Who governs? Academic decision-making in US four-year colleges and universities, 2000–2012

From Partnerships to Bureaucracies: The Constitutional Evolution of Russian Universities

“…Following the overall political-scientific framework of research, attention was paid to powers related to appointment and removal from office. The list also includes some key powers that have been a subject of previous research [Goedegebuure, Boer 1996;Masten 2006;Kaplan 2004;Apkarian et al 2014] and play the greatest role in academic governance: financial issues, human resource policies, establishment and reorganization of subdivisions, and research policies. For governing bodies that were not featured in all the statutes (e. g. school councils), it was documented whether or not they were mentioned at all.…”

“…The latter approach has a higher analytical potential, as dimensions allow building typologies -but it does not work the other way. However, analysis often boils down to only one dimension that opposes managerialism/bureaucracy to democracy/collegiality in university organization [Kaplan 2004;Masten 2006;Jones 2011;Apkarian et al 2014;Woessner, Kehler 2018].…”

“…The most crucial difference lies in faculty involvement in decision making. The category opposing intra-organizational democracy to bureaucratic rule is a powerful ideological formula, yet empirical studies have often been doubtful as to whether this dimension alone is enough to describe all the variations in the political structures of universities [Apkarian et al 2014;Tight 2014]. In one of the studies that pioneered this approach, Janice M. Beyer and Thomas M. Lodahl argue that power is distributed between the central administration and departments, on the one hand, and between administrators and faculty within subdivisions on each level.…”

“…For instance, school-level councils played an important role in Denmark and Germany but had little power in the UK, while university-level councils were vested with significant power in Germany and the Netherlands but played a small part in Sweden, the overall faculty influence being perceived as strong in all cases [Goedegebuure, Boer 1996]. Likewise, a recent study has demonstrated the impossibility of ranking all the United States universities on a single scale of faculty involvement in decision making; in fact, the distribution of power among subdivisions can vary greatly within the same level of faculty participation [Apkarian et al 2014]. In Russian literature, there have been attempts to compare universities by the level of democracy and centralization, where democracy is understood as involvement of regular employees, such as lecturers, in decision making (zero democracy is by default equaled to bureaucratic governance) and centralization shows whether power is concentrated at the center or distributed among a number of divisions (schools, faculties, etc) [Sokolov 2016].…”

U.S. Higher Education Effectiveness

“…Probably the single most distinctive characteristic of these faculty positions, however, is the institution of tenure, a virtually iron-clad guarantee of permanent employment to those faculty who survive what can be a most demanding probationary period. 21 These features of the employment situation support a governance structure that is in most cases still better described as a "dual structure," involving spheres of faculty authority and influence, than as "managerial control" (Apkarian et al 2014).…”