British Journal of Management, Vol.

20, 524–536 (2009)

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2008.00593.x

Private and Public Sector Models for

Strategies in Universities*
Roger Buckland
Accountancy and Finance, Aberdeen University Business School, Edward Wright Building, Dunbar Street,
Aberdeen AB24 3QY, UK
Email: r.buckland@abdn.ac.uk

Increasing formalization of disciplined management of UK universities over the last 30

years has been accompanied by moves to articulate universities’ strategies, by attempts to
connect organizations’ plans and management of activity to those strategies and by a desire
to measure how well outcomes are fitted to universities’ goals. In this complex change in
the orientation of universities’ management, lessons have been drawn from the con-
temporary development of the analysis of strategy and strategic process in commercial
and, latterly, in public sector settings. It is argued that there have been very significant
errors and weaknesses in the importation of such models of strategy, especially in the stress
on strategic planning rather than strategic process and in the insensitivity of universities’
planning to the underlying strategy process of the typical university. Most universities, it is
argued, mistake planning – and even budgeting – for strategy itself, having failed to make
proper sense of their own organizations’ processes of generating strategies and putting
them into practice. They have typically missed the crucial context of strategy and change.
It is argued that there are crucial lessons to be learned from recent advances in theorizing
about strategy in the private or commercial sector, particularly in relation to the
development of modelling complex and path-dependent systems; and it is argued strongly
that universities’ strategic process can fruitfully be analysed through the perspectives of
real options analysis. This can also accommodate the richness of universities’ traditions
of strategy formation and implementation within ‘loose-coupled ’ organizations.

Strategy and its place in university
management
In understanding how and why organizations are
created and run, the management literature has
tended to stratify their control and direction,
segregating the operational activity of the orga-
nization – policy or tactics – from the direction
and control of its purposes – strategy.1 Thus
*The comments and insights of colleagues, especially
Professors Michael Shattock, Ron Barnett and Gareth
Williams, Dr Paul Temple and Professor Lorna McKee,
are gratefully acknowledged, as are the valuable com-
ments of two anonymous referees; remaining errors are,
of course, my responsibility.
1
See, for example, Mintzberg (1987) or Quinn (1980).
Whittington (2001) provides a summary of the main
traditions.
strategy is associated with how the activities of
the organization are selected to be consistent with
its objectives and purposes. This ‘higher-level’
strategic management enables the organization to
avoid infeasible management tasks, such as the
appraisal of all potential activities using its
resource endowment. It also permits the organi-
zation to identify the resources appropriate to
desired strategies, without, again, testing their
suitability against all feasible actions.
Strategy, then, is fundamentally associated with
how organizations confront and shape complex
realities: with how they use ‘bounded rationality’
to solve otherwise infeasible problems (Cyert and
March, 1963; see also Simon, 1996). The concept
is universal in that, by default, all organizations
have strategies by which complex environments
are confronted. Survivor organizations, in this

