Higher education institutions embed a large variety of organizational practices regarding how to organize, plan, and implement managerial decisions and processes. This variation is amongst others related to the multiple relationships the institutions, disciplines and professions have in their networks, formal agreements, and practical cooperation with the actors and agencies of surrounding societies. Here, we focus upon the challenges and contradictions experienced by leaders of educational programmes within teacher education, engineering and health and social care. The professional educational programmes have increasingly been under pressure to strengthen their research capacity. At the same time, these programmes are characterized by strong relationships with the community of practitioners. How does leadership of these programmes seek to solve the challenges and contradictions between on the one hand catering for the relevance of the programmes and on the other hand strengthening the research capacity of the programmes?

Organizational actorhood is a term that has gained prominence in literature about higher education as a way to describe some of the key global change processes with emphasis on organizational accountability, formalization of structure, focus on goal definition and managerialism. At the same time, there is less knowledge about how organizational actorhood is constructed in professional higher education institutions. Based on over 100 interviews and document studies of two case institutions, this article argues that professional higher education institutions show many characteristics of aiming to construct organizational actorhood, while their understanding of accountability is broader than would be in traditional comprehensive universities.

Amidst increased research on mergers in higher education, studies addressing micro level processes are scarce and fragmented across disciplines: our aim is to systematically review existing studies, providing implications for research and practice. We grouped 21 studies from different countries under four themes: academic identity and self-image; cultural integration; staff reaction; teaching and research. Timing, status of institutions and staff, and disciplinary cultures apparently affect post-merger micro-level processes. Policy reforms might indirectly address micro-level processes following a merger, for example in a change of academic identities. Few studies investigated the impact of mergers on teaching and research activities. Studying merger consequences for academic core activities is complex, requiring a longer perspective involving students, staff and quantitative indicators. Longitudinal design in further studies might investigate changes from different angles and for different staff groups and students, exploring country differences in micro-level processes, applying a comparative design. Despite limitations, our review might inform the planning of merger processes regarding reactions at micro level.