The actorhood imperative. On universities as organisational actors

Abstract

Organisational actorhood denotes the agency and capacity of organisations to act for and out of themselves. Sociological neoinstitutionalism has shown how notions of empowered actorhood have spread globally and across modern society. It has however neglected how organisations act upon this notion. Drawing on Foucault’s writings on governmentality, actorhood can be conceived as a ‘technology of the self’ that allows individuals (and organisations) to define how to act for themselves. Understanding actorhood as an imperative to take action in the name of the self, the paper extends the neoinstitutional perspective to account for how organisations perform actorhood. Taking organisational action as starting point for analysing organisational actors allows to overcome the passive conformity of organisations vis-à-vis environmental expectations. This perspective is applied to empirical findings on how German universities act as organisations in teaching. Though actorhood was highly scripted by a national funding scheme, universities more or less used the extra resources to pursue their own goals. Focussing on organisational action shows that universities as organisational actors do not just respond to environmental expecations but act within a field of possible actions that simultaneously pushes and constrains actorhood. The paper therefore proposes to study how universities act as organisational actors.

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