or other’ companies in their jurisdiction or elsewhere for the purpose of promoting the functions of the university. The universities in the Commonwealth and the Australian Capital Territory may establish companies, joint ventures or enter into partnerships if the establishment of these entities is considered to be ‘necessary or convenient’ to the performance of the universities’ functions’ DEST (2001) The Regulatory Environment Applying to Universities, http://www.dest.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip01_19/default.htm 3. ‘The Australian Research Council (ARC) is a statutory authority within the Australian Government’s Innovation, Industry, Science and Research portfolio. The ARC advises the Government on research matters and manages the National Competitive Grants Program, a significant component of Australia’s investment in research and development’ ARC (2009) http://www.arc.gov.au/about_arc/default.htm

Chapter 10

Current and Emerging Challenges

Chapter 1 discussed five key environmental trends that posed challenges for the case study academic units. These trends were globalisation, marketisation of higher education concomitant with declining public funding and increasing operating costs, developments in information communication technologies, massification of student cohorts and increased accountability to stakeholders (governments, professional associations, employers and students). These trends interacted creating an operating environment for the case study academic units that was characterised by turbulence and complexity. This chapter argues that these trends will probably continue to affect many academic units in public universities around the globe over the next decade. Hence units’ environments will remain complex and dynamic and it is the volatility and uncontrollable nature of these environments that poses the greatest challenge for academic units’ survival. While these trends could affect academic units in many nations’ public universities throughout the world, it is also true that there are systemic variations in nations’ higher education systems such as variations in nations’ policies for governing universities that influence how academic units in a particular nation’s public universities experience these trends. This is why this book drew on case studies from a single national context. Further, writing about academic units’ interactions with their operating environments is inherently problematic because these environments are dynamic. In contrast, this book is written at a fixed point in time, the case studies used a freeze-frame approach, they were undertaken from 1999 to 2002. So to conclude the book, this chapter re-examines the nature of Australian academic units’ operating environments at the time of writing (September, 2009) to determine whether these trends still affect academic units in Australian public universities and whether this environment continues to be dynamic and complex. Some comments are offered on whether these trends could affect academic units in other nations’ public universities. This chapter also identifies some future challenges that academic units in Australian public universities could encounter.

D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3_10, 

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Developments in Information Communication Technologies The timeframe for our analysis and discussion is salient. While it is comparatively easy to predict key environmental challenges for academic units over the short term, 5–10 years, it is much more difficult to predict challenges over the long term. In 50–100 years from now universities could undergo such a profound metamorphosis that they may bear only scant resemblance to their current form. Universities may no longer be physical entities with campuses, buildings, permanent employees, academics (faculty) and administrators. Universities may no longer require academic units. Students may no longer need to attend a university to study but could complete entire courses or stand-alone subjects online, on demand. This scenario is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Every day more entire courses and expert lectures are available from open access websites. iTunes University currently offers several hundred lectures and some entire courses by academics from prestigious universities including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge as videos and podcasts, free and accessible 24 h a day, 365 days of the year. There are also thousands more lectures and courses available from other open access websites such as OpenCourseWare Consortium, Academic Earth and the Research Channel (Peters, 2007, p. 241). This trend seems likely to continue, and possibly intensify. Some universities such as the University of Texas and Ohio University have already established virtual campuses on Second Life – an online three-dimensional virtual world accessible through the Internet (3D TLC – 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration, 2009; Vital Wiki, 2009). Universities could attain significant cost savings by opening virtual campuses and moving their teaching programmes online. Infrastructure costs would be removed, there will be no need for buildings, libraries, laboratories, cafeterias, student housing and car parks. Also as online learning systems continue to be enhanced, academic units can attain further reductions in the costs of delivery of instruction, because they will require fewer academics and administrators (3D TLC – 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration, 2009). A potential challenge for universities and their academic units is that it may become increasingly difficult to charge students tuition fees for courses, hence to garner revenue from teaching if open access courses and lectures continue to be provided free of charge. The music and film industries have already encountered this problem with the proliferation of open access sites offering free, albeit illegal access to music, films and television programmes. Developments in information communication technology have transformed how academics undertake research and it seems likely that these changes will continue (Castells, 2001, 2004; de Boer et al., 2002; Etzkowitz, 2003; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). Today many academic journals for researchers in science, the humanities and social science are published online and can be accessed by academics via library web portals anywhere in the world, at any time, with numbers of open access academic journals increasing steadily (Peters, 2007, pp. 235–239). There is also a growing trend for books to be published online; these digitised texts can be accessed in the same way, with the same ease as journal articles. Indeed much of the information and data that humanities and social science researchers require for their research projects – journal articles, reports and statistics are available online.

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Humanities and social science researchers also use web-based applications and email to collaborate with research partners and produce research outputs – books, journal articles and reports with publishers spread over the different continents of the globe. As a consequence of these developments in information communication technology there is less need for humanities and social science researchers to be located on site at physical university campuses. Currently researchers in disciplines such as medicine, biotechnology, physics, chemistry and engineering still need to attend university campuses to conduct experiments in laboratories and use machinery and equipment for their work. Yet as more research nodes and partnerships are formed with researchers from commercial firms there may be less need for universities to provide this capital infrastructure and to maintain these facilities and services, offering significant savings. In a recent UNESCO report entitled Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution, Altbach observes that ‘the academic world has always been characterised by centers and peripheries. The strongest universities usually because of their research prowess and reputation for excellence are seen as the centers’ (Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley, 2009, p. iii). Altbach’s observation is astute. At the risk of offending my colleagues I suggest that Australian public universities are located at the periphery of higher education rather than at its centre; there are three reasons why this is the case. First, Australia is physically isolated from Europe and the United States where the oldest, research-intensive universities are situated. Second, when contrasted with ancient European civilisations, Australia (or more precisely white Australia) is still in its infancy. As such Australian universities have had less time to establish research traditions. The University of Sydney, the oldest Australian public university was founded in 1850. In contrast, the first colleges of Oxford University were established in the eleventh century, the University of Paris was founded in the twelfth century, Harvard University was established in 1636 and the Humboldt University of Berlin was founded in 1818 (Altbach, 2009; Perkins, 2006). Third, in contrast with many European and Asian nations Australia is sparsely populated. Australian public universities lack the critical mass of academics of European, Asian and US universities. Today, 28 September 2009, Australia’s population is 21,997,697 people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009). There are only 37 public universities in Australia, with 72,642 full-time academics employed in 2008 (DEEWR, 2009c). Previously these factors combined to make it difficult for academics from Australian public universities to be at the centre of higher education, to participate in cutting-edge academic debates and to produce world-class scholarship and innovative research. More recently, over the last decade, declining levels of public funding for Australian public universities coupled with the massification of student cohorts resulting in substantial increases in Australian academics’ teaching loads have added further challenges for Australian academics seeking to participate in state-of-the-art research; this issue is explored later. However, recent developments in information communication technology have enhanced communication channels for Australian academics with leading researchers in Europe, the United States and Asia. These developments include digitised books, online journals and databases. Further state-of-the-art developments

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such as Web 2.0,1 cloud computing2 and video conference applications such as Skype make it much easier for Australian academics to collaborate in research networks with scholars located in European, US and Asian universities (Ankolekau, Krotzsch, Tran, & Vrandecic, 2007; Gatewood, 2009). Over the last decade more Australian academic units are using online learning systems such as Blackboard to deliver undergraduate and graduate courses. Blackboard now has tools to upload videos, podcasts and hyperlinks to other websites, and to conduct discussion forums creating opportunities for students situated in different regions of the globe to engage in collaborative learning. The move to online learning systems has enabled some Australian academic units to extend their reach into global student markets, providing greater revenue than possible if these units restricted delivery of courses to domestic student markets. For example, since 2004 all undergraduate students at Deakin University must take at least one unit delivered completely online and many units have an online presence (Leitch & Warren, 2008, p. 263). A challenge for Australian academics and academic units is that Australian broadband infrastructure is inferior compared to that available in Europe and the United States, bandwidth is limited and Internet service providers’ charges are comparatively expensive (Grosso, 2006, p. 4). As we move into the next decade, continued advances in information communication technologies will enhance Australian academics connectivity with global academic communities and assist Australian academics and their academic units to move from the periphery of higher education towards its centre.