r 2008 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford
OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
Strategies in Universities
perspective, have ‘successful’ strategies and are
likely to have their patterns of behaviour copied,
until such time as organizational clones fail and
thus discredit the contemporary model of best
practice. Such Darwinian selection of superior
performers characterizes almost all recorded
history. What modern strategy literature at-
tempts to do is to understand the generation,
patterning, implementation and review of strate-
gies, with a view to generating several normative
outcomes.2
First, by a formal study of strategy, some ‘best
practice’ strategy might be more quickly and
reliably identified, its relation to suitable envir-
onments clarified and its implementation adapted
for other organizations facing collateral environ-
ments. Such reflective organizations try to
enhance their probable survival. Second, organi-
zations may better understand their strategic
environment, their resource capabilities and the
potential strategies with which to confront their
environment, again leading to better-informed
selection of a more refined and apposite strategy.
Third, the implementation of existing or of novel
strategies may be improved, with conscious
feedback of the review of outcomes into strategic
change and organizational renewal.
Since all organizations entail strategies and
may survive by their choice of strategy, superior
prowess at the tasks of strategic analysis, selec-
tion, implementation, review and change is likely
to produce conditions where more value can be
created, competition can be resisted, and com-
parative advantages can be sustained.3 Hence
much attention to the study of strategy derives
from a search for models of better strategy, for
the transference of strategic success from one
organization to another. This paper addresses
whether the study of strategy in the private and
public sectors offers lessons for universities, or
2 its fulfilment of mission.
The tradition deployed here is an ‘evolutionary’ theory
of strategy; ‘classical’ strategy would suggest a planning
perspective. See Whittington (2001, ch. 2).
3
These may be frustrated, however, by operational
failures, by management or organizational slack, or by
the pursuit of other organizational objectives. In the
processual tradition of strategy – still more in the
sociological, or systemic, tradition – strategy processes
are not necessarily associated with ‘good’ performance,
or with creation of comparative advantage (Mintzberg,
Ahlstrand and Lampel, 1998; Whittington, 2001).
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525
whether, in contrast, universities are strategically
unique and distinct, with peculiar strategic
issues (or, as for Barnett (2000), characterized
by implacable and irresolvable problems of
strategic management). In the next section, core
issues of strategy are clarified, separating key
concepts of strategic planning from strategic
process and demonstrating the applicability of
strategy concepts to the modern university
organization.
This is followed in the third section by a critical
examination of how concepts of strategy have
been imported into UK universities, focusing on
the concern with strategic planning and the
neglect of concern with enhancement of the
strategy process. In this section we analyse how
the nature of strategizing in universities interacts
with the modelling of the strategy process. As
well as examining the use of private and public
sector organizational models, the experience of
other university systems, in the USA, Australia
and elsewhere in Europe, is considered.
In subsequent sections this critical examination
is extended to highlight, first, the importance of
contextual understanding in the analysis of
strategy, central to the transference of models
from one sector to another. Second, the role of
the contemporary analysis of leadership and
followership is addressed, showing how experi-
ence in both private and public sector settings is
instructive for better strategizing in universities.
Third, we consider how modern derivatives
analysis can be applied in the understanding of
universities’ strategy, showing how the concepts
of real options might radically improve the
strategy process for universities, in light of their
complex environments and production function.
The paper concludes by showing how such an
approach can reconcile the organizational com-
plexities of universities with the capacity to
formulate and implement strategy as a major
element of a university’s competitive success and
Strategy, strategic planning and the
strategy process
‘Strategic’ management activity in organizations
was developed as a concept in the 1960s by
analysts of the General Motors Corporation in
the USA (see, for example, Chandler, 1962;
526
Sloan, 1963). Their rationalist perspective sug-
gested that this high-level management function
is about uncovering and implementing the high-
level institutional plans by which enlightened
management can achieve greater stakeholder
(shareholder) returns. Identifying the ‘right’
strategy, gaining organizational adherence to it
and organizing its attainment represent the core
of this ‘classical’ perspective.
While powerful, coherent and consistent with
the economic orthodoxy of rational wealth
maximization, this rationalist (and determinist)
model dominated for only a brief period. While
legitimating the position of the burgeoning
managerial ‘class’ in US society, it failed empiri-
cally either to account for the history of ‘non-
strategy’ or to explain the complexities of
strategic opportunities, choice and outcomes.
While articulation of strategy in strategic plans
may be needed for implementation, such plans
are not, in themselves, strategy. Strategy is,
rather, a process whereby organizational activity
is managed such that it is aligned, more or less,
with the expression of the organization’s goals
and objectives, enabling the organization to
