Configuration and Strategy Making in Universities

This article examines configuration and strategy making in universities. Previous work has often focused on the university as a generic form of professional organization. This study attempts to broaden the scope of existing frameworks by using the concept of configuration to illustrate university forms that differ from the professional bureaucracy and provide a mechanism that facilitates comparisons between different institutions. The second part of the article critically examines the conventional view of strategy making. In this way, the article hopes to make two contributions. It presents a model that will help us to understand the diversity and complexity that exists in the university sector and it provides insight into how universities form strategy. The article is structured as follows. The first part briefly examines models of decision making and structure in higher education. These models are linked to the concept of configuration, which is used to present two university settings that are not often featured in the existing literature. The article then turns to the concept of strategy. These theoretical arguments are illustrated with examples from a study of Brazilian universities. It might be tempting for readers to ignore the findings as being irrelevant to the North American context. At a time when research in fields such as organization and management theory is emphasizing globalization, such a reaction would seem shortsighted: we have much to learn from comparisons with other countries.