Fiscal Challenges When the case studies were undertaken the most significant environmental pressure encountered by the case study academic units was the decline in public funding. Other nations’ public universities also experienced similar fiscal duress at this time. For example, Pilbeam offers this comment on levels of public funding for UK universities ‘while absolute levels of funding from central government may have increased, funding per student has fallen’(Pilbeam, 2009, p. 353). However given systemic variations in nations’ funding models and policies, the present discussion relates specifically to the funding of Australian public universities. Earlier chapters illustrated how the decline in public funding forced most case study units to adopt marketisation. These units developed alternative revenue streams using entrepreneurial activities such as teaching full-fee-paying students, international and postgraduate course work to compensate for the revenue lost through reduced levels of public funding. Only the reactor case study academic units did not follow this pattern. However there were variations in the extent of marketisation amongst case study academic units. For all of the case study units, except the prospectors, marketisation was accompanied by a rise in managerialism. These units appointed managers that monitored and evaluated academics’ performance of core functions: teaching, supervision of research students, production of research

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outputs, and obtaining research grants. An important key performance indicator in these performance management regimes was the amount of independent (nongovernment, or third-stream revenue) academics generated. The rise in managerialism occurred because units wanted to deploy their resources more efficiently; they were also attempting to enhance their adaptive capacities by increasing academics’ productivity. Academic units in Australian public universities continue to experience fiscal challenges. Until 2007 Australian academic units had to maintain their teaching, research and administration in an environment where federal government funding was only marginally increased. At the time of writing (September 2009) the most recent data on federal government funding for Australian public universities that is available is for 2007 (DEEWR, 2008). Table 10.13 depicts levels of Commonwealth Government Grants to Australian Universities from 1999 to 2007. The situation for academic units in Australian public universities was made even more challenging because the relatively modest increases in revenue from the Australian federal government were offset by significant increases in the number of students taught (massification) and by continued increases in operating expenses. In 2008 there were 1,066,095 students enrolled in Australian universities (DEEWR, 2008). In contrast, in 1999 there were 686,267 students enrolled in Australian public universities (DETYA, 2000b), an increase of 55.3%, see Table 10.2. In its 2007 budget statement the Australian federal government announced the first substantial increase in public funding for Australian public universities in a decade. The AU$6 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund (HEEF) was designed to provide funding for capital works and research infrastructure for Australian public universities. However the Liberal party government was defeated at the federal election in November 2007 and replaced by a Labor government. On the 13th May 2008 the Labor government released its budget including the establishment of the Education Investment Fund (EIF) with AU$11 billion in funding for capital expenditure and refurbishment in universities. The AU$11 billion

Table 10.1 Commonwealth government grants for Australian public universities

Year

Commonwealth government grants AU$billion

Percentage of total revenue

Total revenue AU$billion

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

3.9 3.9 4.1 4.8 4.9 5.3 5.9 6.6 7

44.8 41.9 40.2 41 40 40 40 42 40

8.7 9.3 10.2 11.2 11.9 13 13.9 15.5 16.8

Source: DEEWR, selected higher education statistics: Finance (1999–2007)

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Table 10.2 Total number of students taught by Australian public universities Year

Total number of students

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

686, 267 695, 485 842, 183 896, 621 929, 952 944, 977 957, 177 984, 146 976, 786 1, 066, 095

Source: DEEWR selected higher education statistics – students

was derived from combining the AU$6 billion held in (HEEF) with $AU 5 billion from the budget surplus. The 2008 federal Labor budget also announced an additional AU$500 million to assist Australian universities rebuild capital infrastructure including libraries and information communication technology. The 2008 federal Labor budget also announced that from 2009 onwards Australian public universities would no longer be permitted to offer full-fee undergraduate degrees removing a revenue stream worth AU$112,148 million in 2006 (DEEWR, 2007). This reduction in revenue was offset by the announcement of a further 11,000 new Commonwealth government-supported places (previously known as HECS places). In March 2008 the Labor government commissioned a review of the Australian Higher Education Sector; Emeritus Professor Denise Bradley, former vicechancellor of the University of South Australia, chaired the review panel. In December 2008, the Bradley Review4 suggested that the Australian higher education sector required these changes in fiscal policy: Our universities lie at the heart of the national strategy for research and innovation – itself a critical foundation of our response to a globalised world. There is abundant evidence that government provision of funds for underlying infrastructure to support research in universities is very significantly below the real costs. This is leading to a pattern of quite unacceptable levels of cross-subsidy from funds for teaching, adversely affecting the quality of the student experience. Analysis of our current performance points to an urgent need for both structural reforms and significant additional investment. In 2020 Australia will not be where we aspire to be – in the top group of OECD countries in terms of participation and performance – unless we act, and act now (Bradley, Noonan, Nuguent, & Scales, 2008, p. xii).

More specifically the Bradley Review called for ‘a more appropriate rate of indexation and regular triennial review of the adequacy of funding for higher education are required to ensure that the country’s efforts in this area remain competitive internationally over time’ (Bradley et al., 2008, p. xv). Recommendation 26 of the Bradley Review called on the Australian government to increase the base funding for teaching and learning in higher education by 10% from 2010’ (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 153). Recommendation 27 of the Bradley Review specified that

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‘the Australian Government maintain the future value of increased base funding for higher education by an indexation formula that is based on 90% of the Labour Price Index (Professional) plus the Consumer Price Index with weightings of 75 and 25% respectively’ (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 154). Recommendation 29 of the Bradley Review was ‘that the Australian Government introduce a demand-driven entitlement system for domestic higher education students, in which recognised providers are free to enrol as many eligible students as they wish in eligible higher education courses and receive corresponding government subsidies for those students . . .’ (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 158). Governments may commission reviews of higher education sectors, yet they are not beholden to implement the recommendations of the review panel. In this case the Australian federal government has accepted much of the social justice ideology that informs the Bradley Review. It has also indicated its intention to implement some of the reforms recommended by the review for governance and regulation of the Australian higher education sector, (see DEEWR, 2009d, pp. 58–66). However the 2009 federal government budget announced a staggered rollout of additional public revenue for teaching, research, innovation programmes and infrastructure reforms for Australian public universities over a 4-year period, from 2010 to 2013, see Fig. 10.1 and Table 10.3. Australian university executives, heads of academic units and unit staff welcomed this substantial increase in public funding. However their enthusiasm is tempered by concerns that this additional revenue may only partially ameliorate the

Fig. 10.1 Additional funding for higher education and innovation Source: DEEWR (2009) Transforming Australia’s higher education system. (CEI research refers to research projects to improve energy efficiency and environmental sustainability)

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Table 10.3 Projects allocated funding 2009 Australian federal budget Project

AU$ invested

Timeframe

1. Demand-driven funding for domestic students 2. National body for regulation and quality assurance 3. Performance Funding 4. Indexation 5. Structural adjustment funding 6. Funding to support low SES participation targets 7. (HELP) student loan repayment reduction 8. Increased student contributions education & nursing 9. Removal of the overseas help loan fee 10. Sustainable research excellence in universities 11. Collaborative research networks 12. Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) 13. Postgraduate research student support 14. Investing in Infrastructure

491 million 57 million 206 million 578 million 402 million 433 million 83 million 33 million 17 million 512 million 52 million 36 million 52 million 3 billion

2010–2013 2010–2013 2012–2016 2012–2016 2012–2016 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013 2010–2013

Source: Adapted from DEEWR (2009) Transforming Australia’s higher education system

substantial loss of revenue that occurred over the preceding decade. A decade that also saw Australian academic units’ operating costs continue to increase because of unfunded increases in salaries, increases in infrastructure costs and costs associated with the massification of students, see Table 10.4. Also as noted, Australian public universities along with their counterparts in other parts of the globe have lost significant amounts of revenue from their investment portfolios. There is concern amongst some members of the Australian higher education sector that a significant amount of the additional funding promised in the 2009 federal budget AU$578 million for indexation, AU$402 million for structural adjustments to the sector and AU$206 million for meeting performance targets cannot be accessed until 2012. Should the incumbent Labor government lose the federal election scheduled for 2010, there is no guarantee that this funding will be delivered should the opposition Table 10.4 Australian public university operating expenses before abnormal items Year

Staff salary costs AU$billion

Total expenses AU$billion

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

5 5.4 6 6 6.4 7.1 8 8.2 9

8.4 9 10 11 11.4 13 13.1 14.2 15.4

Source: DEEWR, Selected Higher Education Statistics: Finance (1999–2007)

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Table 10.5 Difference between total revenue and total expenses for Australian public universities

Year

Total revenue AU$billion

Total expenses AU$billion

Total revenue – total expenses AU$billion

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

8.7 9.3 10.2 11.2 11.9 13 13.9 15.5 16.8

8.4 9 9.7 10.7 11.4 13 13.1 14.2 15.4

0.3 0.3 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.8 1.3 1.4

Source: DEEWR, Selected Higher Education Statistics: Finance (1999–2007).

