Are Dutch universities becoming managed institutions? Seeking evidence for archetype change from the study of university decision-making processes

There is wide agreement in the higher education literature that New Public Management has aimed to render formal authority distributions in university decision-making more hierarchical and management-driven (see, e.g. Amaral et al. (2003), Brunsson & Sahlin Anderson (2000), de Boer et al. (2004); Leisyte (2007), Paradeise et al.(2009)). Changes in the formal decision-making structure must, however, not necessarily allow university managers to exercise better control of the university’s core technologies. In this paper, I will introduce the analytical concept of organizational archetypes to address this question for the transformation of Dutch and British universities. I will complement conceptual deliberations with empirical evidence gained from the study of allocating research and teaching tasks in the humanities and the life sciences at a Dutch research university. The evidence indicates that managerial decision-makers on the mid-management level assume an increasingly authoritative role when it comes to allocating teaching- and research tasks among staff members, but that their acting is triggered off by financial concerns and only to a lesser extent by purely functional deliberations. Viewed from a broader perspective, the study sheds light into the organizational consequences of the ‘autonomization’ of the university, being accompanied by a shift away from direct state-funding for teaching and research activities into the direction of competitive funding.