The general theme of this year's CHER annual Conference will be Universities in transition: shifting institutional and organizational boundaries.
The following three presentations will be held by Tatiana Fumasoli, Åse Gornitzka, Jeroen Huisman, Peter Maassen, Christopher Morphew and Bjørn Stensaker:
Peter Maassen, Tatiana Fumasoli and Åse Gornitzka will present their paper The level of internal integration in European flagship universities. This paper investigates change and stability in higher education by critically assessing the assumptions underpinning recent reforms and by scrutinizing university transformation according to organizational principles and practices. Policy makers have presumed that more autonomous universities become more efficient, more strategic, more sustainable as well as better able to contribute to the coordination of the higher education system (Gornitzka and Maassen 2000). Additionally such reforms have been supported by the New Public Management ideology, which prescribes delegation and control at a distance from the state in order to produce a more efficient system.The paper questions these assumptions by presenting the findings the Flagship project and another Project (Horizon) funded by the Norwegian Research Council .
Tatiana and Jeroen Huisman will present their paper Organizational boundaries and institutional change in higher education. This paper discusses the literature on boundaries in organization and management studies, and compares it with the current state of the art regarding higher education institutions as organisations. Specifically, by focusing on the definition, characterization and functions of organizational boundaries, it aims to contribute to a more thorough understanding of the complex (and at times contradictory) institutional dynamics in the transformation of the university, of its role in society and its legitimacy.
Tatiana will also present a paper with Christopher Morphew and Bjørn Stensaker on Changing Missions in Public Higher Education? Analyzing Strategic Plans of Research-Intensive Universities. The paper aims at studying how a sample of US and European research-intensive universities has chosen to use their organizational autonomy to utilize these new higher education functions and roles. The data for the study come from an analysis of university strategic plans, both in a historical and comparative perspective.
Moreover, Tatiana will be a panel commentator in the panel on methodology of higher education research: International and global knowledge production in higher education research and the limitations and virtues of national explanatory frameworks. The aim of this panel is to address the challenge of balancing between nation-state and international/global accounts as exploratory frameworks. Comparative studies are a mixed blessing: "exiting but difficult, creative but problematic” (Livingston 2003: 3). Principles of good research design are difficult to achieve (Hantrais 2009) and conceptual and methodological problems are often posed in a complicated and intractable fashion (Smelser 2013). Whilst we thus assume that international comparative studies will never fully resolve the methodological pitfalls, comparative researchers should nevertheless make informed and explicit choices regarding their approach to comparison. The panel aim to bring together ICHE scholars and those who study international and global topics to discuss methodological issues that arise in classifying, describing, and measuring empirical phenomena and to reflect upon the ways in which international and global knowledge production in higher education contributes to existing power relations.