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This paper argues that it is useful to regard 'reputational risk' as a pervasive logic of organizing and organizational attention. First, we suggest that the risk management agenda has expanded from its roots in technical analysis to become a cornerstone of good governance and responsible actorhood. We illustrate this claim in the context of English universities.Second we suggest that this expansion in the reach and significance of risk management has increased organizational orientations to reputational risk and to more defensively and legalistically framed forms of asset management. Specifically, organizations are responding to the growth of external bodies which evaluative and rank, and thereby generate reputational risk. In the context of universities, we argue that this leads both to specific transformations in organizational practices in response to ranking systems, and also to an increased generalised concern with reputational risk, which is a symptom of late modern insecurity.

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The questions of how universities are governed and how they should be governed have recently gained attention throughout Europe. The history of universities shows a diffused pattern of repeated reform efforts. However, this situation has more or less exploded since the turn of the century, bringing in new modes of organising. In short we can observe a diffusion of more managerial forms of organising, leading to a situation where different governance ideals co-act. In this paper we analyse the interplay of several governance ideals as they play out in practice. We begin and end the essay by noting that collegiality is a modern, efficient and practical form of governance, but it never works entirely on its own; rather it interacts with other modes of governance. After an introduction of diverse modes of governance, analysed as ideal type models, we exemplify how those diverse modes mix in practices of governance and organising. A more theoretical argument that runs through the paper is a critique of the dominance of ideal types of discussions on university governance and in organisation theory more generally, to the extent that those ideal types tend to be reified.

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