Bureaucrats, Brokers, and the Entrepreneurial University

• Main Authors: VOGEL, Ann, Kaghan, William
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2001
• Subjects: Higher Education; Sociology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/379
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Recent research and theorizing on topics such as the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Etzkowitz, 1997) and ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997) suggests that higher education across the world is experiencing dramatic institutional changes. Yet, in this research, the focus remains on the traditional knowledge producers—faculty and graduate students—rather than on all groups within the university who are not part of this academic core but who support them in some sense. Particularly neglected in our view are university administrators. In our essay, we argue that analyzing university administration is crucial to a true understanding of the sort of institutional changes that universities are now experiencing. We can no longer assume that university administrators are little more than meddlesome bureaucrats whose functions do not affect the institutional change we see. Rather, we argue that the function of university administrators in the ‘entrepreneurial university’ increasingly involves active brokering with worlds outside the university so that universities can better compete in a global marketplace while they simultaneously build increasingly complex relations with governments.