The reform process of Portuguese higher education institutions: from collegial to managerial governance

Special Issue: Professions and Professionalism in Market-Driven Societies

“…The way these macro-structural changes affect professional groups, professionals and professionalism, has been a core concern for the sociology of professions in more recent years (Brock, Leblebici, & Muzio, 2014;Carvalho, 2014;Correia, 2013;Evans, 2016;Noordegraaf, , 2011Noordegraaf, , 2016Skelcher & Smith, 2015;Kuhlmann et al, 2013). This special issue intends to further contribute to the discussion of market-driven societies through the lens of the sociology of professions.…”

“…The question is whether this criticism is based fundamentally upon an idealization of a preceding organizational pattern purportedly characterized by looser professional regulation and is now, in hindsight, being remembered nostalgically as democratic. 2 In order to get closer to discourses regarding change, in the following, we try to synthesize two different models (see Table 1) based upon an opposition between ideal types of models of administration that may hypothetically be extracted from discourses about governance models in public HE: a democratic-collegial model and a managerial-bureaucratic model (Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2014;Kallio & Kallio, 2014;Olssen & Peters, 2005;Santiago & Carvalho, 2008;Schminank, 2005;Ter Bogt & Scapens, 2012;Van Dalen & Henkens, 2012;Vicente & Stoleroff, 2016). Although this opposition may appear somewhat simplistic, it does represent opposing discourses regarding the relevant changes in the institutions.…”

“…There was, therefore, a significant delegation of decision-making to the institutions themselves, extending even to financial and administrative matters, although many fundamental decisions, such as the creation of courses, the number and distribution of students to be enrolled or the creation of teaching lines for hiring, remained subject to ministerial approval. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 1990s, managerial principles, at least at a rhetorical level, began to make their way into a political debate and effective practice (Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2014), preparing the way for important changes to the traditional model by the 2000s (Amaral et al, 2003). Subsequently, and in the wake of OECD recommendations for publicly financed institutions to operate within the private market (Kauko & Diogo, 2011), their administrative and management models were altered relatively rapidly along the lines of NPM (Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2014;Diogo & Bruckmann, 2015), with the passage of the Law Nr.…”

“…Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 1990s, managerial principles, at least at a rhetorical level, began to make their way into a political debate and effective practice (Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2014), preparing the way for important changes to the traditional model by the 2000s (Amaral et al, 2003). Subsequently, and in the wake of OECD recommendations for publicly financed institutions to operate within the private market (Kauko & Diogo, 2011), their administrative and management models were altered relatively rapidly along the lines of NPM (Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2014;Diogo & Bruckmann, 2015), with the passage of the Law Nr. 62/2007 creating the Judicial Regime for HEIs (RJIES).…”

Higher Education institutional governance reforms in the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy: A policy translation perspective addressing the homogeneous/heterogeneous dilemma

“…These studies usually limited their analyses to legal requirements (e.g., de Boer, Huisman, & Meister-Scheytt, 2010) or made inductive reasoning considering a single (e.g., flagship university; Gornitzka et al, 2017) or limited number of case studies per country (e.g., Kretek, Dragšić, & Kehm, 2013) to exemplify convergence. On the other hand, heterogeneity among institutional governance structures has been stressed in single-country analyses (e.g., Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2014;Donina, Meoli, & Paleari, 2015a;Meister-Scheytt, 2007). This is because institutions strategically translate and revise policies according to their own historical legacies and institutional specificities, among others (Frølich, Huisman, Slipersaeter, Stensaker, & Bótas, 2013;Fumasoli & Huisman, 2013).…”