Prof. Jürgen Enders

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Prof. Enders' presentation will be based on a joint paper with Ivar Bleiklie (Bergen) and Benedetto Lepori (Lugano). The paper contributes to the scholarly debate on transformation of organizational control in knowledge-intensive professional organizations by investigating public universities and changes in the institutional and resource environment related to New Public Management (NPM) policies.

The authors focus on the extent and means through which organizational leadership achieves control in universities. Their key findings are:

1. that there is no global solution to the tension between organizational control and autonomy, and that local orders emerge characterized by different levels of centralization and different combination of control instruments;
2. that the environment influences organizational control through a range of mechanisms, including varying degrees of institutional pressures towards a corporate organizational model, direct regulatory intervention from the State and the structure of the resource space;
3. that these mechanisms are associated with how public policies are instrumented and that the impact of NPM policies might generate both pressures for tighter control and new forms of loose couplings; and
4. that external relationships with the State and other key stakeholders amplify or curtail intra-organizational leadership power depending on the national policy environment and the distribution of external relationships across organizational layers.

The authors propose the term penetrated hierarchies to label this coupling of intra-organizational control with the multiple external relationships of organizational members.

Jürgen Enders is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bath. His academic interest is focused on the study of institutional change in the field of universities, and their role in society and economy. He has written and (co)edited 14 books, and published more than 100 articles. Jürgen is member of the Academia Europaea and of the German Academe of Science and Engineering, and Honorary Fellow of the Society for Research in Higher Education. He is member of the Advisory Committee for Research and Knowledge Exchange of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, of the German Advisory Council for Education, and of the R&D committee of the European Federation for Management Development.