Background

This European Review Focus is based on a conference on the topic ‘Institutional Perspectives on Universities’ held at the Wenner-Gren Centre in Stockholm on 21−23 May 2025 with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundations. The conference was part of a series arranged by the Higher Education, Research and Culture in European Society (HERCulES) group within Academia Europaea. Since its formal establishment in 2004, the group has organized the following symposia addressing issues in relation to higher education and research:

To put the topic of the 2025 symposium into perspective, the following section offers the outline to the programme of the conference. This is followed by a section introducing the 13 articles presented in this journal issue, which are based on presentations at the conference.

The Proposal for the Conference

For decades, students of organizations have characterized universities as a specific kind of organization and have developed highly influential concepts addressing the limited rationality of organizational behaviour based on the study of the university, such as ‘loose coupling’, ‘organized anarchy’ or ‘garbage-can decision making’. The study of the university highlighted its fragmented nature within decentralized structures, the important role of the academic collegium in its self-governance, and weak capacities to govern decision-making processes from the top. This organizational form of the university seemed coherent with the unclear and ambiguous core technologies of the university in teaching and research and the consensus-based nature of scholarly communities within universities.

This perspective has gradually changed, reflecting an ongoing socio-political struggle about the institutional form of the university as a cultural institution, a public agency or a knowledge business. The uniqueness of the university as a special organization is not taken for granted anymore. Alternative models for universities as organizations appeared in policymaking, as well as in the study of higher education – such as the corporate model of universities, the entrepreneurial model, the service model or the stakeholder model. They all stress the university’s need to become a more proper or ‘complete’ organization, their growing responsibilities as organizations and their strategic capabilities for becoming masters of their own fate within a more competitive environment.

In view of these circumstances, it was time to devote a symposium to the challenges that universities as institutions are facing, currently and in the future. For such a symposium, four topics appeared particularly relevant: (1) the role of leadership; (2) the role of university administration; (3) the role of stakeholders; and (4) the role of risks.

The Role of Leadership

Traditionally, the term ‘management’ was not part of the vocabulary of universities except for pointing at ways of running business organizations alien to them. The university was governed and administered, but not managed. In recent decades, the development of universities has been characterized by the emergence and spread of leadership and management as an increasingly accepted, although contested, principle of organizing the modern university. One indication for this trend are changes in the role of top-level and mid-level academic leadership, which is expected to take over a more managerial role, as well as changes in the administrative pillar of universities, toward managerial roles and practices. Another indication concerns the rise of ‘management talk’ in universities, for example about line management, targets and accountability, full costing and strategic planning.

Most debates on the role of leadership and management tend to fall into two categories. On the one hand, it has been argued that the modern university can only benefit from importing ideas and practices from business based on the assumption that the latter are superior to the old academic leadership and public administration of universities. Proponents highlight the functional need for new roles in top leadership and middle management, for example for deans, in strategic management of the university and their faculty, in operational management, human resource management and performance evaluations, the academic management of teaching and research programmes, and external stakeholder relationship management. On the other hand, detrimental effects of the modern leadership and management of universities are also highlighted; on the commitment of academics to their organization; undermining a sense of collegiality, values of academic freedom and participation in decisions. Proponents highlight the gap between academic and managerial norms and values and the rise of leadership and management as a substitute for the fading faith in professionalism and professional self-regulation.

The Role of University Administration

The role of administration has long been of interest to organizational scholars. A basic question has been about the relationship between persons whose main task is administrative duties and those who are working on the key mission of the organization. The relationship between the former and the total workforce is usually mentioned as administrative overhead. In business companies, there have been efforts for some time to reduce this parameter by decentralization to lower units and by cost control, making them less apt to increase administration. Universities, so far, appear to be going in the other direction. The focus on leadership in general, and strong leaders in particular, has had the effect that university administration is expanding. The university leaders simply need assistance in their work. Another important explanation is the increasing governance through the market, which has been the case in many countries. This has caused a felt need in universities to add administrators in order to handle stakeholders. There is evidence that the addition of administrators is particularly happening at the top, while administrative support to faculty members has decreased. As in many modern organizations, to an increasing extent the lower-level employees have to handle many administrative tasks themselves.