Liberal party be elected as the government. Even if the Labor government wins the 2010 federal election, if the nation’s economy deteriorates further as a result of the global financial crisis, a scenario that is possible given the current volatility in global markets, (Australia’s budget deficit was AU$27.1 billion for the 2008–2009 financial year) (Reuters, 2009), then the government may face other more pressing demands upon the public purse and therefore be unable to deliver this additional funding for Australian universities (Table 10.5). While Australian universities and their academic units anxiously await the delivery of the additional funding promised by the Australian federal government, in the short term most still need to adapt to the legacy of years of diminished public funding. They continue to rely on generating additional revenue from entrepreneurial activities such as teaching full-fee-paying students, consultancy and commercial research to provide sufficient revenue to sustain their operations. Only time will tell whether the fiscal environment for academic units in Australian public universities improves and stabilises or whether it remains turbulent and unpredictable.

Increased Accountability to Stakeholders Another key environmental pressure for the case study academic units was increased accountability to external stakeholders. In my view academic units in Australian public universities are even more accountable to external stakeholders now in late 2009 than they were at the time the case studies were undertaken. Academic units in Australian public universities now interact with an increasing number and variety of external stakeholders. Also Australian public universities and units’ key external stakeholder, the Australian federal government has tightened its regulatory and steering powers over these institutions. Evidence to support this contention is found in the growing significance of global higher education markets for Australian academic units. In 2007 (the most recent year that data is available) Australian public

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universities received approximately 15% of their operating revenue from international student fees (DEEWR, 2008, p. 16). Australian academic units had increased dealings with foreign governments, educational providers, recruitment agents, students and their parents. In 2007 Australian public universities received 5% of their total operating revenue from consultancy and contract work for external clients, the source of this funding is not disaggregated; however it is fair to assume that these clients included local and global commercial firms and governments (DEEWR, 2008, p. 3). In addition in 2007 Australian public universities received 8% of their total operating revenue from ‘other sources’ including joint ventures (with external firms), royalties, trademarks and licences; again this data is not disaggregated, yet we can assume that earning this revenue involved negotiations and collaborations with external stakeholders and agents. In addition Australian public universities recruit academics from many other nations’ universities and research centres. Data on source countries of academics working in Australian public universities is not available, yet it is evident that marketing, recruiting, appointing and ‘importing’ foreign academics requires that Australian academic units need to engage with foreign governments (to negotiate immigration and visa arrangements), academics and other agencies. Further evidence supporting the contention that Australian academic units are presently more accountable to external stakeholders than they were at the time the case studies were undertaken is found in the nature of units’ relationship with the Australian federal government and in particular with its departments of treasury, higher education (at the time of writing this is known as DEEWR5 ) and research and innovation (at the time of writing this is known as DIISR). We have already observed that the Australian federal government continues to provide a significant proportion of the operating revenue for Australian public universities. Yet the Australian federal government’s key power and authority over the Australian higher education sector and academic units in Australian public universities resides in its establishment of the structural and regulatory framework that establishes the parameters and shapes the policy agenda under which these institutions must operate. The 46 recommendations of the Bradley Review constitute clear evidence of the significance of external stakeholders for Australian public universities and their academic units. While it is true that the Bradley Review of Australian higher education and the Cutler review of research and innovation accepted submissions from Australian universities, academics and other stakeholders such as academics’ trade unions, ultimately power and authority for developing the review documents and their recommendations resides with the review committee (Bradley et al., 2008; Cutler, 2008). The 2009 Australian federal government budget statement also provides further evidence of the power and authority of the Australian federal government as an external stakeholder in steering and regulating the operations of Australian public universities and their academic units (DEEWR, 2009d). In particular, the 2009 Australian federal budget statement includes six key measures that demonstrate the state’s power as an external stakeholder for Australian academic units. First, the establishment of TESA, a new Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency

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with the power to accredit and re-accredit university providers, evaluate the performance of providers and programmes and conduct quality assurance audits of onshore and offshore teaching (DEEWR, 2009d, p. 31). Second, the establishment of ERA, the Excellence in Research Framework ‘will assess the nation’s performance both across discipline areas across the country and against international benchmarks. It will provide a solid evidence base for assessing performance and will provide a framework for negotiating performance targets’ (DEEWR, 2009d, p. 26). Third, the provision of performance-based funding: The Government intends to hold higher education institutions accountable for the significant public investment in the sector. One of the main ways of doing this will be through the use of a new funding stream to ensure universities meet agreed attainment, participation, engagement and quality targets. . .. In 2010 the Government will work with the higher education sector to develop a robust set of performance indicators. The indicators will include measures of success for equity groups as well as measures of the quality of teaching and learning (DEEWR, 2009d, p. 33).

Fourth, the establishment of a Structural Adjustment Fund designed to assist universities to make strategic decisions about their future mission for a more sustainable higher education sector, especially in regional Australia’ (DEEWR, 2009d, p. 41). Fifth, the establishment of student demand-based funding from 2012, ‘the government will fund a Commonwealth-supported place for all undergraduate domestic students accepted into an eligible, accredited higher education course at a recognised public higher education provider. Universities will not be funded for places that they do not fill’ (DEEWR, 2009d, p. 17). Sixth, the negotiation of mission-based compacts between universities and the Australian federal government, these compacts will consist of two parts, one for teaching and learning and the other for research; the compacts will specify performance targets that universities need to meet for each function and provide rewards for meeting these targets’ (DEEWR, 2009d, p. 47). It is interesting to observe an overt tension and contradiction within this policy framework. On the one hand the Australian federal government seeks to encourage Australian public universities and their academic units to become more autonomous, to develop fiscal self-reliance, to actively pursue marketisation and entrepreneurial activities. Yet these six policy initiatives indicate that the Australian federal government is also enhancing its demands on Australian public universities to be accountable for the efficient and effective use of the public funding they are granted. The Australian federal government is also mandating that Australian public universities meet designated performance targets. Australian public universities and thereby by default their academic units must also provide annual reports, with budget statements to relevant state governments. So it is evident that academic units in Australian public universities experience considerable pressure from a range of powerful external stakeholders. Academic units must heed stakeholders’ needs and expectations and meet federal and state governments’ regulatory requirements when making decisions relating to each facet of their operations, teaching, research, financial and human resource management and administration. This is not an easy task because the needs and expectations of these stakeholders may conflict and compliance with regulatory requirements can be expensive.

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Massification of Student Cohorts Altbach argues that although the massification of student cohorts is a key global trend, it is not a new phenomenon. He notes that the United States achieved mass higher education in the 1960s when 40% of the eligible age cohort entered tertiary institutions (Altbach et al., 2009, p. vi). In 2000, 19% of the eligible age cohort were enrolled in tertiary education, by 2007 this figure had increased to 26% (Altbach et al., 2009, p. vi). Of course student access and participation rates to university education vary across nations. As a norm rates are higher in highincome nations, Europe and the United States than in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (Altbach et al., 2009, p. iv). See (OECD, 2007, pp. 146–54, 2008, p. 76, 130, 2009, p. 308, 328) for comprehensive data on rates of massification across global higher education systems; this discussion is confined to exploring how massification has affected Australian public universities and their academic units in the years following the case studies. We observed that the massification of student cohorts intensified after the case studies were completed; between 1999 and 2008 there was a 55.3% increase in the numbers of students enrolled in courses delivered by Australian public universities, see Table 10.2. This decade witnessed more Australian academic units deliver courses online and develop franchise and partnership arrangements with third-party offshore providers primarily although not exclusively in neighbouring countries in the Southeast Asian region including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and China (Marginson, 2009, p. 250). However ‘staff numbers have not kept pace with the growth of the system overall’ (Coates et al., 2009, p. 5). In 1999 80,832 FTE, (full-time equivalent staff includes full-time, fractional full-time and estimated casual staff) (DEEWR, 2009b) taught 686,267 students (DETYA, 2000b). In 2008, 101,475 FTE staff taught 1,066,095 students enrolled in courses delivered by Australian public universities (DEEWR, 2009b). Whilst this expansion in student numbers especially in full-fee-paying students, internationals, postgraduate coursework, and up until 2009 domestic feepaying students enabled Australian academic units to garner significant additional revenue, this expansion in student numbers also brings attendant costs. This increased volume of students and pressures to increase throughput of students (for example, to shorten the length of PhD candidature to push more students through more quickly) has increased infrastructure costs as increased volumes of students have led to a need for more lecture theatres, classrooms, laboratories, libraries, computers, cafeterias, car parking spaces, student accommodation and has increased maintenance costs for these facilities. Yet the greatest cost associated with this substantial increase in student numbers has been the increase in Australian academics’ teaching workload, they must now teach more courses with more students. However as Chapter 1 noted, massification of student cohorts refers not only to increasing volume of students but also to increased diversity within student cohorts: more mature-age students with weak academic foundations, international students with limited proficiency in English and unaccustomed to self-directed learning, a pedagogical norm in Australian universities. Altbach argues that most university systems have now managed to adapt to increases in student demand but are still

