Introduction
Reputation management or branding, imitated from private organizations, has become increasingly important for public organizations the last decades (Wæraas and Maor 2015). The world has become more globalized, more complex and insecure than it used to be, making it more difficult for public leaderships to know what measures with what effects to take to fulfill public instrumental goals. This leads to more ‘talk’, either as a substitute for action or to supplement action (Brunsson 1989). This balance between talk and action is meant to increase support and legitimacy from other public organizations, from stakeholders in the environment or from citizens at large.
In recent decades, European universities, most of them public, have changed more quickly than ever before, reflecting, with a certain time-lag, the role models derived from American universities. In a broader perspective, this development reflects the global formalization and rationalization of the universities, leading them to develop more generic or general organizational features and detracting from their unique status/special character (De Boer et al. 2007; Ramirez 2006a). Current university developments have entailed a shift in the balance and blend of the different visions of the European university (Olsen 2007), as a community of scholars, a representative democracy, an instrument serving the public interest or a service enterprise embedded in a competitive market. In this mix the latter two have gained strengths, in particular the last one, which may be seen as reflecting that so-called New Public Management reforms have increased their influence in universities (Christensen 2014).
There are some major aspects of this change of universities (Aberbach and Christensen 2017; Ramirez and Christensen 2013). First of all, the internal decision-making system, which used to be totally dominated by professors in European higher education systems, has changed in two contradictory ways. Decision-making bodies now comprise a decreasing number of professors, but more administrative actors, temporary academic staff and external societal representatives, often seen as democratization (Christensen 2011). But at the same time one also experiences a rehierarchization with more power to the top leaders and more closed and exclusive decision-making processes. Second, university administrations have become relatively larger, more professional and more influential compared with the academic staff, and it’s a closer coupling of the academic and administrative hierarchies (Bleiklie and Michelsen 2013; Enders et al. 2013; Gornitzka and Larsen 2004; Ginsberg 2014). Third, universities are generally more catering to students’ needs than before, ranging from new teaching methods and more feedback to providing more and better services and facilities (Ramirez et al. 2016; Ramirez and Christensen 2013). Overall, this creates more influence from non-academic decision makers in daily university life.
Fourth, universities are more ‘socially embedded ’ than before, i.e. they reach out more to stakeholders in the environment and those actors have more influence (Ramirez et al. 2016; Ramirez and Christensen 2013). This is partly a result from a more proactive university policy of the central authorities, but also because universities now have to find extra resources from public or private actors, for they are considered part of the knowledge economy and regarded as actors in international markets of students, researchers, and research projects (Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka 2006). This is facilitated by an increasingly professional university administration, but has also resulted in external actors becoming more integrated in universities and hence exerting more influence. Bleiklie (2013) argues that today’s universities are characterized both by more centralization and professional hierarchies and by more social embeddedness .
Furthermore, the socially embedded university is often imagined to be normatively good. The socially embedded university is either linked to progress, as in Clark’s (1998) vision of the entrepreneurial university and its role in fostering local and national development or to equity, as in current discussions of the more democratic university and its role in promoting greater accessibility and valorizing diversity (Maher and Tereault 2009). Some of these virtues, of course, can also be seen as shortcomings. There are critics of entrepreneurial universities as sites of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). There are also those who critique an overall decline in the distinctive focus of and intellectual standards in the university (Readings 1996; Bloom 1987).
We study two aspects of this development . First, the reputation or reputation management of a selection of Nordic , American , and Chinese universities , or how the universities present themselves to internal and external stakeholders through different channels. We focus here on how they present themselves on their websites. Second, we study in American universities how the increasing social embeddedness is leading to institutionalization of new organizational features connected to development units, diversity and legal elements.
Accordingly, the following research questions are posed in this book:
- What is typical for the reputation management of the universities, as reflected by their websites? What are the core symbols—related to their performance record, professional qualities, moral features and procedural features—balanced and changing over time?
- How is social embeddedness reflected in the institutionalization in universities over time of diverse organizational features, exemplified by the emergence of development offices, diversity units and legal units?
- What explains differences between universities with respect to reputation management and the institutionalization of new organizational units?
Reputation and Reputation Management
Carpenter (2010, p. 33) defines organizational reputation as ‘a set of beliefs about an organization’s capacities, intentions, history , and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences ’. This implies that leaders of an organization, in our universities, have to use symbols to reach and appeal to diverse audiences to build a reputation (Wæraas and Maor 2015). Doing this in an organized and systematic way is what is called reputation management. Aside from their own organization and the superior ministry, the stakeholders for universities would be regional/local authorities, private funding actors, and national and international communities of universit...