The Role of Stakeholders

Over recent decades, ‘autonomy’ has become a buzzword in higher-education reform, and universities were thought to be empowered to determine their own course of action. Autonomy became an abiding policy issue in the relationships between the state, higher education and society, subject to many higher education reforms. The general perception in public sector policies, including higher education, was that state micro-management was not the most effective and efficient way to coordinate and steer the sector. The traditional steering model with strong state control and weak organizational control was intended to be replaced with a model in which the state was steering from a distance and organizations were empowered in several ways to determine their own destiny. In many countries, reforms were initiated to devolve authorities and decision-making capacities from the state to the universities. Europe’s modernization agenda for higher education is just one example of the policy belief that organizational autonomy is one of the key aspects of good governance systems. At the same time, the autonomy of universities is strongly circumscribed by their lasting financial dependence on the public purse and increasing state intervention. Other policy instruments such as contractual performance agreements, multiple accountability requirements and the inclusion of external stakeholders in university governance raised further doubts on universities’ autonomy working in the shadow of governmental rules and expectations.

The Role of Risks

The perceived failure of the institution is often seen as the cause of an institutional crisis. The institution is perceived to be not meeting functional expectations, and a lack of performance may also undermine longstanding trust into its normative basis. Developments around the modern university suggest that an institutional crisis may also be caused by institutional success. The university has in many ways been a success. Over recent decades, the university has grown enormously, attracting ever more students, extending its research into more and more areas and being asked to take on more and more roles in contributing to solving socio-economic problems of modern societies. The university has developed into a key institution of the ‘knowledge society’.

Yet, the university also seems to have become a victim of its success, facing work overload, increasing and sometimes unrealistic expectations, and a more utilitarian perspective on the role of the university in society. Educational expansion, austerity and ongoing political reform have all affected universities. Governments seem to have lost some faith in universities, no longer funding them for what they are but for what they can achieve under the condition that they align with governmental expectations and priorities. Parents and students increasingly ask if universities are still the right place to prepare graduates and give them the skills needed for employability and advanced careers. Higher education has also become a much broader church, including public and private institutions that would traditionally not have been considered a university proper. Last but not least, higher education is increasingly thought of as a directly economic factor (being itself profit-oriented or market-mediated); and, where it is perceived as being outside the market, it is expected to contribute directly to economic competitiveness.

Contributions to this Focus

Based on the above call, specialists were invited to present their views on the university as an institution. From these presentations, 13 articles are included in this issue. They cluster into four groups. First, there are four articles dealing with the relationship of universities and the state. A second group, consisting of two articles, elaborates on leadership recruitment and development. In the third group, there are four articles discussing universities’ administration and bureaucracy. Finally, in the fourth group, three articles focus on navigating risk in higher education and research.

Universities and the State

First, Francisco Ramirez points at a recent development under the Trump administrations, where American universities are increasingly threatened with cuts in government funding unless they eradicate diversity promoting programmes. To contextualize this targeting by the state, he reflects on two major organizational transformations in higher education in America: the rise and diffusion of university fundraising development offices and the emergence and growth of university diversity offices. The former was part of a long-term multiple stakeholder strategy that would make universities see themselves as less dependent on government. The latter reflected a more recent shift in the direction of valorizing diversity. Operating as organizational actors, universities launched both strategic initiatives. Ramirez argues, however, that universities underestimated their dependence on federal funding and overestimated public support for diversity-promoting policies. In retrospect, American universities have both acquiesced and resisted the attacks on their institutional autonomy and the academic freedom of their professors. Ramirez argues that the challenges American universities face from the Trump administration are attempts to diminish both institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Elite universities are especially targeted. He concludes that this targeting will lead to calls for university leaders to save the university, and that in turn will ironically result in enhanced organization and increased management, thereby further institutionalizing universities as organizational actors.

Roxana-Diana Baltaru focuses on the diffusion of commitments to inclusion, equality and diversity in European universities, and considers the institutional environments that shape universities’ inclusionary commitments. She uses historical and sociological institutionalist perspectives to make sense of how regulatory and resource conditions of the national higher-education systems that universities inhabit blend with global cultural pressures and supply universities with socially desirable ways of pursuing inclusion. A comparative case study of inclusionary commitments in an English and a Norwegian public research university is provided.

Despite substantial differences between these higher-education sectors, universities portray themselves as deliberate and strategic in their pursuit of inclusion, and the state is a key ‘rationalizer’ of this process through equality legislation. Nevertheless, inclusionary commitments appear more organizationally embedded and cognizant of student needs in the English university. In the Norwegian university, structural measures to foster inclusion become more visible within the comparatively rudimentary organizational structure, with regional cooperation and the needs of personnel being highlighted. Baltaru concludes that the spread of inclusionary organizational actorhood is marked by differences in regulation, national service and market orientations between HE systems. They are paving distinct possibilities for how universities may relate to their inclusionary commitments if challenged.