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grappling with the issues arising from the diversity of new student cohorts, especially the dilution of academic standards to accommodate new student cohorts’ weaker skills (Altbach et al., 2009, p. i). In addition to increases in Australian academics’ teaching loads Australian academics must now comply with performance management systems that require enhanced research productivity, requirements to obtain more and larger research grants especially entrepreneurial commercial research sponsorship and to produce more research outputs, books, journal articles, conference papers and reports. Some Australian academics have managed to cope with this increased workload by obtaining greater efficiencies in their work, employing rigid time management techniques. Others have coped with this increase in their workload by extending their working hours to nights and weekends and not taking any annual leave, sacrificing work/life balance and relationships with partners, families and friends. Australian academic units have benefited from this additional unpaid work performed by many academics. Yet not surprisingly some Australian academics have experienced considerable stress and health issues trying to keep pace with this work intensification, this group of staff has extremely low morale and little energy or enthusiasm to actively participate in activities designed to strengthen their academic units’ adaptation. The most common solution adopted by Australian academic units to cope with this increase in student numbers is an increasing reliance on casual academic staff. In 1989 Australian public universities employed 3,315 casual academic staff; by 2007 they employed 7,440 casual academics, an increase of approximately 125% (Coates et al., 2009, p. 7). As noted it is not within Australian academic units’ best interests to rely on significant levels of casual/sessional academics for the bulk of their teaching because these casuals have no job security, they have weak affiliations to academic units and are unlikely to participate in activities aimed at enhancing units’ adaptive capacities. Further whilst Australian academic units’ reliance on casual academic labour and unpaid overtime labour of full- and part-time academics has provided an adequate solution to the massification of student cohorts in the short term, it is evident that this solution could prove inadequate over the long term. The Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education calls for further expansion of the Australian Higher Education sector: An agreed target for the proportion of the population that has attained a higher education qualification by 2020 will provide a focus for action. There is already a target set by the Council of Australian Governments to halve the proportion of Australians aged 20 to 64 years without a certificate level III qualification by 2020. The target proposed for higher education is that 40 per cent of 25 to 34 year olds will have attained at least a bachelorlevel qualification by 2020. This will be quite testing for Australia as current attainment is 29 per cent. Another important target is one to ensure that those from disadvantaged backgrounds aspire to and are able to participate in higher education. By 2020, 20 per cent of undergraduate enrolments in higher education should be students from low socio-economic backgrounds (Bradley, et al., 2008, p. xiv).

If Australian academic units are to meet these expansion targets it is imperative that they increase the numbers of academics that they employ. Given that ‘a

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Current and Emerging Challenges

large and growing proportion of academics in Australia is aged over 50 years. . . and the relative decline of the proportion of academics in the 30–39 year age bracket. . .suggest that the current stock of young academics will certainly not be large enough to replace the large numbers of older academics as they retire over the next decade’ (Coates et al., 2009, p. 5). There are five options available for Australian academic units to address the looming shortage of academics: one, import additional academics from other universities around the globe. Two, embark on significant domestic recruitment programmes to attract PhD graduates to become academics. Three, retain existing academics past the standard retirement age of 65. Four, recruit additional academics from other sectors of the workforce both here and abroad. Five, employ existing casual academics as full-time academics. Yet each option is not easy to attain. Competition in global academic labour markets is likely to continue, Australian academics currently earn salaries that are comparable with those of colleagues in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada (Coates et al., 2009, p. 12). Yet as competition for academics between universities around the globe intensifies (OECD, 2008, pp. 105–119), nations whose universities possess greater resources such as the US Ivy league universities will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining academics. However, salary is not the only factor that will determine where academics choose to work, working conditions including teaching load, opportunities for research, ancillary benefits such as health and dental plans, housing and leave entitlements, opportunities for promotion are all factors that academics will consider when choosing where to work. Australian academic units do not have a good track record in this regard; whilst they have been able to put substantial pressure on existing academics to increase performance over the last decade and have benefited from the unpaid overtime worked by many academics they will not be able to continue these practices if academic labour markets become more competitive. It will also not be easy for Australian academic units to recruit more graduates to become academics over the next 10–20 years, as there are many other careers available to graduates that offer higher salaries and better working conditions (Coates et al., 2009, p. 2). The option of retaining existing academics to work beyond 65 years of age is also problematic because work intensification has burnt out some of these academics, they are exhausted and demotivated; having worked too hard for too long, it will be difficult to obtain more productive years from these people. Australian academic units could also encounter difficulties convincing casual academic staff to become full-time academics as some have experienced less than optimum employment experiences as casual academics and witnessed substantive work intensification of full-time academics, they do not find the idea of pursuing an academic career appealing. Under these circumstances it seems prudent for Australian academic units to amend their approach to managing academics, rather than adopting ‘burn and churn’ style policies designed to garner maximum productivity from academics in the short term and then discard these academics once they are burnt out and no longer productive; it is more efficient and cost-effective to enhance existing academics’ ‘shelf life’, to conserve and sustain their long-term productivity by providing more humane workloads and realistic performance measures.

Globalisation

165

Globalisation Globalisation is a paradoxical phenomenon. It offers possibilities for collaboration and enrichment through the exchange of culture, knowledge and material wealth. Yet it can also serve to divide nation states and their institutions pitching them against each other in competition for power and resources: fiscal, knowledge and social capital. Globalisation and marketisation has blended to transform the landscape of higher education. In previous eras higher education’s mission was to create knowledge with an intrinsic value and to educate students so that they could be valuable citizens of their nation. The contemporary world of global higher education markets for research funding, outputs, academics (faculty) and students’ marches to the beat of a different drum. Commodificaton and competition are the cornerstones that underpin these global higher education markets. Academics are now commodities traded in global markets with price points determined by their current and future research productivity, their track record in attracting research funding and producing large volumes of high calibre research outputs. Trade in academics as with trading all products or services in commercial markets is subject to the laws of supply and demand; academics working in niche disciplines or with stellar research track records tend to be in short supply, so they command higher prices. Students are now customers and universities around the globe spend significant amounts of fiscal resources and human capital (time and creativity) developing marketing strategies and products, pitching brands, establishing networks with government and recruitment agents to develop new student markets or capture competitors’ territory. Student evaluations of teaching and units, that is customer satisfaction surveys and feedback are used to design new products (courses) or to modify the design or delivery of existing courses to better meet students’ needs and expectations. Even knowledge has been commodified, often it is packaged into modules so that it can be presented to customers in forms that is easy for them to digest. In some universities researchers are only permitted to undertake quests for knowledge that yield tangible and therefore saleable research outputs, books, journal articles and reports, patents, products or technologies. Academics’ productivity is now measured, monitored and evaluated and their tenure or promotion prospects determined by numbers of satisfied students taught, research outputs produced and amounts of money earned from entrepreneurial activities. Although Australian public universities and their academic units engage in valuable institutional-level collaborations with other nations’ universities and some Australian academics have global networks with colleagues from other nations’ universities with whom they collaborate on research projects and exchange knowledge free of charge, or reciprocal obligations: in my view the competitive aspects of globalisation now take precedence over the collaborative facets of globalisation for Australian public universities and their academic units. This paradigm shift has occurred for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. Australian public universities and their academic units had to find alternative revenue streams to sustain their operations after the state relinquished its role as the major resource provider for Australian public universities. They had no option but to engage in competition in

