Conflict and Organizational Culture in Universities

This book explains why conflict between the institutional and human agencies is an unavoidable outcome of competing local, national and global agendas at a major research university. It illustrates this by means of a case-study of Glonacal U, a university which belongs to the category of exceptional institutions that excel due to an established organizational culture of academic freedom, research excellence, shared governance, and intellectual leadership. The book shows how such a university may succumb to anxiety when neoliberal managers seek to exploit stakeholder doubts about university sufficiency, relevance, and performance in national and global markets and hierarchies of knowledge products and status goods. As top-down pressure for strategic choices in scientific partnerships increases at the world-class university, grassroots resistance to centralization increases also in order to remind the research university leaders that intellectual work and academic freedom are interdependent and central to building capacities for impactful global science. Productive global linkages are prerogative of academics who take full responsibility for success of project implementation and outcomes in scholarship and practice.