The Post-entrepreneurial University: The Case for Resilience in Higher Education

Abstract

AbstractHistorically speaking, the university has been a highly resilient organizational form; however recent pressures to become entrepreneurial threaten the institutional foundations on which that reliance is based. The chapter first provides conceptual clarity by revisiting what we argue are two distinct schools of thought on the entrepreneurial university. We show how the economic school’s conception intertwines with the rise of New Public Management (NPM) in Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, reframing the concept in ways that made it incompatible with resilience thinking. However, we argue that by tying back into ‘lost’ elements of sociological school’s conception, and associating them with concepts from complex systems literature (loose coupling, slack, and requisite diversity), a hybrid model which is both resilient and entrepreneurial can be achieved. We call this the post-entrepreneurial university.