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global student, staff, research funding, outputs and knowledge markets. This task was far from easy, thrust into a role as quasi-corporate enterprises they were now expected to generate the major portion of their operating revenue from globally contested commercial markets whilst still complying with regulatory and policy frameworks mandated by the nation state. Australian public universities and their academic units have been strong competitors in global student markets, ‘education exports are now Australia’s third largest export behind only coal and iron ore’ (Reserve Bank of Australia, 2008, p. 12). ‘International education activity contributed AU$15.5 billion in export income to the Australian economy in 2008’ an increase of 23.4% from 2007 (Australian Education International, 2009). ‘In 2008, the higher education sector generated AU$8.9 billion in export income (59.4% of total onshore earnings)’ (export income does not include income generated by the operations of offshore campuses, twinning and franchises operated by Australian universities) (Australian Education International, 2009). In 2008 international student enrolments in courses taught by Australian universities increased by 5% to 182,770 (DEEWR Australian Education International, 2009). The largest international markets for onshore delivery of Australian university courses in 2008 was China with 51,600 students, India 27,701 students, Malaysia 15,652 students, Hong Kong 8,552 students and Singapore with 7,499 students (DEEWR Australian Education International, 2009). In 2007 (the most recent data available) there were 72,282 students enrolled in trans-national education courses delivered by Australian public universities or their franchisees offshore (entire courses, or partial courses) (DEEWR Australian Education International, 2009). The top five markets for trans-national courses delivered by Australian universities in 2007 were Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong and Vietnam (DEEWR Australian Education International, 2009). This data is not disaggregated to indicate the levels of engagement of individual Australian public universities in international education, or within these institutions to identify particular academic units’ involvement. Although this data collection indicates that most onshore and offshore international students study business and management courses, information technology or engineering courses (DEEWR Australian Education International, 2009; DEEWR Australian Education International, 2009). The overall trend suggested by this data is that international student markets are increasingly important for many Australian academic units, Australian public universities and indeed for the Australian economy. Some Australian academic units are heavily reliant on revenue generated from international student markets. This data suggests that globalisation continues to constitute a significant aspect of many Australian academic units’ exogenous environments much as was the case at the time the case studies were undertaken. Given that revenue from international student markets is increasing it is possible to contend that globalisation constitutes an even more important aspect of some Australian academic units’ exogenous environments than was the case at the time of the case studies. Both onshore and offshore education provision are perfect examples of the complexity and dynamism of Australian academic units exogenous environments because units’ positions in these markets and hence revenue garnered from these markets is subject to change dependent on many factors

Globalisation

167

that are outside the preserve of Australian academic units’ control, such as fluctuations in the value of the Australian dollar, changes in purchaser nations’ higher education policies and immigration policies. Another indicator of the significance of globalisation for Australian academic units is the growing emphasis on international ranking of universities. While league tables ranking universities such as the US News and World Report have been produced since the 1980s (Marginson & van der Wende, 2007a), more universities around the globe are actively concerned with and competing to improve their institution’s position on international ranking scales. This concern is because a university’s position on these rankings has become a de facto indicator for the quality of universities, a guide to institutional reputation that has the potential to affect a university’s performance in higher education markets: not only to attract stellar researchers and research funding but most importantly to attract students, especially international students. There are two international ranking systems that receive attention by Australian public universities, The Shanghai Jiaotong University Institute of Higher Education (SJTU) ranking and the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking. The SJTU released its first ranking of world universities’ research performance in 2003 (Institute of Higher Education, 2007; Marginson & van der Wende, 2007a). The SJTU ranking system was developed to ‘find the gap between Chinese universities and world-class universities’ (Shanghai Jiaotong University: Institute of Higher Education, 2008, p. 1). The SJTU ranking focuses on research performance, see Table 10.6. The methodology employed to construct the SJTU ranking has been criticised: ‘ . . . it measures past research output, not present research capacity, . . .Thomson ISI comprises the database which determines which journals receive a rating, so it has a vested interest in selecting its own journals ahead of other journals, . . .the Nobel Prize criterion is perhaps the most controversial, as the prize is Table 10.6 SJTU ranking criteria and weights Criteria

Indicator

Code

Weighting

Quality of education

Alumni winning Nobel Prize or Fields medal Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prize or Fields medal Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories Articles published in Nature and Science Articles indexed in science citation Index-expanded, and social science citation Index Per capita academic performance of an institution

Alumni

10%

Award

20%

Hi Ci

20%

N and S

20%

PUB

20%

PCP

10%

Quality of faculty

Research output

Per capita performance Total

100%

For institutions specialised in humanities and social sciences such as London School of Economics, N and S is not considered, and the weight of N&S is relocated to other indicators Source: The Shanghai Jiaotong University Institute of Higher Education (2008)

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submission based and at times has been open to claims that an element of politicking enters the decisions . . .’ (Marginson & van der Wende, 2007b, pp. 311–312). The SJTU ranking team defended their ranking methodology against this criticism by stating that: Since different stakeholders have different expectations about quality, the quality of higher education institutions is not easy to compare internationally. It would be impossible to rank the quality of university education worldwide because of the huge differences of universities in the large variety of countries and the technical difficulties in obtaining internationally comparable data. If one wants to construct a reliable ranking of world universities, the only possible ranking will be a comparative display of research performance. Therefore, the Ranking Group chose to rank research universities in the world by their academic or research performance based on internationally comparable data that everyone could check. No subjective measures were taken. No data is obtained from any kind of university reports (Shanghai Jiaotong University: Institute of Higher Education, 2008, p. 9).

In 2008 the SJTU refined its ranking system, releasing rankings of world universities by broad subject fields (Shanghai Jiaotong University: Institute of Higher Education, 2008). The Times Higher Education Supplement published its first ranking of universities in 2004; it evaluates institutional reputation using data gathered from a survey of academics and global employers, internationalisation – international students and staff, student–staff ratios and research citations (Marginson & van der Wende, 2007a; Times Higher Education Supplement, 2007). At present the elite group of Australian public universities known as the group of eight (The Australian National University, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Western Australia, University of Queensland, University of Adelaide, University of Melbourne and Monash University) focus their concern on their position on institutional-level rankings, publicising their ranking position on their websites and other marketing material. The University of Melbourne has commenced marketing its ranking position on the SJTU broad subject fields; other elite Australian universities are yet to do this, probably because they are excluded from these SJTU top 100 world universities by broad subject field rankings. However it is possible that as competition between universities around the globe intensifies, Australian university executives could exert pressure on academic units to improve their performance on these ranking scales so that this indicator can be used for marketing to attract potential students, academics, research sponsors and consultancy clients. Williams and Van Dyke (2007) recently published an article ranking academic disciplines in Australian universities, yet so far this sort of work has not crossed the boundary from the specialised literature of higher education scholars to the mainstream media. If the mainstream media begins to publicise rankings by discipline or academic unit, this would act as a further catalyst for units to implement changes to improve their rankings on these measures. Kegley and Raymond write that ‘the study of global futures entails imagining what is possible, forecasting what is probable, and determining how to attain what

Notes

169

is preferable’ (Kegley & Raymond, 2010, p. 404). Yet from an ontological perspective, we cannot know the future because it does not exist yet, futurists’ forecasts are hypotheses that are yet to be verified. All that we can do is study the past, examine the present and offer predictions of trends that at this moment in time seem likely to continue or become more significant. Who among us would have predicted that the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 would have occurred, or that it would have such a serious impact on so many nations’ economies, firms, public universities and their academic units? However I think that the case presented here suggests that the five trends identified as significant factors in the case study academic units’ exogenous environments: globalisation, developments in information communication technologies, fiscal challenges, increased accountability to stakeholders and the massification of student cohorts are trends that are likely to continue to pose challenges for Australian academic units in public universities and probably for many any other academic unit in universities around the globe. The only certainty for Australian academic units and probably for many others is that their exogenous environments will remain turbulent; changes will be difficult to predict and control. As the Heraclitus epigram states: ‘one cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs’ (Khan, 1979, p. 53). Academic units’ quest to adapt to and survive the challenges posed by their exogenous environments is an enduring battle, one probably without resolution, yet most of us became academics because we enjoy the quest; our goal is to enjoy the journey rather than to reach the destination.

