The Structure of University Governance in Canada: A Policy Network Approach

Abstract

Research on higher education governance in the United States and Canada has tended to emphasize the importance of a number of analytical approaches (Birnbaum 1988; Hardy 1990; Pusser and Ordorika 2001). While these approaches are frequently discussed as ‘models’ of higher education governance, they are perhaps best understood as different organisational frames or analytical lenses. The bureaucratic frame, for example, applies Weber’s characteristics of bureaucracy to the university setting in order to illustrate a rational arrangement of hierarchical authority relationships (Stroup 1966). The collegial frame begins with the assumption that the university can be understood as a community of scholars where decisions are made by consensus (Goodman 1962; Millet 1962), while the political frame described by Baldridge (1971) assumes that the university is a pluralistic entity where the decision making process involves a competition between competing individual and group interests. Other analytical frames have included organised anarchy (Cohen and March 1974), professional bureaucracy (Mintzberg 1991), and ‘mixed models’ that attempt to combine different frames and/or relate these frames to theories of organisational culture (Hardy 1990; Pusser and Ordorika 2001). While each of these frames contributes to our understanding of different ways of understanding university governance and decision making, the utility of each approach in the empirical analysis of university governance is limited since each begins with a template of normative characteristics. What one sees depends on the lens that one has chosen to look through, and yet many observers have noted that elements of each frame can be found in the same institution.