In the third article in this first group, Pedro Texeira focuses on more general recent developments in university–state relationships in Europe. Higher education has been increasingly presented and perceived as being of strategic importance for many dimensions of governments’ policies. It has become a cornerstone of national policy agendas, encompassing aspects related to economic competitiveness and innovation, as well as issues of social mobility and equality. Governments have expected institutions to deliver on a wide array of objectives. Texeira argues that these high expectations have become intertwined with rising performance demands, including rapid adaptation to labour market needs, internationalization and measurable societal impact. Hence, institutions are facing a growing scrutiny over their efficiency, accountability and responsiveness to multiple societal and policy needs.

These rising expectations have also shaped the evolution of institutional autonomy in the higher-education sector, with the emergence of new forms of state interference. Although many European countries have formally increased institutional autonomy, particularly in the financial and organizational domains, this autonomy has often been counterbalanced by new mechanisms of state steering, such as performance contracts, detailed reporting requirements and external quality assurance. Texeira concludes by arguing that these tools enabled governments to influence university priorities and operations without direct intervention, creating a paradox of ‘steered autonomy’.

André Keet and Daniella Rafaely see the current assault on the legitimacy, relevance and independence of higher-education institutions as a systematic attack on the foundations of democratic society and the radical-liberal project itself. To address this issue, they propose ‘outsides’ as a theoretical framework for reconceptualizing the university’s legitimacy beyond state-centred political imaginations. They theorize two interconnected forms of outsides. The first of these is political outsides, or spaces of engagement that generate thinking, action and accountability beyond state apparatuses. The second is university outsides, or solidaristic networks that generate transformative spaces to protect academic autonomy from corporate and managerial encroachment.

They propose ‘outsides’ as a progressive and innovative social legitimacy ecosystem that positions universities as an ‘estate’ within democratic architectures, embedded in broader society networks rather than solely dependent on state recognition. They argue that this reframing offers pathways for universities to recover and reconfigure their academic autonomy while maintaining genuine accountability to diverse publics, ensuring that the ‘public good’ status of higher education is actively produced through relational engagement rather than assumed as a static institutional privilege. They argue that these outsides strengthen institutional autonomy and accountability, facilitating generative options for programmatic work and action in higher education. Finding ways ‘to think against the state that has no outside’ has the potential to reframe the social legitimacy of the university in ways that may respond to the current challenges of the higher-education sector.

Leadership Recruitment and Development

In the first in the second group of articles, Lars Engwall presents a study of the selection of academic top leaders from 1900 to 2025 in six highly ranked universities from the 2024 Academic Ranking of World Universities. These institutions represent the United States (Harvard and Stanford) with presidents as leaders, the United Kingdom (Cambridge and Oxford) with vice-chancellors, and Scandinavia (Copenhagen and Oslo) with rectors. For these universities, Engwall shows an increase in the length of leadership tenure, in the selection of female leaders and of externals, a decline in the number of recruitments per decade, recruitment ages and the recruitment of persons with a background in STEM disciplines and medicine. Harvard and Stanford differ from the other four universities by having much lower numbers of recruitments, longer length of tenures, lower recruitment ages and by recruiting externals earlier than their European counterparts. The Europeans started recruiting externals and female leaders in the 1990s.

An analysis of the most recent recruitments demonstrates that Harvard, Stanford and Copenhagen include outsiders in the decision process and keep candidacies secret. The latter is also the case for Cambridge and Oxford, which, however, do not include externals in the decision process. Oslo also leaves it to internals to decide but has a process where candidacies are publicly known. For the future, Engwall expects that non-US institutions will follow the top US universities more, thereby increasingly involving search consultants.

Richard Bolden and Sanna Lassen argue that universities have long needed to balance competing demands while the situation seems to have been exacerbated in recent years, particularly in relation to funding, digital disruption and political interference. Their article explores implications of such developments for the recruitment and development of higher-education leaders. Building on the concept of the ‘leadership pipeline’ they consider the passages that must be navigated on the way to becoming an effective academic leader, alongside associated (often competing) logics and identities. Through vignettes from an empirical study in a Danish university, they illustrate the complexities of leadership transitions, leadership disconnections and logic misalignment in educational leadership.

Their discussion of these findings presents an ecosystems model that shows the interdependencies and interconnections between core functions of higher education and the internal and external context. Bolden and Lassen conclude by considering implications for leadership recruitment and development, with a particular focus on identity work and the need to embrace multiple logics. They propose crafting ‘identity workspaces’ where people can develop, refine and reframe their identity as a ‘leader’ in ways that enable them to traverse competing logics and perspectives of/on higher education. Through such interventions, it is suggested, it may be possible to foster the required levels of inclusion, collaboration and resilience in higher-education leadership to navigate the challenging path(s) ahead.

