Strategic Action and Response Strategies in a Changing Swedish Higher Education Landscape

For the past 20 years, Swedish universities have undergone a radical change in their working conditions. It has evolved from detailed regulation of organization, resource allocation and forms of employment to considerable freedom of action on the same issues. The task that this project has dealt with is this new situation for the universities, where they are no longer detail-managed, but at the same time expected to identify common goals and strategies that should implemented and followed up. The project has studied forms of prioritization, management and organization within Swedish universities over the past two decades. It has been based on theory formation that deals with issues of rationality, meaning creation, renewal and continuity in professionally dominated organizations. The focus has been on higher education institutions with a technical profile in order to identify similarities, but also differences within an area with similar conditions and external expectations.

The project began with a survey of so-called initiative at the research institutions examined, in relation to the four themes that were outlined in the project application:
1) Organizational change
2) Evaluation and assessment
3) Types of funding and structures
4) Academic work and leadership.

Within the framework of these themes, a number of case studies have subsequently been carried out. Within the project, a theoretical frame of reference has been prepared for how to understand organizations' identity as designed in contact with available categories. The primary application for this framework in the project's analysis has been the intended organizational identity category "technical university", and its relation to alternative (competing, but also partly overlapping) categories such as "research university" and "polytechnic". In the book manuscript developed within the project, the concept of organizational identity category functions as a reference framework within which the conclusions and results of the various chapters are interpreted. In the separate, yet unpublished, article produced, the focus is on exploring the actual frame of reference as a theoretical tool. Empirically, the project has produced more knowledge within each of the four themes, with relevance for both universities and other knowledge-intensive organizations.

The project's work on studying the technical universities as a possible organizational field gave rise to theoretically innovative research on how organizations' identity is formed around several available categories of identity. For the studies of technical universities, this approach had the advantage that, unlike the field concept, it does not require a particular organization to be sorted as more or less belonging to a particular category ("to what extent is MIT a technical university?"), But focuses on global templates and ideals ("to what extent is it relevant for MIT to strive to be a technical university?"). This enables a freer analysis of how globally moving ideas and ideals affect the organizations' strategic and conceptual orientation. Our hope is that, through further work, this can be established as a contribution to the literature. The project has also given rise to a proposed approach to linking issues about universities as organizations and their strategic ability to handle changes in their surroundings to an analytical approach that is based on collective action theory. In this way, a series of pressing issues are linked to what kind of organization university is, and can and should be, to a rich tradition of analysis of under what conditions people are led to act in line with common interests, even when this entails a direct cost of some kind to the individual ( "Collective action"). Our hope is that this approach can stimulate further theory development in that field (research on higher education) that studies the universities and their inner life.

The project focuses on HEIs in Sweden. Early on, however, the need for a larger element of international perspective was identified. A number of leading European researchers were invited to a workshop in October 2017, and these researchers, and some others, later came to contribute to the volume that is to be released in 2019. The project and its sub-studies have also been presented at conferences in the areas of higher education, organizational theory and science. and Technology Studies (STS). The project has had a number of affiliated junior researchers who contributed to the implementation. These have also had the opportunity to present their research at meetings and seminars.

The project has been presented at the following conferences and seminars:
Academic Entrepreneurship and Knowledge and Technology Transfer: How do they relate to Research, Teaching, and Universities as Organizations? University of Kassel, Germany
Lars Geschwind: Before and Beyond Humboldt: The Teaching-Research Nexus in Technical Universities.

Katarina Larsen: Rhetoric of engineering skills and heroes: institutional logics of university-industry relations in engineering education.

Anders Broström: Mobilising the organised anarchy: Structured relations between higher education institutions and external organisations.

SPRU 2016
Katarina Larsen: Back to basics – revisiting rhetoric of competitive research funding allocation and impact agenda in Sweden

EGOS 2017
Katarina Larsen: Under construction: negotiating engineering sciences scenarios and grand societal impact

CHER 2017
Lars Geschwind & Anders Broström: To be and to remain a Technical University: A historical study of arguments for and against organizational change.

EAIR 2017
Katarina Larsen: Technical universities and complexity of centres of excellence.

Malin Ryttberg and Lars Geschwind: Professional support staff, networks and sense making.

EGOS 2018
Katarina Larsen: Narratives of centres of excellence.

LAEMOS 2018
Lars Geschwind & Anders Broström: To be and to remain a technical university: A historical study of arguments for and against organizational change

Important such communication will also be made in connection with the launch of the book that was produced through the project.