Notes 1. Web 2.0 is a form of computer network architecture that enables users to modify and improve software applications and to create web content such as blogs, wikis and tags. 2. Cloud computing provides access to software applications through web browsers; software and data are stored on distant servers. 3. Table 10.1 excludes ‘Other Commonwealth Grants’ because funds under this category varied over these years making valid comparisons between years difficult. 4. The Bradley Review made other key recommendations for the reform of the Australian Higher Education Sector including improvements in student equity and access and implementation of an independent regulatory authority with responsibility for accrediting and re-accrediting higher education providers and quality assurance, see http://www.deewr.gov.au/ HigherEducation/Review/Documents/PDF/Higher%20Education%20Review_one%20 document_02.pdf for the complete list of recommendations. 5. The Australian federal government undertakes frequent structural rearrangements of its administrative departments; this adds a further degree of complexity and turbulence for Australian academic units to contend with.

Appendix A Details About Interviewees from Academic Units

All academic units – Gender

Male

Female

Total

Academics Administrators

52 9

18 16

70 25

All academic units – Academics’ age Under 30 31–40 41–50 51–65 Over 65

5 16 25 22 2

Total no. of academics

70

All academic units – Administrators’ age Under 30 31–40 41–50 51–65 Over 65

2 5 15 3 0

Total no. of administrators

25

All academic units – Academics’ appointment level Level A Level B Level C Level D Level E Dean

0 27 13 7 18 5

Total no. of academics

70

D. de Zilwa, Academic Units in a Complex, Changing World, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9237-3, 

171

172

A

Details About Interviewees from Academic Units

All academic units – Administrators’ appointment level HEW 3–5 HEW 6–8 HEW 9–10

16 6 3

Total no. of administrators

25

Appendix B Interview Questions – Academic Units

For Academics Research 1. What are your academic unit’s research strengths? 2. What are the major sources of your unit’s research funding? Have the unit’s sources of research funding changed over the last 5 years? Does your academic unit have research grants from the NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) or the ARC (Australian Research Council) or from other government agencies or departments? 3. Are you or any other academic in unit engaged in entrepreneurial research activities, commercially sponsored research or commercialisation of research outputs created by academics in the unit? 4. Is your research performance evaluated? Are there key performance indicators to measure how many grants you obtain, revenue generated from research and outputs – publications, patents, etc.? 5. How many research students (PhD and masters) does your unit supervise? 6. Approximately what percentage of your time do you spend on research, teaching and administration?

Teaching 1. What courses does your academic unit teach? 2. Approximately how many postgraduate and undergraduate EFSTU (Effective full-time students) are enrolled in the courses delivered by your academic unit? 3. Have the units’ courses, student numbers or student cohorts changed over the last 5 years? 4. Have class sizes or teaching methods altered over the last 5 years? Are classes larger? 5. Does your unit run as many tutorials or laboratory classes as they previously did? 173

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B

Interview Questions – Academic Units

6. Does your academic unit have fee-paying domestic undergraduate students? 7. Approximately how many international students are enrolled in your academic units’ courses? 8. What form of delivery does your academic unit use for international students: on-campus, online, offshore (which countries does your unit deliver in)? 9. Does the unit engage in entrepreneurial teaching activities – fee-paying continuous education programmes, tailored fee-paying postgraduate courses for commercial firms, delivered at workplaces or online?

Organisational Culture and Values 1. What is it like to work in this academic unit? Is it a collegial, bureaucratic, competitive, performance-oriented or entrepreneurial place? 2. What values does the head of the academic unit encourage and reward? What sorts of rewards do academics receive? 3. Do you think that the values and goals of the unit, what it is like to work here as an academic has changed over the last 5 years? 4. Is there synergy or agreement between academics’ values and goals and those of the head of the unit and the university or is there tension between them? 5. What is the relationship between academics and administrators in the unit like? 6. How do you think your academic unit is viewed by staff from other academic units in your university and by university executives?

Funding and Resource Management 1. Do you know what the financial position of your academic unit is? 2. Has your unit experienced a reduction in public funding over the last 5 years? 3. If your unit has experienced a reduction in public funding over the last 5 years, what consequences has this had for your unit? 4. Are staff in your unit engaged in any entrepreneurial activities to generate independent (non-government) revenue, what sort of activities, how much revenue do they generate, how did the unit become involved in these activities? 5. Are you involved in decisions about funding and resource management, which student cohorts the unit tries to attract, which research projects are funded, staff appointments? 6. What percentage of revenue generated by the academic unit from teaching and research is taken by the university’s central administration?

Marketing and Communications 1. Does your academic unit undertake marketing activities? If so what are they? 2. Does your academic unit have designated marketing staff? 3. Do you know how much revenue your unit spends on marketing?

B

Interview Questions – Academic Units

175

Strategic Planning 1. Does your academic unit undertake any strategic planning activities? What are they? Do you participate in these activities or are they conducted by the unit management? Who monitors and evaluates the implementation of the strategic plan? 2. Does your academic unit undertake any form of external environmental scanning, identifying possible markets and monitoring activities of competitors in key markets, identifying risks in current markets? 3. Do you know what other academic units in your discipline are doing, courses taught, type of student cohorts, research activities, research partnerships, etc.?

Quality Assurance 1. Does your academic unit have a quality assurance system? What is it? Was it developed by staff in the unit or is it an institutional initiative? 2. Does anyone monitor the quality of your teaching and research work? How is the quality of your research and teaching monitored and evaluated?

Management and Decision Making 1. How would you describe the management and leadership style used in your academic unit? 2. Is it collegial, participative and consultative or is it a more top-down, directive style? 3. Is the academic unit managed differently now compared to how it was managed previously? 4. What form of decision making is used in the unit? Are decisions made by the Dean and/or Head of School/Department or by committees? Are academics involved in decision-making processes relating to courses taught, research priorities, hiring new staff, etc? 5. How would you describe the relationship between the managers of the academic unit and academics and administrators in the unit? Has this changed over the last 5 years?

Institutional Governance 1. Is your academic unit involved in institutional governance, such as strategic planning, market positioning and research priorities? 2. How would you describe the relationship between your academic unit and university executives?

176

B

Interview Questions – Academic Units

3. Do they share values and goals? Has the nature of the relationship between university executives and your academic unit changed over the last 5 years? 4. How would you describe the units’ relationship with institutional (central) administrators? 5. Do central administrators understand what it is like to work in your unit today?

For Administrators 1. What is your role? 2. Has your role changed over the last few years? How has it changed? Why do you think it has changed? 3. How many administrators work in your academic unit? Are there more or fewer administrators working in the unit than there were 5 years ago? 4. What changes have occurred in the unit over the last 5 years? Why do you think these changes have occurred?

Organisational Culture and Values 1. What is it like to work in this academic unit? 2. Do you think that workloads have increased over the last few years or are they the same? 3. Do you think that the work of academics in unit has changed over the last few years, in what way and why? 4. What is the relationship between academics and administrators in the unit like?

Funding and Resource Management 1. Do you know what the financial position of your academic unit is? 2. Has your unit experienced a reduction in public funding over the last 5 years? 3. If your unit has experienced a reduction in public funding, what consequences has this had for your unit? 4. Are staff in your unit engaged in any entrepreneurial activities to generate independent (non-government) revenue, what sort of activities, how much revenue do they generate, how did the unit become involved in these activities? 5. Are you involved in decisions about funding and resource management, which student cohorts the unit tries to attract, which research projects are funded, staff appointments? 6. What percentage of revenue generated by the academic unit from teaching and research is taken by the university’s central administration?

B

Interview Questions – Academic Units

177

Marketing and Communications 1. Does your academic unit undertake marketing activities? If so what are they? 2. Does your academic unit have designated marketing staff? 3. Do you know how much revenue your unit spends on marketing?

Strategic Planning 1. Does your academic unit undertake any strategic planning activities? What are they? 2. Do you participate in these activities or they conducted by the unit management? Who monitors and evaluates the implementation of the strategic plan? 3. Does your academic unit undertake any form of external environmental scanning, identifying possible markets and monitoring activities of competitors in key markets, identifying risks in current markets? 4. Do you know what other academic units in your discipline are doing: courses, taught, type of student cohorts, research activities, research partnerships, etc?