Administration and Bureaucracy

In the third group of articles, dealing with university administration and bureaucracy, Kerstin Sahlin addresses the profound waves of reformed governance and organization of higher education and research during the past few decades. Management positions have expanded with a stronger emphasis on hierarchy, more well-defined boundaries between universities as organizational actors and their environments, more rigorous performance measurements at the organization level and a changed political control. Administration has been centralized and relations between academic and administrative staff have been transformed.

Changes in university governance are sometimes described as a shift from collegiality to enterprise management. However, in previous studies, Sahlin has found that this development could rather be described as a remixed governance. Even if collegiality as a mode of governance in universities has been challenged and partly replaced by more enterprise-like forms of governance, collegiality is not completely absent anywhere. Sahlin thus argues that universities are subject to mixed modes of governance related to the many tasks and missions they are expected to fulfil. Mixed modes of governance also stem from reforms based on widely held ideals of governance and organization. Much previous research has analysed the changing roles and influence of faculty and leadership that follow on these reforms. The diverse modes of governance also imply diverse roles for administration. Furthermore, with mixed modes of governance, the roles of administrators and their relations with academic faculty may vary depending on issues and situations.

Liudvika Leišytė explores another important change in and around universities as regards the role of stakeholders in higher education. Her article explores this topic within the broader context of global, political and technological transformations. Over recent decades, universities have undergone significant shifts driven by New Public Management reforms, increased accountability and the growing expectation that universities contribute directly to societal and economic goals. These developments have transformed governance systems, creating complex networks that include both traditional and emerging stakeholders. As a result, the balance between academic autonomy, managerial control and external influence has been fundamentally redefined.

Drawing on stakeholder theory, her analysis demonstrates that universities now interact with a wide range of actors whose legitimacy, power and urgency vary across contexts. Traditional internal stakeholders, such as students and academic staff, have gained new forms of representation and agency, although their influence remains uneven. Student participation in governance and quality assurance processes, for instance, reflects an increased legitimacy and urgency but is often constrained by tokenistic implementation. Similarly, early-career researchers, while formally recognized in policy frameworks, continue to experience limited power due to persistent academic hierarchies and precarious employment conditions.

Among external stakeholders, organized labour and EdTech platforms represent contrasting developments. Labour unions and academic collectives continue to advocate for fair working conditions and academic freedom but struggle to maintain legitimacy and bargaining power within neoliberal policy environments. Conversely, the rapid rise of the EdTech sector has introduced powerful new actors that shape teaching, learning and administrative practices, raising questions about surveillance, data ownership and institutional dependence.

Christian Schneijderberg also addresses changes in the organization of universities due to New Public Management (NPM). He argues that NPM, which hit the German university sector in the mid-1990s, could be considered as a rediscovery of bureaucratic organization. More university autonomy came at the cost of budget negotiations, agreements on objectives, accountability, steering by indicators, third-party funding competition, etc. In his article, the discussion paper ‘More Autonomy – Less Regulation. Proposals for the De-bureaucratization of the Science System’ by the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) is used as a point of departure to discuss increasing external regulation (case: public third-party funding competition) and university-internal bureaucratization (case: professorial hiring).

The theory-led discussion is based on the elaboration of bureaucratic organization as a concept defining the social forces of structures, actors and activities. The concept is further detailed by the four Weberian subconcepts – official duties, authority relations, employment of qualified personnel and career paths, and individual agency/enterprise – developed by Schneijderberg. They emphasize that bureaucratic organization provides some leeway for bureaucrats within legal and ethical boundaries. Schneijderberg uses these concepts to analyse the positions and roles of higher-education and science professionals in the bureaucracy to show how the NPM regime of bureaucratic organization expanded into academic functions.

Celia Whitchurch looks at these new positions and roles bridging administrative and academic functions. She draws on a project conducted between 2017 and 2020 for the UK Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) and discusses the place of such third-space professionals within a changing professional workforce in UK higher education. At the same time as routine administrative roles in registry environments have, by and large, been superseded by online registration and data management facilities, new roles have emerged in a ‘third space’ between academic and professional spheres of activity.

These have created issues of visibility, place, recognition and reward for those occupying them. Examples are given of a misalignment between such individuals and the organizational structures within which they work, affecting, for example, job descriptions, titles and promotion and progression criteria. Whitchurch further offers reflections on the perceptions of senior institutional managers who are responsible for maintaining institutional structures, as well as of those in third space roles on the ‘third space’. Finally, Whitchurch makes suggestions as to ways in which adjustments might be made for the future visibility and recognition of these new professionals in universities.

