Bringing the State Back In: Promoting and Sustaining Innovation in Public Higher Education

Abstract

Since the well-known failures of many experimental colleges and programs in the 1960s and 1970s, policymakers and scholars are often cynical about the possibilities for organisational innovation, particularly within public universities. Public university innovation is possible, however, when organisational actors seek to institutionalise reform and use the legitimacy of reform to obtain adequate human and financial resources. An illustrative case study of California State University at Monterey Bay is used to describe how institutionalisation processes can be used to establish, support and expand public university innovation, which may be increasingly crucial to meet political and competitive demands for university adaptation.

College Rankings as an Interorganizational Dependency: Establishing the Foundation for Strategic and Institutional Accounts

“…Analyzing the strategic ability to manage institutional environments provides a space for agency within a theoretical perspective that has been seen as overemphasizing convergence (through isomorphism, for example) towards a single norm of indeterminate history, and underemphasizing the role of power, influence, entrepreneurship, and elites on the institutionalization process. Recently, however, scholars have described a wide range of cases that rectify this imbalance (Bastedo 2005(Bastedo , 2007(Bastedo , 2009bGuler et al 2002;Martins 2005;Rao et al 2003).…”

Information Security in Higher Education: A Neo-Institutional Perspective

“…The NIT has been adopted in higher education as well. The NIT was applied to investigate the changes that have taken place in the liberal art colleges (Kraatz & Zajac, 1996), the organizational innovation in public universities (Bastedo, 2007), and the relationship between organizational changes in higher education and governmental policies (Gornitzka, 1999).…”

Serving Others and Gaining Experience: A Study of University Students Participation in Service Learning

“…The strategic value of service learning is not just for university students who gain an opportunity to learn and to put to the test the skills they have acquired or can acquire. It is also for the other organisational actors involved in the educational process, namely both community and institutions (Bastedo, 2007; Bringle & Hatcher, 1996). While for the community, the value of having committed young adults as a resource lies in society's increased ability to help the disadvantaged or those who need assistance which is affordable, the institutions benefit from voluntarism's intrinsic value, which is its value in educating for citizenship (Annette, 1999) through experience of local area, organisation and workings, thereby enhancing an understanding of opportunities, constraints and limitations involved in dealing with public affairs.…”