Quality Assurance 1. Does your academic unit have a quality assurance system? What is it? Was it developed by staff in the unit or is it an institutional initiative? 2. Is your work subject to any form of quality review process?

Management and Decision Making 1. How would you describe the management and leadership style used in your academic unit? 2. Is it collegial, participative and consultative, or is it a more top-down, directive style? 3. Has the way your academic unit is managed changed over the last 5 years? 4. What form of decision making is used in the unit? 5. Are decisions made by the dean and or head of school/department or by committees? 6. Are administrators involved in decision-making processes over courses taught, research priorities, hiring new staff, etc? 7. How would you describe the relationship between the managers of the academic unit and academics and administrators in the unit? Has this changed over the last 5 years?

178

B

Interview Questions – Academic Units

Institutional Governance 1. Is your academic unit involved in institutional governance, such as strategic planning, market positioning and research priorities? 2. How would you describe the relationship between your academic unit and university executives? Do they share values and goals? 3. Has the nature of the relationship between university executives and your academic unit changed over the last 5 years? 4. How would you describe the units’ relationship with institutional (central) administrators? 5. Do central administrators understand what it is like to work in your unit today?

Appendix C Interview Questions for University Executives

1. What are your university’s strengths? What are its greatest challenges? 2. Which universities are your main rivals in terms of teaching and research, other Australian universities or international universities? 3. How does your university differentiate itself from its main competitors in student, research funding and staff markets? 4. What is your university’s financial position? Does your university currently receive less public funding than it did 5 years ago? How has your university responded to this reduction in public funding? 5. Is your university currently undertaking entrepreneurial activities such as commercialising research outputs, knowledge transfer, selling patents and technology, teaching international or domestic fee-paying students, undertaking commercial ventures to generate more independent (non-government revenue)? 6. Does your university intend to undertake such entrepreneurial initiatives in the future? 7. Which academic units in your university have adjusted to environmental changes such as reduced public funding, increasing operating costs and increasing global competition in student and research funding markets better than others? Why do you think this is the case? 8. What principles or policies are used to determine how resources are allocated between academic units within the institution, e.g. student load, research funding, infrastructure funding, funding for staff, etc. 9. What is the greatest challenge that you encounter in your leadership role? Do environmental changes such as declining public funding, increasing staff costs and more aggressive competition for international universities make your role more difficult, how? 10. How do you encourage the leaders of academic units, deans and heads of schools, departments to motivate staff to increase units’ flexibility, entrepreneurial activities, innovativeness and competitiveness? 11. What role do the academic units in your university have in institutional governance, e.g. in relation to strategic planning, major decisions, opening new campuses, etc?

179

180

C

Interview Questions for University Executives

12. Do you think that staff in academic units in your university share the same goals and values as the university’s executive managers? What is the relationship between the two parties like? 13. What do you see as the key future challenges for your university and its academic units?

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Author Index

A Agocs, C., 18, 30 Altbach, P., 6, 153, 162–163 Amaral, A., 8 B Becher, T., 20, 132, 134 Bourdieu, P., 14, 56, 114 C Cameron, K., 18, 30, 31–32, 107, 121 Castells, M., 5–6, 9–10, 64, 143, 152 Coates, H., 162–164 Considine, M., 6, 21–22, 132 D DEEWR, 115, 117, 120, 131, 153, 155–162, 166 DETYA, 7, 11, 13, 131, 155, 162 De Zilwa, D. K., 113, 118, 133–134, 136, 142 Dill, D., 8–9 Di Maggio, P., 30, 71, 106, 109, 121 E Etzkowitz, H., 143, 152 F Fischer, F., 19 Fleming, P., 30, 108 Foucault, M., 108 G Geiger, R., 118 Giddens, A., 5, 107, 122–124 Gornitzka, A., 30 Granovetter, M., 134

H Haeckel, S., 125, 127, 129 Harman, G., 13, 113 I Introna, L., 125 J Jermier, J., 30 Jongbloed, B., 8–9 K Ketchen, D., 37 Knight, P., 6, 65, 139 L Lewin, A., 30 Lewin, R., 129 Luhmann, N., 129, 148 M Maassen, P., 30 Marginson, S., 5–6, 11, 15, 21–22, 27, 117–118, 132, 162, 167–168 McMillan, E., 125–127, 129, 132 Meek, V. L., 13–14 Meyer, J., 106, 109 Miles, R., 25–26, 30–37, 51, 53, 55, 61, 63, 65, 71–72, 75, 77, 80–81, 87, 91, 93, 112, 114–116, 121, 139 Miller, J., 107, 125–126 Mitleton-Kelly, 125, 127–129 Musselin, C., 29–30 N Neave, G., 13 North, D., 30

195

196 O OECD, 156, 162, 164 Oliver, C., 107, 109, 116 P Page, S., 107, 125–126 Pfeffer, J., 18, 107, 109–110, 121 Powell, W., 30, 71, 106, 109, 121 R Regine, B., 129 Rhoades, G., 5, 15, 30, 118, 143 Rowan, B., 106, 109 S Salanick, G., 107, 109–110, 121 Schumpeter, J., 9, 145 Scott, W., 11, 107, 109, 143 Shattock, M., 118, 144 SJTU (Shanghai-Jiantong University Institute of Higher Education), 167–168 Slaughter, S., 12–13, 30, 118, 143 Snow, C., 31–37, 71–72, 77, 80, 87, 91, 93, 112, 114–116, 139

Author Index Spicer, A., 30, 108 Sporn, B., 30 Staber, U., 122–124 Stacey, R., 107, 125, 127, 129, 132 Sydow, J., 122–123 T Teichler, U., 4, 11–12 Teixeira, P., 8 Tierney, W., 135 Tolbert, P., 109 Trowler, P., 20, 132, 134, 139 Trow, M., 10–12 V Van der Veen, M., 9, 145 Van der Wende, M., 5, 10, 167–168 W Williams, G., 14, 168, 188 Y Yin, R., 20, 23

Subject Index

A Academics’ affiliation with academic unit, 134–135 Academics (faculty), 3, 126, 148, 152, 165 Accountability, 3, 12–15, 29, 64, 115, 131, 151, 159–161, 169 Adaptation – definition, 18 Adaptive capacity, 54, 117–126, 128–132, 134–137, 139–141, 146 Administrative staff (professional staff), 22–23, 48, 63, 66, 82, 118, 126–127, 136, 142 Analysers, 31, 33, 35–37, 42, 69–88, 107, 110–112, 114, 116–117, 120, 122, 124, 130, 133, 141, 143 Autopoiesis, 128–129, 148 B Biology/Biological Sciences/Life Sciences, 20, 41–42, 52–54, 73–79, 89–92, 96–101, 106, 113, 115 Biotechnology, 20, 54, 73, 75–77, 97–99, 153 Bradley Review, 156–157, 160, 163 Budgets, 13, 23–26, 47, 50, 53–54, 65, 69, 72, 76, 82, 87, 89–92, 94, 97–98, 116, 126–128, 136–137, 143, 146, 155–161 Business units, 21, 41 C Case studies, 3–4, 9, 17–26, 29–33, 37, 41–57, 59–101, 105–117, 120, 123–124, 128, 130, 133–134, 138–139, 143–144, 147, 151, 154, 159–160, 162, 166, 169 Chancellery, 47, 78, 81, 92 Change, 7, 9–10, 13–15, 18–19, 21–27, 29–31, 34, 36–37, 41–42, 44–45, 51, 54, 56, 59, 62, 64, 66–67, 72, 75–76, 79–80, 83–84, 87, 89, 91, 93, 97, 105–117,

120–129, 136–140, 143–144, 146–147, 152, 156, 165–169 Civil engineering units/engineering units, 21, 84, 86 Commercialisation of research/industry partnerships, 62, 79, 96 Compacts (mission based), 161 Competitive advantages, 30, 77, 86, 108, 130, 141, 144, 147, 164 Complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory, 124–129, 132 Conceptual reflections, 105–149 Culture and values, 24, 29, 32, 129, 133–134, 141–142, 144–145 D Deans, 23, 42–49, 51–52, 64–67, 83, 89, 92, 101, 112–115, 120, 132, 138 Defenders, 31, 33–37, 41–57, 59, 71–72, 84, 106, 110, 114, 116, 124, 133, 142–144 Deputy vice chancellors, 27, 93–94 Disequilibrium, 107–108, 125–126, 128–132 Distributed leadership, 133, 139–140 Dynamic environments, 142 E Edge of chaos, 125–126, 129–130 Elite universities, 68 Emergence, 5–6, 31, 126 Empirical data, see Case studies Endogenous environments, 105–106 Endowments, 118, 155 Entrepreneurialism, 9, 45, 56–57, 61–62, 73, 83, 91–92, 95–96, 101, 107, 109–114, 117, 126, 128–132, 137–138, 144–146 Equilibrium, 14, 18, 34, 107–108, 121, 125–126, 128–132

