Abstract
We gain insight into the emerging character of the entrepreneurial university by pursuing empirical answers to two questions: How are such universities initially formed? And how do they sustain themselves? My 1998 book, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities, used European cases to conceptualize five ‘pathways of transformation.’ My 2004 book, Sustaining Change in Universities, in search of exemplars of entrepreneurial action, turns to 14 internationally distributed case studies to clarify anew these transforming steps and to suggest dynamics of change that produce a new steady state change. Drawn largely from the book's concluding chapter, this article emphasizes key features of change-promoting organization in universities and highlights the growing centrality of university-led action based on flexible and adaptive self-reliance.
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Notes
Smelser and Content (1980, 7). The authors noted in a study of the US academic labor market that competition for academic talent ‘is simultaneously a competition for individual services and a competition between universities trying to advance or solidify their own position in the prestige hierarchy’. See also Becher (1989) and Ziman (1991).
Herbst (2004, 5–21). See also Herbst et al (2002, passim) and CEST (2002), i–vi.
Lindblom (2001, 41, 23, 83). See also Fligstein (2001) and Dobbin (2002, 64–65). A growing group of economists and sociologists argue persuasively that economic behavior is a subcategory of social behavior and must be explained socially, that states and societies are the ‘architects’ of markets. They stress that as governments create the rules under which markets operate many different kinds of modern economy can be found, for example, in Sweden, Japan, France, Germany, and the United States. The logic of their system-level analysis may readily be applied to an institutional sector, such as higher education, in which state and university shape the architecture of markets. The cultures and norms — and power — of the universities shape their relevant markets.
References
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Clark, B. Delineating the Character of the Entrepreneurial University. High Educ Policy 17, 355–370 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300062
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300062