Governance Reforms and Organizational Dilemmas in European Universities

The aim of this article is to examine how European universities, confronted with national reforms of their governance, have tried to resolve the dilemmas traditionally associated with internal reorganization, the redistribution of power, and the reformulation of teaching and research policies. The article does not focus on the central governance of universities—which is the object of most current analyses—but on their “peripheral” units and decision-making processes. There are four basic organizational dilemmas encountered when structuring the internal organization and functioning of universities. They concern the degree of differentiation and integration of the organizational units, the role and modes of action of middle management, the search for synergies and the optimal extent of aggregation, and the degree of centralization or decentralization of functions and processes. The article offers a comparative analysis of eight universities in four European countries—the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and France—aimed at understanding how these universities have dealt with such organi- zational dilemmas.