197

198 Excellence in Research Australia (ERA), 131, 158, 161 Executive managers, 19–20, 23, 27, 44–45, 49, 56 Exogenous environments, 3–15, 17, 22–27, 29–32, 41–42, 105–110, 117, 119–122, 166, 169 F Faculty, see Academics (faculty) Fiscal challenges, 154–159, 169 Fiscal resources/funding, 12, 22, 26, 32, 52, 62, 72–73, 88, 96, 110, 117–120, 122, 154–159, 165 Fiscal self-reliance, 120–121, 133, 144–148, 161 Flexibility, 9–10, 35–36, 63, 66–67, 81, 88, 122, 124, 126, 128–133, 141–145 G Global financial crisis, 31, 118–119, 122, 124, 159, 169 Globalisation, 3–6, 14–15, 31, 42, 134, 137–138, 151, 165–169 Governance, 5, 12–14, 21, 131, 157 Group of eight universities, 48, 168 H Heads of department/schools/academic units, 23, 26, 54–55, 62, 64, 69–72, 75, 89–92, 101, 107, 112–115, 120–121, 126, 131, 138–139, 145, 157 I Independent revenue (non-government funding), 91, 135, 147 Inertia, 9, 30, 36, 91, 93, 95, 101, 111, 120, 126, 129–130, 138, 142 Information communication technology, 3, 9–12, 14, 63–64, 135, 137, 151–154, 156, 169 Innovation, 5, 10, 34–36, 61, 122–123, 126, 128–133, 141–144, 148–149, 156–157, 160 Institutional theory, 30, 106, 109–111, 116, 121 International students, 6, 15, 42, 53, 55, 61, 66, 68, 72, 77, 80, 84, 87, 95, 99, 105, 111, 124, 142, 147, 160, 162, 166–168 K Key performance indicators, 13, 64, 81, 101, 113–115, 155

Subject Index L Law faculties/schools, 23, 41–52, 56, 59, 64–68, 138, 143, 147 Leadership, 24, 32, 55, 65, 74, 93, 100, 106, 113, 126, 133, 136, 138–140 M Management, 8, 10, 12–15, 19, 21, 24, 31–32, 36–37, 43–45, 48, 50, 53, 55, 63–64, 67, 70, 73–75, 79–80, 82–84, 91–92, 94, 99–100, 106–107, 111–117, 120, 125–128, 130–133, 135–136, 139–140, 144–145, 147–148, 155, 161, 163, 166 Managerialism, 131–132, 154–155 Marketisation, 3, 6–9, 14–15, 30, 44–45, 57, 61, 73, 83, 91–92, 95–96, 101, 107, 109–114, 117, 130, 137–138, 140–141, 144, 151, 154, 161, 165 Markets (student, staff and research funding), 8–10, 22, 30, 44, 47–48, 51, 53–54, 60, 64, 72, 76, 79–80, 83–84, 86, 88, 107, 111, 122, 128, 130, 136, 140, 142, 147, 154, 165–166 Massification of student cohorts, 3, 11–12, 14, 43, 113, 135, 151, 153, 162–164, 169 Mimetic isomorphism, 35, 57, 71, 77, 109–110, 116–117, 120, 126, 130 Modes of adaptation, 17, 31, 33, 36, 56, 71, 109, 130, 133, 139 N Neo-institutional theory, 110, 116, 121 Network enterprises, 64, 110, 143 Networks/networking, 5–6, 9–11, 15, 21, 25, 32, 42, 46, 50, 52, 59, 61–62, 64, 66–68, 79, 85–87, 107, 110–111, 123–124, 127–129, 132–134, 136, 141, 143, 145, 154, 158, 165, 169 New public management, 13, 44, 91–92, 107, 111–112, 114, 135 Non-linear feedback loops, 126–127 O Offshore operations, 166 Online learning, 10, 44, 148, 152, 154 P Path dependency, 9, 30, 56–57, 93, 111, 116–117, 120, 124, 129, 138 Practical implications, 121–149 Private universities, 50–51, 118 Processes of adaptation, 17–18, 24, 32–33, 109–111, 120 Professional associations, 3, 12–15, 29, 105–106, 127–128, 151

Subject Index Prospectors, 31, 33–37, 42, 44, 49, 52, 56, 59–68, 71–72, 75, 77, 79–81, 84, 87, 106–108, 110–112, 114, 116–117, 120, 122, 124, 132–133, 138, 141–144, 154 Public funding, 3, 6–9, 12–13, 22, 30, 47, 49, 51–54, 59–60, 65, 69, 72–74, 78–79, 83, 89–91, 94, 96–97, 99, 105–106, 110–112, 115–116, 118, 130, 135, 151, 153–155, 157, 159, 161 Q Quality assurance, 8, 12–14, 24, 32, 92, 135, 158, 161, 169, 175, 177 R Ranking of universities, 167–168 Rectors, see Executive managers Research methods, 14, 17–19, 25–26, 29, 105 nodes, 143, 147, 153 Resistance –definition, 18 Resource dependency, 112, 117–120 Resource dependency theory (RDT), 30, 107, 109–111, 121 Risk taking, 9, 71, 87, 126, 128–133, 141–145 S Self-organising teams, 126, 132 Social science units, 143 Spatio-temporal orientation of academic units, 136–137 Stakeholders, 3, 12–16, 29, 67, 86, 97, 101, 105–107, 122, 124–125, 127–128, 151, 159–161, 168–169 Strategic planning, 13, 24, 32, 55, 62–64, 66–67, 70–71, 75, 91–92, 114–117, 128, 140 Strategic positioning, 50, 114, 126–128, 140 Students administration, 10, 15 domestic, 7, 61, 68, 128, 148, 154, 158, 161 EFSTU (Effective Fulltime Students), 43, 46–47, 53, 69, 73–74, 78–79, 86, 89–90, 94, 97 enrolments, 6, 69, 73, 76, 79, 82–84, 166

199 global, 8, 154, 166 increased accountability to stakeholders, 12–15 international, 6, 15, 42, 53, 55, 61, 66, 68, 72, 77, 80, 84, 87, 95, 99, 105, 111, 124, 142, 147, 160, 162, 166–168 markets, 10, 44, 47–48, 51, 54, 60, 72, 79–80, 83–84, 86, 107, 111, 142, 147, 154, 165–166 massification of student cohorts, 3, 11–12, 14, 43, 113, 135, 151, 153, 162–164, 169 mature-age, 46, 50, 162 overseas, 5–8, 11, 61 postgraduate, 46, 53, 55, 69, 72, 78–79, 148 potential, 55, 70, 77, 86, 97, 101, 168 undergraduate, 50, 54, 61, 65–66, 70, 79–80, 86–87, 93–94, 97, 124, 140, 154 T Teaching, 6–14, 22, 24, 29–30, 42–44, 46, 48–53, 56–57, 59–61, 65, 67, 69–76, 78–81, 83, 86–88, 90–91, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 105–106, 110–111, 115–117, 119, 122, 124, 126, 128–135, 139, 142–144, 146, 148, 152–157, 159, 161–165 Transformation, 4, 31, 65, 96, 117, 124, 126, 134, 139, 143 Trust, 14, 65, 74, 94, 132, 135–136, 141, 149 Turbulence, 3, 9, 31, 34, 127, 151, 169 U University profiles, 53, 100 University type, 25, 27 V Values, 14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 29, 32, 35, 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 62, 64, 70, 79–80, 83, 92, 95, 106, 108–109, 111–115, 118–119, 123, 129, 133–135, 137–138, 141–142, 144–145, 147, 157, 165, 167 Vice chancellors, 13, 23, 27, 51, 55, 60–62, 70, 76, 79, 89, 93–94, 100–101, 120