Institutional entrepreneurship and management control systems

The public higher education sector (HES) alongside health, is one of the biggest portfolios in most national governments, and is one that potentially provides the greatest returns to a country in productivity gains through skills acquisition, and research and development (Chatterton and Goddard, 2000; Kogan and Bauer, 2006; Middlehurst, 2001). Given the central role university research plays in a nation’s competitive capacity in the international market, and the prominent position it occupies in a nation’s overall research efforts, governments have centralised their control over universities’ outcomes predominantly through making government funding contingent on their achievement of research targets (Broadbent and Laughlin, 2003; Tooley and Guthrie, 2007). Consequently efforts to measure research performance have multiplied in the last decade (Bazeley, 2010). As universities struggle with changes in funding mechanisms and compete for contracting public funds with other well-established universities, they have adopted strategic management activities, and are engaged in institutional entrepreneurship (Liu and Dubinsky, 1999). Thus, universities (and therefore Vice Chancellors) have become entrepreneurs, risk takers, innovators and change makers (Marginson and Considine, 2000; Mautner, 2005; Wong et al., 2007). The impact of managerialism on univeristies and more directly on the management responsibilities and practices of VCs has dominated the public agenda for a while (McClenaghan, 1998). University management, changes to the Australian higher education environment and the impact this has on the role of the most senior executive officer, the VC, occupy the theme of this paper. In comparison to studies in the US and the UK, there is very little research devoted to the role of VCs in Australia. Although institutional studies emphasise the understanding of how entrepreneurs can impact and change institutions and their related fields (e.g. Greenwood et al., 2008; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), much less work examines how institutional entrepreneurs contribute to the creation of change and emergence of new institutions, and what they actually do to bring about change. This paper seeks to address these gaps.