Academia and Crisis: Institutions, Governance, and Change (2028-2031)

Coordinators:

Elizabeth Buckner, University of Toronto, Canada
Gili S. Drori, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
David John Frank, University of California, Irvine, USA
Anna Kosmützky, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
Stephanie Mignot-Gérard, Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC), France
Simon Oertel, Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria
Linda Wedlin, Uppsala University, Sweden
This SWG provides a forum for theory-driven, comparative research on how universities and research organizations organize under crisis and contestation. It focuses on how governance arrangements, decision-making routines, and organizational practices emerge, adapt, or erode under pressure. Bridging organization studies, higher education research, and science studies/STS, it advances comparative, multi-level research that contributes to theory development on governance, coordination, and change, with relevance beyond higher education.

Academia is increasingly entangled in crisis dynamics: acute disruptions – geopolitical conflicts, pandemics, and attacks on academic freedom, diversity, and internationalization – combine with slower-moving yet consequential shifts in governance, funding, digitalization, and societal expectations. These pressures unfold across multiple levels, shaping everyday academic work and student experience (Teelken, 2012; Tight, 2024; Zhang et al., 2022), reconfiguring organizational subunits such as positions, departments, and research groups (Gerhardt et al., 2023; Oertel, 2018), and transforming universities and research organizations through governance, evaluation, and performance regimes (Townley, 1997; Gläser & Laudel, 2016). They also play out at the level of higher education systems and regional fields – for instance via mission, identity, and stratification dynamics (Mizrahi-Shtelman & Drori, 2020; Philippczyck et al., 2025; Seeber et al., 2019) – and at the level of the global academic field and its expanding organizational actorhood (Lee & Ramirez, 2023; Musselin, 2000, 2018; Schofer & Meyer, 2005; Zapp et al., 2021). Taken together, these multi-level dynamics make academia a particularly productive site for theory-driven, comparative research on organizing under crisis and contestation.

This Standing Working Group (SWG) provides a dedicated forum for examining how universities and research organizations navigate such pressures in increasingly unsettled and polarized societies, while explicitly connecting organization studies, higher education research, and science studies/STS to translate empirical insights into broader contributions to organization theory.

The SWG rests on two connected premises. First, academia occupies a paradoxical position: universities and scholars are expected to address pressing societal challenges while simultaneously facing political, economic, and cultural pressures that contest legitimacy, autonomy, and expertise. Second, universities are a classic – and currently re-energized – empirical site for organization studies. Since the 1960s, scholarship on universities as organizations has generated foundational concepts, and it continues to illuminate why particular structures and practices are adopted, persist, or disappear, and how universities shape – and are shaped by – broader organizational fields (Reed & Burrell, 2018; Musselin, 2021). Against this backdrop, the SWG focuses on organizing and governance under conditions of contestation, asking how universities respond to societal polarization while maintaining legitimate forms of governance; which coordination and decision-making routines emerge, adapt, or disappear under crisis pressures; and how organizational change is patterned across contexts. A core ambition of the SWG is to build an intellectually vibrant and inclusive community that bridges three research traditions that too often develop in parallel: organization studies, higher education research, and science studies/STS (Musselin, 2014; Hamann & Kosmützky, 2021).

The SWG fosters theoretical pluralism (including institutional theory, behavioral and contingency perspectives, strategy research, and critical approaches) alongside methodological diversity. The SWG also foregrounds the methodological challenge of studying fast-moving, politicized phenomena in academic organizations and actively encourages exchange on appropriate approaches (e.g., process and comparative designs; computational text methods; administrative/archival data; mixed methods).

In doing so, the SWG aims not only to advance knowledge about academia, but also to use academia as a lens for refining central organizational concepts such as legitimacy, authority, professional work, institutional complexity, and organizational resilience – contributing to ongoing debates about theorizing and theory development in organization studies (Cornelissen, Höllerer, & Seidl, 2021; Leone, Mantere, & Faraj, 2021).

Based on this research agenda, several guiding research questions for the SWG emerge:

  • How do universities and research organizations organize under societal polarization—navigating expectations of neutrality, safeguarding academic freedom, and sustaining legitimate forms of governance?

  • Which governance, coordination, and decision-making routines emerge, adapt, or disappear under crisis conditions, and what comparative patterns across countries, sectors, disciplines, and organizational forms explain variation in organizational responses?

  • How and why do organizational structures and practices in universities persist, change, or decline over time – and under what conditions do particular structural forms become institutionalized while others remain unstable or disappear from higher education systems?

  • Which methodological strategies are best suited to capturing fast-moving and politicized organizational phenomena in academia (e.g., process designs, comparative approaches, computational text methods, and mixed methods)?

  • How can established organizational theories be extended or revised in light of contemporary evidence from higher education research and science studies/STS—and what does research on academia contribute back to core debates in organization theory?
     

