Innovation bureaucracy in the higher education management

Abstract

In recent decades, the Russian education system has been constantly reformed. Its current state and problems cannot be understood without identifying the subject initiating and carrying out these permanent changes. Such a subject is an innovative bureaucracy - a specific type of bureaucracy that serves innovative processes and creates social and organizational routines from them. This bureaucracy managed to make a conveyor of innovations, which often moves in a circle - without beginning or end. The reforms have become pendulum and repeat at certain intervals. The article considers numerous consequences and excesses of the innovative bureaucracy’s dominance in the higher education management, which are determined by this bureaucracy success in replacing the real, socially significant goals of the higher education system with indicators that can be quickly achieved and reported as if for the public good. The harsh administrative pressure of the innovative bureaucracy leads to the constant updating and combination of standards (although not all their content can be standardized), to an increase in reporting (including in electronic, online form) and in teaching load. The lack and ambivalence of goals and the non-stop projects of changes hinder the formation of institutional matrix to meet the contemporary challenges and determine destabilizing processes in the education system. The authors argue that an institutional approach to the higher education management can change the situation, since it focuses not on administrative orders and formal goals but on establishing norms and rules for the education system self-development. Thus, the efficiency of the education system should be evaluated by the society and the state and not by representatives of the innovative bureaucracy, who strive to preserve the innovation conveyor. The principles of post-industrial management should be applied in the higher education system, replacing the bureaucratic approach to the implementation of innovations.