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 Academic Entrepreneurialism and Private Higher Education in Europe 321
Change agents supporting new academic and new
administrative units
In entrepreneurial universities generally, there emerge an increasing number
of operating units that are not traditional, discipline-centered departments.
These units particularly take the form of interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary research centers focused on a wide range of societal
problems. The extended periphery can also be units of teaching outreach,
under such labels as continuing education, lifelong education, distance
education, and professional development (peripheries consist of a
combination of academics and administrators, contributing further to what
Gordon and Whitchurch 2010 termed an increasingly  diversifying
workforce in academia). These research and teaching instruments cross old
university boundaries to bring in new students and new kinds of research.
Clark (2004a) suggests that such base units have natural allies in the steering
core  among agents of change located in the center. These new
entrepreneurial units may fundamentally change the character of the
university, adding new dimensions to traditional (departments  faculties 
the center) or newer, flatter structures (departments and the center). They
require different management styles as they are often non-permanent,
contract-funded units, staffed by non-tenured contracted academics. These
styles are more flexible and relationships between the center and peripheral
units become much less formal and less bureaucratic  one of the reasons is
that these units at the peripheries are often where external research funds are
being invested.
The crucial role of these new research centers is overwhelming  and
universally reported.227 Research centers increasingly attract more outside
227 Not surprisingly, a considerable proportion of centers for higher education research in
Europe could be classified as academic peripheries: often located between faculties of
social sciences, education, and economics; financially unstable and funded through
competitive (often European-level) research grants, with non-tenured, contracted staff
funded via projects and working on their PhD dissertations; often with disciplinary
problems in terms of academic promotion etc. As Patricia Gumport gloomily notes in
an American context (2012: 18-19),  for all its promise, the study of organizations
faces the same challenges as our larger field for the precarious position of higher
education research and researchers in today s academy. Stated simply and starkly,
neither the scholarly nor practical legitimacy of higher education research is assured.
& the limited reach of our field beyond our own community remind us that we need to
reconsider our intended goals and audiences  not only in writing up our research but
322 Chapter 6
funding in the form of competitive grants and research contracts. Their
existence confirms a dual structure of most entrepreneurial institutions:
traditional academic departments (and traditional disciplines of teaching and
research) and transdisciplinary and non-traditional research centers (and
transdisciplinary research; sometimes teaching  but then mostly
postgraduate programs and short courses). These academic peripheries can
come under the structure of departments, or be accountable directly to the
center (as is the case in Poland where most new research centers are
accountable academically and financially directly to vice-rectors for
research, avoiding hierarchies of departments and faculties, and deans and
heads of departments, as reported for example in the AMU case study about
AMU research centers).
The new peripheries take two basic forms: a) new administrative
offices, and b) new academic units. The appearance of new specialized
administrative offices is closely related to new tasks being undertaken and
unknown to the institution in its traditional structures and funding
opportunities. New peripheries are focused on Clark's third stream of
funding  that is, in fact, on any non-basic sources  state and non-state
(regardless of the level of their separation  governmental, ministerial or
regional and local). And they are also focused on the second stream of
funding, that is, on competitively acquired funding, mostly through state
grants for research.228 New offices (and posts) include: grants and contracts
also in terms of the questions we consider worthy of study and how we frame them .
Gone are the times when  we had permission to explore ideas that were illuminating.
Instead of having to take problems from practice, we were encouraged to identify [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]