Organizational Culture in Contemporary University

Abstract

The organizational culture concept help understanding and analyzing the triggers that make an educational organization such a university to get structured, develop, and perform. The analysis on organizational culture results into various models that may be identified. A series of studies have built upon that and contributed to the development of a matrix of organizational cultures, more and more detailed and sophisticated, acknowledged under the name of Competing Values Framework. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) is a matrix of four quadrants resulting from crossing the essential dimensions that any organization may display. The horizontal dimension goes from cultures with internal emphasis, short- term orientation, and smoothing activities to cultures with an emphasis on external positioning, long-term orientation, and achievement-oriented activities; while the vertical dimension refers to cultures characterized by flexibility, individuality, and spontaneity at one end and cultures characterized by stability, control, and predictability at the other end (Beytekin, 2010). Ian McNay (1995) developed a model meant to describe organizational culture of higher education institutions on two particular dimensions: the form and intensity of control and the focus on policy and strategy. McNay's model displays four quadrants corresponding to as many types of university organizational culture: enterprise, consisting of firm policy and loose operational control, focus on market, external opportunities, and relationships with stakeholders; corporate, consisting of tight policy and operational control, dominance of senior management, executive authority; collegiate, consisting of loose policy and loose operational control, decentralization, focus on individual freedom; bureaucratic, consisting of loose policy and tight operational control, focus on rules, regulations, and precedents. The report of Le Feuvre and Metso (2005) identifies three traditional “ideal-type” academic models of teaching and research related to national culture and the government policy on education: the Humboldtian, the Napoleonic, and the Anglo-American model. Contemporary universities face a new mode of knowledge production associated with the post-industrial knowledge economy, which would imply a marketisation of higher education and research in the global economy.

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