Post-NPM-Governance und Grenzobjekte. Zur organisationalen Funktion des Digitalisierungsdiskurses an Universitäten

Building on scholarship on the mediatization of organizations, we propose a conception of the social media orientation of organizational leaders and apply it to higher education. Based on an online survey of 276 leaders of Swiss higher education institutions, we show that social media platforms have made their way into university management and communication but are still not as important as news media. The study discusses differences between university types and uses the literature on new public management to derive influencing factors.

mentioning

confidence: 83%

Beyond the News Media Logic? Analyzing the Social Media Orientation of University Leadership

Fürst,

Schäfer,

Vogler

et al. 2023

“…The strategy documents thus signal continuity precisely through the transformation process that has been embarked upon, that is, "stability through change" (Esposito 2014, 102), and transfer this into a political format with the SDS. The arbitrariness of the concept of digitalisation, organised and ordered in this way, not only allows the strategies to be connected to other actors in the sense of a boundary-object (Star and Griesemer 1989;Star 2010;Tratschin 2021), but also allows uncertainty to be dealt with and reduced (Beckert 2016;Meyer 2019). The contingencies and uncertainties of the future, which are exemplarily condensed in the multidimensional concept of digitalisation, are prospectively extrapolated through political ideas of linearity and continuity.…”

Section: The Rise Of Data and Artificial Intelligencementioning

confidence: 99%

A Tamed Transformation. Debating Digitalisation in Research and Higher Education Policy in Switzerland, 1998–2020

Saner

2023

In this article, I investigate the discursive field of the digital transformation of higher education and research policy in Switzerland. The qualitative analysis of political strategies and documents shows that actors in this policy field use open, ambiguous terms to characterise digitalisation. By building on this discursive strategy, the political actors aim not only to reduce uncertainty about the digital transformation as a complex phenomenon but also to build political consensus about the future development of this discursive field.

“…One explanation is that the issue of identity is of greater importance for full universities since they are organisational brackets for a greater variety of disciplinary and professional activities than universities with a more specialised profile (at the top right and the top left of the field of universities). This explanation is supported by the observation that digitalisation represents a boundary object for universities that allows them to relate heterogeneous activities to one another (Tratschin 2022). According to this interpretation, digitalisation should be particularly attractive for highly heterogeneous universities (e. g. full universities).…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Digitalisation as Distinction? Identity Articulation and Tacit Competition in the Swiss University Field, 2010–2020

Tratschin,

Rost,

Leder

2023

Self Cite

This article examines how digitalisation is used for organisational distinction in the field of Swiss universities for the period 2010–2020. It shows that digitalisation does not fundamentally challenge the order of the Swiss university field but triggers competitive dynamics that are accompanied by different forms of identity articulation. The article concludes that the interplay of competition and identity articulation of actors is complex and must be analyzed in the context of relative field positions.