Navigating Risk in Higher Education and Research

In the fourth group of articles, dealing with risk in higher education and research, Ivar Bleiklie bases his article on the idea that the shape and strength of pressures against academic research are intimately related to democratic institutions and the values of academic freedom and institutional autonomy through which democracy is mediated. He questions whether democratic societies are sufficiently prepared to safeguard their academic institutions against recent developments, such as the increased interest and diversity of stakeholders in academic research, the complexity and strength of expectations affecting academia, and current political developments that are threatening democratic institutions.

The first part of his article seeks to clarify the concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy that guide the argument. The second part deals with external pressures on universities and introduces some distinctions that may help us tell the difference between external pressures, which may be beneficial or harmful to academic research. The third part focuses on how organizational changes in research institutions have affected their ability to handle external pressures. It discusses how changes in leadership and internal decision making have affected the capacity of institutions to resist or deflect the harmful effects of pressures. The fourth part analyses the role of public policies and how they may sustain or jeopardize academic freedom. Bleiklie concludes by drawing a prescriptive conclusion about the defence of academic freedom under democratic and authoritarian political conditions.

Yuzhuo Cai diagnoses how professional, market and state logics generate risks in university research and how hybrid governance can mitigate them. He argues that the landscape of university research has undergone a profound transformation in the twenty-first century, blurring boundaries between academic inquiry, commercial application and public policy. Universities now sit at the centre of innovation ecosystems, where academic freedom intersects with market demands and governmental priorities, reflecting broader shifts in the knowledge society that position universities as engines of growth, technological innovation and societal problem solving.

Conceptually, Cai integrates triple-helix and institutional-logics perspectives. In doing so, he advances a cross-level risk analysis (individual, organizational, system) and a triple-temporal mitigation design that aligns short-term relational routines, mid-term interface infrastructures and long-term institutional and policy change. The synthesis extends existing work on selective coupling and institutional complexity by linking specific risk mechanisms to sequenced interventions. It further refines research on boundary organizations and intermediaries by positioning interface roles within system-level coordination. The article shows how openness, sovereignty and mission pressures map across logics within responsible research and innovation and open-science agendas. Overall, the study offers a parsimonious and actionable framework for steering collaborative research under conditions of institutional plurality.

Finally, Elizabeth Halford and Roger King reflect on risks and regulation in English higher education. Their article focuses on the role that risks, together with their prediction, management and mitigation, play in the regulation of higher education. The article is informed by the authors’ practical experience of senior leadership, governance and consultancy in higher education over many years and aims to offer insights into how risk management can operate in practice. Halford and King recognize the dual role of risk in organizational life in higher education, which generates dilemmas for regulators and governors. That is, risk may be viewed as a source of potential hazard and harm on the one hand, requiring mitigation and transfer, while also being a source of innovation, enterprise and value enhancement on the other.

With this base, they attempt to identify some concepts currently associated with risks in the higher-education systems of developed countries; discuss how these are applied through instruments of regulation in diverse public/private economies and raise some questions for consideration about the implications and effectiveness of regulatory requirements for the leadership and governance of universities. In particular, they look at the English system of higher-education regulation, as administered by the Office for Students.

Concluding Remarks

The university has long been regarded as one of the most successful and important institutions in modern societies, characterized by a high degree of stability and resilience. As shown above, this status of the university as an institution has come under pressure and can no longer be taken for granted. Instead, the university finds itself ‘living in interesting times’, where expectations on the contributions of the university to society and economy are growing while widespread support by government and society is in decline. Traditional values and beliefs associated with the university as an institution are challenged by more recent socio-political and economic developments.

The articles published in this Focus demonstrate that the state, at least in liberal democracies, can no longer be taken for granted as a trusted partner and supporter of universities. Various forms of political interference are seen to impact on academic activities, and the interference is often undertaken using more intrusive policy instruments. In parts of the world, liberal democracy as such has come under pressure and political authorities aim to discipline universities as liberal institutions according to their agendas. The university as an organization, and within it a growing cadre of professional leadership and management, has become the addressee of such utilitarian or ideological interventions. Paradoxically, the university as a managed organization might then challenge the university as an academic institution.

Mixed forms of governance providing spaces for academic voice and influence would be important to avoid alienation between the academic core and their organization. Externally, networking with stakeholders and finding legitimacy beyond the state might have the potential to counterbalance detrimental state dependence and interference. The articles in this Focus also remind us that the complexities of recent developments generate risks for teaching and research within the university. The most common response seems to be to manage such risks, calling for a rather conservative and defensive reply. Instead, risks could also be seen as a productive force of innovation and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the university will need to mobilize its communities, internally and externally, to re-establish itself as an institution and to make meaningful contributions to societies living in turbulent times.