Abstract
Abstract This paper parallels the changes experienced by universities and science at the beginning of the new century in order to explore one relevant source of resilience and change inside the universities’ institutional fabric, which is its persistent dependence on the signs and norms produced by science as a nested institution. In no small degree, science is organized according to its norms and values. Notwithstanding, it de facto exists inside the institutional environment created by the university. As such, one could argue that it is a nested institution. Our argument holds that the interplay between the institutional norms coming from the university and science gives rise to one of the more relevant sources of resilience of universities. The paper explores the soundness of these assumptions on primary data collected in a research focusing on the responses of lower-level academic unit leaders in two universities: the University of Tampere, Finland, and the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In each case, we explore the local responses to the changes engendered by autonomy as a proxy of the substantial change in the university's environment, to map how the small academic units respond to a quickly changing external environment.
Highlights
The resilient universityIt is in the last sense that the concept of resilience enters into the higher education literature
This paper parallels the changes experienced by universities and science at the beginning of the new century in order to explore one relevant source of both resilience and change inside the universities’ institutional fabric, which is its persistent dependence on the signs and norms produced by science as a nested institution
We are aware of the need of collecting more evidences from a larger set of middle level academic leaders and the need of exploring the effects of the bottom-up flow of communication, in order to access to what degree the university’s high administration is aware of the university dependence on its academics reputation within the global science networks to branding the name of the university
Summary
It is in the last sense that the concept of resilience enters into the higher education literature. In this approach, resilience links with the idea of an entrepreneurial university, “a university that actively seeks to work out a substantial shift in its organizational character to arrive at a more promising posture for the future” Across their long history, universities have experienced many deep crises, some of them challenging the very existence of their institutional core (Perkin, 2007). Universities have experienced many deep crises, some of them challenging the very existence of their institutional core (Perkin, 2007) In all these events, the university bounced back renovated, by changing its structure, adding new roles, and forging new links with different stakeholders in the society. We argue that the ability to adapt to a changing environment while preserving its core traits is related to the particular pattern by which rules from two institutional logics are interweaved in the university’s internal environment: the institutional logic of the university as organization and the institutional logic from science
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