'Strategic Bureaucracy: The Convergence of Bureaucratic and Strategic Management Logics in the Organizational Restructuring of Universities' by Peter Woelert and Bjørn Stensaker in (2024) Minerva comments
Over recent decades, the organizational dimensions of universities have taken a center stage in analyses of higher education policy reform and governance change (e.g., Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2015; Fumasoli and Stensaker 2013; Seeber et al. 2015). Research from different parts of the world has documented a changing university where key organizational trends include greater centralization and formalization, more external and internal reporting and accountability pressures, and the growth of an increasingly professionalized and managerial administrative apparatus within universities (e.g., Christensen 2011; Croucher and Woelert 2022; Ramirez and Christensen 2013).
Across the literature examining the changing organizational governance of universities, one can identify two related but differently accentuated narratives concerning the observed changes. The first narrative is broadly associated with analyses of public sector reform along New Public Management (NPM) lines and the associated policy and governance changes (Ferlie et al. 1996). Key elements in this narrative are, first, the state’s off-loading of responsibilities for organizational governance to universities and increases in universities’ institutional autonomy in operational matters, and second, increases in universities’ accountability to government authorities and other key stakeholders setting the broader policy goals and objectives (e.g., Capano 2011; Christensen 2011; Enders, de Boer, and Weyer 2013). This shift towards increased institutional autonomy and accountability entails new and expanded administrative responsibilities and demands that, so the narrative goes, compel universities to increasingly acquire the characteristics of formalized, centralized, and hierarchical organizations (Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2015; Musselin 2006). In view of these apparent changes, universities thus can be said to have undergone an organizational process of bureaucratization.
The second narrative is related to the first in that it also sees the environment as the core driver of change within universities. However, in contrast to linking organizational change in the university directly to public sector reform and ‘steering at a distance’, this narrative foregrounds the emergence of dynamic forms of institutional competition including those associated with markets or quasi-markets (see Jungblut and Vukasovic 2018) as a key driver of change. Intensifying institutional competition for domestic and international students and university ranking positions (Brankovic 2018; Espeland and Sauder 2007), the narrative then goes, has made it imperative for universities to become comprehensively managed organizations capable of strategic decision-making and swift internal restructuring to effectively identify and realize opportunities offered by their environment (see, e.g., Krücken and Meier 2006; Thoenig and Paradeise 2016). In short, according to this narrative, an increasingly competitive and uncertain environment has driven universities to transform into strategically managed organizations.
Despite the ongoing centrality of these two narratives to accounts of university reform and change, the question of how specifically the two associated organizational logics – bureaucratic and strategic – interrelate in the restructuring of universities has received little attention. This is in parts because the strategic organizational logic, on a more general level, has been frequently yet simplistically painted as implying a radical departure from bureaucratic forms and processes (see on this point, e.g., Hoggett 2007; Wright, Sturdy and Wylie 2012). Applied to the domain of universities, such ‘post-bureaucratic’ notion of strategic management thus provides little scope to account for any common ground or convergence between the two logics in processes of organizational restructuring and change.
This is an issue also since more recent empirical studies from around the world appear to present a mixed picture as to how universities are changing as organizations (see, e.g., Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2017; Ramirez and Christensen 2013; Seeber et al. 2015). There is, for example, a range of evidence suggesting that universities have become more tightly integrated and managed as organizations (Bleiklie, Enders, and Lepori 2015, Seeber et al. 2015). Yet there are also signs of ongoing fragmentation in university organization due to the successive addition of new administrative layers that ultimately appear to have expanded the bureaucratic dimensions of university life (Maassen and Stensaker 2019, Ramirez and Christensen 2013; Woelert 2023).
In this conceptual paper, we argue that bureaucratic and strategic logics, despite their different emphases and points of departure, converge and combine with respect to key dimensions of universities’ internal governance and organizing, ultimately giving rise to a hybrid form of organizational governance we refer to as ‘strategic bureaucracy’. We suggest that the manifestation of strategic bureaucracy within universities is inter alia characterized by a strong focus on strategic leadership and the associated management techniques alongside intensification of organizational features and dimensions traditionally associated with bureaucratic governance such as formalization and hierarchical authority.
The key research questions guiding our discussion are: 1. What are the key characteristics of bureaucratic and strategic logics in a university setting? 2. How are the bureaucratic and strategic organizational logics articulating within universities? 3. What are some of the key organizational implications arising from this articulation between both logics?
Our use of the notion of organizational logic throughout this paper is motivated by the ambition to conceptualize (a) distinctive forms or types of collective rationality that frame, legitimize, and guide organizational activities; and (b) the relationships between these forms. There are affinities to the institutional logics conception that has become widely popular in the social sciences over recent decades, and which assumes that typically there are several such forms, or logics, to be found and interacting within organizations, and which further posits that understanding of the articulation of such different forms is key to understanding organizational change also (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). In contrast to the institutional logics perspective and its ambition to integrate macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analysis (see Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012), our analyses remain, however, more modestly focused on the organizational level and, in particular, do not attempt to integrate individual or micro-level dimensions or foundations.
