The Management of Academic Culture Revisited: Integrating Universities in an Entrepreneurial Age

Abstract

Some 30 years ago I published a paper, 'The Management of Academic Culture: Notes on the Management of Meaning and Social Integration' (Dill, 1982a), which has been frequently cited in the subsequent higher education literature addressing the concept of 'organizational culture'. Like other early contributions to the general literature on organizational culture, my paper was inspired in part by growing knowledge at that time about management processes in Japanese industries, which placed an emphasis on increasing worker interdependence and on developing a special organizational identity or culture as a means of enhancing worker loyalty and productivity. My paper also reflected a distinctive line of research on 'academic culture' then emerging within the field of higher education through the contributions primarily of Burton Clark (1970, 1972, 1983) and Tony Becher (1981, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1994) as well as my personal experiences with the symbols and ceremonies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the US's oldest public university. In this chapter I would like to revisit the concept of academic culture as I defined it, further clarifying what I meant by this term as well as relating the concept to more recent theory, research and the contemporary challenges of universities.