Theoretical perspectives on university strategy

The main purpose of this chapter is to set the theoretical stage for developing the notion of university strategy using a quantitative approach. The notion of strategy has been applied repeatedly to universities in the literature, but the efforts for operationalizing it have so far been very limited. As a result, many claims about the centrality of universities as knowledge production and diffusion actors have a poor empirical foundation. As the chapter will show, developing an operational notion of strategy requires a lot of conceptual and methodological clarification, if one wants to build up reliable quantitative indicators. We shall discuss some streams of literature that have addressed the issue of strategy from various perspectives, namely institutional theory, political science, the sociology of higher education, the economics of higher education and of science, and public management. The purpose is clearly not one of comprehensive survey, but rather of mapping the field of potential contributions, mainly with a focus on appropriate interpretation in terms of quantitative indicators at the micro level.