'Turning universities into data-driven organisations: seven dimensions of change' by Janja Komljenovic, Sam Sellar and Kean Birch in (2024) Higher Education comments
Universities are striving to become data-driven organisations, benefitting from data collection, analysis, and various data products, such as business intelligence, learning analytics, personalised recommendations, behavioural nudging, and automation. However, datafication of universities is not an easy process. We empirically explore the struggles and challenges of UK universities in making digital and personal data useful and valuable. We structure our analysis along seven dimensions: the aspirational dimension explores university datafication aims and the challenges of achieving them; the technological dimension explores struggles with digital infrastructure supporting datafication and data quality; the legal dimension includes data privacy, security, vendor management, and new legal complexities that datafication brings; the commercial dimension tackles proprietary data products developed using university data and relations between universities and EdTech companies; the organisational dimension discusses data governance and institutional management relevant to datafication; the ideological dimension explores ideas about data value and the paradoxes that emerge between these ideas and university practices; and the existential dimension considers how datafication changes the core functioning of universities as social institutions.
Universities recognise the potential value of their digital data and strive to become data-driven organisations that collect, analyse, structure, manage, and use data and data products in their strategic and operational activities. As one of the participants in the focus groups we held during our research on the digitalisation of higher education (HE) in the UK noted: I think every university knows that the data they hold is the wealth of the institution, whether that’s data about how people are behaving or what they’ve actually produced. But that is, at the end of the day, that is the most valuable thing you have. (G6P3).
This imaginary of the value of digital data is supported and encouraged by policymakers and sectorial agencies (Gulson et al., 2022). Jisc, a digital technology and data agency supporting HE in the UK, has recently launched the Data Maturity Framework, which universities can use to assess their ‘data capability’ and guide strategic change. The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) led the Data Futures Project, which aimed at sector-level data collection and analysis to modernise HE data collection and make it more efficient. These initiatives are further driving the marketisation of HE in the UK (Williamson, 2018) and supporting commercial actors to economically benefit from university data (Komljenovic, 2020), including the recent emergence of educational data brokers (Arantes, 2023).
Datafication refers to the ‘quantification of human life through digital information, very often for economic value’ (Mejias & Couldry, 2019, p.1), which involves representing social and natural worlds in machine readable digital formats (Williamson et al., 2020) with significant social consequences. In education, datafication consists of collecting and processing data at all levels, from individual to institutional, national and beyond, impacting education stakeholders’ discursive and material practices (Jarke & Breiter, 2019).
We specifically focus on digital data collected by or registered in digital platforms and digital infrastructure. In many industries, data are valuable when aggregated into big data, allowing more sophisticated analyses, such as group analysis and comparison of individuals for targeted advertising (Birch et al., 2021; Pistor, 2020). In HE, policymakers and educational leaders are attempting to improve quality, efficiency, and impact via datafication at the sectoral and institutional levels (Eynon, 2013). Imaginaries of precision education promise to deliver personalisation akin to other sectors, such as medicine and agriculture (Kuch et al., 2020).
This omnipresent and techno-deterministic belief in the value of data acts as a mythical belief in magic in that it evokes the ideas of seamless functionality with impressive end experience without attention to how it works or the means with which this was achieved, including struggles, efforts, risks, and costs (Elish & boyd, 2018). However, a paradox emerges as this belief in the value of data is not realised in HE, at least not to the extent that stakeholders would wish; yet it continues to drive investment, business models, actions, and strategies (Komljenovic et al., 2024, 2024b). Currently, data are both valuable and not valuable. Various actors, including EdTech companies and universities, experiment and look for ways to realise economic and social value from data.
Universities are diverse along many dimensions, including size and resources, which are particularly important for datafication. These differences mean they organise data processes differently. Having thousands of students and staff, universities have to manage petabytes of data, which is a complex task technologically, financially, and legally. The costs of data storage alone have substantially increased, on top of other new costs related to establishing and maintaining the digital ecosystems required for datafication. Universities also deal with legacy software, problems integrating various systems and data flows, ensuring data security, facing cyberattacks, and more. Moreover, diverse actors formally and informally scrutinise universities concerning their data and digital practices (Komljenovic et al., 2024, 2024b).
In this article, we focus on the UK as an illustrative case due to the high level of digitalisation and datafication of HE (Williamson, 2019). We aim to recognise UK universities’ needs and aims to become data-driven organisations and analyse the challenges they face as they pursue the datafication journey. We first examine datafication in HE and then elaborate on our methodological approach. We then turn to our analysis, structured around seven interrelated dimensions of change, followed by a brief conclusion calling for democratic and relational datafication in HE.
