127such as steelmaker Nucor and appliance-maker Haier include developing targets based on the environment, not on the last year’s performance. In high-performing anti-bureaucracy corporations, units within and across the firm are encouraged to pursue open innovation possibilities, internally and externally. For market-facing business units such as executive education, the world’s top-ranked schools provide performance bonuses on a team basis and allow re-investment into the pool. Universities can also follow top-performing corporations by creating opportunities for social collaboration across the entire organization, and with customers, and by setting some standards but providing scope for creative solutions. A final suggestion is to reduce or eliminate internal offices that must be used for some processes, and instead allow a bidding process involving multiple units.

128S. Terjesen

Conclusion and Future Research Directions

This chapter identifies some underlying causes of the growing bureaucratization in higher education and offers a range of solutions at individual, business unit, university, and other levels. Although higher education bureaucracy is most often identified by academics, researchers, and policymakers, a growing share of the public is becoming aware of the phenomenon, thanks in part to the new Netflix show The Chair, which follows a new academic chair for an English department facing the often bureaucratic demands inside her department, school, and university. The Twitter account Associate Deans (2021) has also noted a tendency for bureaucracy, with near daily tweets such as: “From my annual review: ‘an almost savant-like aptitude for bureaucratic administration!’ Finally, they are noticing my skill set!”

Many possibilities, such as calculating the present bureaucratic mass and administrative burdens of proposed changes, implementing technology solutions, leading change management, and employing best practices in decision-making, can be implemented and studied. There is incredible potential to research promising practices to reduce higher education bureaucracy and reclaim the entrepreneurial university. These future research directions can be categorized by theoretical, methodological, and phenomenological contributions.

Future enquiry can test existing management theories within the higher education context. For example, upper echelons theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) suggests that managers’ background characteristics can lead to organizational outcomes in the form of strategic choices and performance. This theory could be tested, for example, to determine whether new university presidents with a background in leading businesses or business schools are able to improve their universities’ financial performance, and whether new university trustees with particular expertise are able to help their universities expand on these capabilities. The attention-based view (ABV) (Ocasio, 1997) could be extended to higher education contexts to explore how decision-makers’ concentration of time and effort results in certain organizational outcomes. This could examine university leaders who focus on particular metrics for development into distinct strategies that create value.

From a methodological standpoint, researchers can utilize an “action research” (McNiff, 2013) approach to simultaneously seek to research and transform their organizations. For example, researchers can create new programs in a skunkworkslike structure apart from the university bureaucracy, and directly test hypotheses about how to create knowledge and value through this new component. Future enquiry can utilize a variety of both quantitative and quantitative methodologies. Empirical researchers will be drawn to existing databases, particularly at federal and local levels, but also maintained by individual universities and colleges for internal and external reporting purposes. Qualitative methodologies such as case studies and ethnographies offer a unique opportunity to probe certain phenomena.

There are many new phenomena in higher education that merit future enquiry. I highlight future research directions for three key trends: long-term economic recession, new third-party players in the higher education industry, and corporate entries.