The SWG is designed to be cumulative. Over 2028–2031, the planned EGOS sub-theme trajectory is:

  • 2028: Academia and Crises: Organizational Responses to Geopolitical Crises and Nationalism

  • 2029: Structures and Practices of Organizing Universities: Adoption, Persistence, and Change

  • 2030: Organizing for Sustainability in Higher Education

  • 2031: Academia and the Crisis of Truth: Organizing amidst Uncertainty

In addition to the annual sub-theme, the SWG is committed to community-building and capacity development, with a particular focus on supporting the next generation of scholarship in this area. It will host pre-Colloquium get-togethers to welcome newcomers and strengthen continuity, contribute to EGOS PhD pre-Colloquium mentoring (as needed and in coordination with EGOS), and provide structured early-career support through mentoring relationships.

The SWG will also organize Pre-Colloquium Development Workshops (PDWs) aligned with the respective annual theme, including a PDW with journal editors to support publishing across fields; PDWs on methodological topics (e.g., comparative and multi-level research designs, text-mining methodologies); and a PDW introducing alternative strands of institutional theory. In addition, the SWG pursues a clear output strategy, aiming to produce at least one peer-reviewed Special Issue (or equivalent edited collection) over the four-year period, complemented by community showcase formats and shared resources.


 

References

  • Cornelissen, J., Höllerer, M. A., & Seidl, D. (2021). What theory is and can be: Forms of theorizing in organizational scholarship. Organization Theory, 2(3).
  • Gerhardt, L. M., Goldenstein, J., Oertel, S., Poschmann, P., & Walgenbach, P. (2023). The managerialization of higher education in Germany and its consequences: Changes in job advertisements for professorships in German universities, 1990 to 2010. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (pp. 59–85). Emerald Publishing Limited.
  • Gläser, J., & Laudel, G. (2016). Governing science: How science policy shapes research content. European Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 117–168.
  • Hamann, J., & Kosmützky, A. (2021). Does higher education research have a theory deficit? Explorations on theory work. European Journal of Higher Education, 11(1), 468–488.
  • Lee, S. L., & Ramirez, F. O. (2023). Globalization of universities as organizational actors. In K. Sahlin & U. Eriksson-Zetterquist (Eds.), University collegiality and the erosion of faculty authority (pp. 87–104). Emerald Publishing Limited.
  • Leone, P. V., Mantere, S., & Faraj, S. (2021). Open theorizing in management and organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 46(4), 725–749.
  • Mizrahi-Shtelman, R., & Drori, G. S. (2020). World-rank and/or locally relevant? Organizational identity in the mission statements of higher education organizations in Israel, 2008–2018. Minerva, 59(1), 1–25.
  • Musselin, C. (2000). Do we compare societies when we compare national university systems? In M. Maurice & A. Sorge (Eds.), Embedding organizations: Societal analysis of actors, organizations, and socio-economic context (pp. 295–309). John Benjamins.
  • Musselin, C. (2014). Research issues and institutional prospects for higher education studies. Studies in Higher Education, 39(8), 1369–1380.
  • Musselin, C. (2018). New forms of competition in higher education. Socio-Economic Review, 16(3), 657–683.
  • Musselin, C. (2021). University governance in meso and macro perspectives. Annual Review of Sociology, 47, 305–325.
  • Oertel, S. (2018). The role of imprinting on the adoption of diversity management in German universities. Public Administration, 96(1), 104–118.
  • Philippczyck, N., Hoffmann, H., & Oertel, S. (2025). The role of institutional factors in shaping university mission statements: A topic-modeling approach. Public Administration Review. 85(4), 1187-1216.
  • Reed, M., & Burrell, G. (2019). Theory and organization studies: The need for contestation. Organization Studies, 40(1), 39–54.
  • Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2005). The worldwide expansion of higher education in the twentieth century. American Sociological Review, 70(6), 898–920.
  • Seeber, M., Barberio, V., Huisman, J., & Mampaey, J. (2019). Factors affecting the content of universities’ mission statements: An analysis of the United Kingdom higher education system. Studies in Higher Education, 44(2), 230–244.
  • Teelken, C. (2012). Compliance or pragmatism: How do academics deal with managerialism in higher education? A comparative study in three countries. Studies in Higher Education, 37(3), 271–290.
  • Tight, M. (2024). The crisis literature in higher education. Higher Education Quarterly, 78(4), e12504.
  • Townley, B. (1997). The institutional logic of performance appraisal. Organization Studies, 18(2), 261–285.
  • Zapp, M., Jungblut, J., & Ramirez, F. O. (2021). Legitimacy, stratification, and internationalization in global higher education: The case of the International Association of Universities. Tertiary Education and Management, 27(1), 1–15.
  • Zhang, L., Carter, R. A., Jr., Qian, X., Yang, S., Rujimora, J., & Wen, S. (2022). Academia’s responses to crisis: A bibliometric analysis of literature on online learning in higher education during COVID-19. British Journal of Educational Technology, 53(3), 620–646.