deliver value to its various stakeholders. In the
processual school of strategy, strategies are
contingent on organizational history, internally
contested and emergent4 from the patterns of
organizations’ choices and experiences. Mintz-
berg, Ahlstrand and Lampel (1998) draw out
these distinctions in their seminal discussion of
the varied perspectives on the nature of strategy –
the conceptualization of the ‘elephant’ – where
they establish how the complexities of support for
the function of strategy require both contextual
understanding and processual modelling. They lie
also at the heart of the development of the
resource-based view (RBV) of strategy by Wer-
nerfelt (1984), Peteraf (1993) and Teece, Pisano
and Sheen (1997),5 in which contextualization
and particularization of the process of strategy is
placed at the centre of strategic analysis.
4
As outlined in Quinn’s ‘logical incrementalism’ (Quinn,
1980); see also Eisenhardt (1999); the ‘realized pattern of
emergent strategy’ of Hax and Majluf (1996); the
‘intelligent opportunism’ of Liedtka (1998); the ‘activ-
ity-based’ strategy in Miller, Wilson and Hickson (2004);
and, in the context of strategy in complex, non-private
organizations, Pettigrew, Ferlie and McKee (1992).
5
An excellent collation of key contributions to the RBV
is given by Foss (1997).
R. Buckland
Contemporary analysis of strategy, therefore,
has moved far beyond the early notions of heroic
management, or of strategy as plan. Context,
culture and process are placed alongside evalua-
tion and leadership as central to the under-
standing of how strategy is formed, emerges and
is implemented (Wall and Wall, 1995). Arthur
(1989) further articulates formally how strategies
are necessarily developed within a path-dependent
environment. For Arthur, however complex the
environment, the central feature and problem of
the analysis of strategy is that the organization
lies at a position defined and contingent on its
history, facing futures that are also contingent,
but upon future decisions that are yet to be taken,
even yet to be conceived. Strategy is thus at once
immensely complex and also unique, implying the
impossibility of any ‘rational’ selection of an
‘optimal’ strategy. This concept of path depen-
dence in the emergence of strategy is built upon
further by contributors such as Sanchez (1993)
and by Dixit and Pindyck (1995), who view
strategies in terms of the organization’s apprecia-
tion of the value of options.6 In the next section
we consider how these developments have been
reflected in strategic thinking about universities
and in the practice of strategy in universities.
The use of strategic modelling in UK
universities
The planning model and its limitations: coupling
and complexity
In any evolutionary perspective of organizations,
universities display quite exceptional organiza-
tional survival (some have endured since mediae-
val times and many over several centuries). They
have adapted and changed to operate within both
benign and hostile environments. One would
expect the patterning of their ‘strategy’ through
that time to reflect the behaviours that have led to
such survival. In terms of the formalization of
either ‘management’ or ‘strategizing’, however,
universities have been latecomers to the table: if
the early 1960s saw the birth of strategic planning
6
For a summary, see Amram and Kulatilaka (1999).
These perspectives on strategy are now mainstream: see
Levinthal and March (1993), Rutterford (1998) or
Darragh and Campbell (2001), for example.
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Strategies in Universities
in the corporate world, it was some 15 years or
more before ‘strategy’ was being placed at the
heart of university reform. In the UK, univer-
sities’ strategy was critically appraised in the
Jarratt Report (Jarratt, 1985); and through to the
end of the century successive sector reviews
became increasingly critical of the quality of
UK universities’ attention to strategic planning
(Dearing, 1997; Shattock, 2000; Thomas, 1996;
Watson, 2000). Only since the turn of the century
have the UK funding councils prioritized strate-
gic planning in their advice to institutions (see,
for example, HEFCE, 1998, 2000; Scottish
Executive, 2003, 2004; SHEFC, 1999, 2002).
(More widely, the OECD (2007) documents
how many societies have sought to embed
‘strategy’ in their higher education systems.)
The analysis of strategizing contained in such
documents and reviews betrays their roots in the
identification of ‘strategy’ with planning and, by
extension, with measurement, control and man-
agement. As Watson summarizes the position in
2000:
Now, however, ‘strategic plans’ are de rigeur,7 and
most institutional planning processes are carefully
constructed around what they perceive as funding
council ‘requirements’ and what the FCs [the
funding councils] in turn call ‘advice’ or ‘best
practice’. (Watson, 2000, p. 46 – author’s italics)
Such bureaucratic capture of strategic manage-
ment – by funding councils and, internally in
universities, by management – signifies several
facets of the processes of strategy in contempor-
ary UK universities. First, the common, domi-
nant model of strategic planning, used as a
simulacrum of strategic management, avoids
any close analysis of existing strategy process. It
invites a top-down modelling of strategy, con-
sistent with the analyses by Jarratt and Dearing
that the sector required firmer central direction
and location of strategic leadership and account-
ability, in the person of the chief executive.
There is little or no evidence, however, that
strategic analysis, or the coherence of the strategy
process in UK universities, has advanced or
become more prominent. Deem and Brehony, for
example, report in their Economic and Social
Research Council sponsored research that
7
Italics in original.
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527
the features of ‘new managerialism’ most evident in
UK higher education appeared to be: changes to
the funding environment, academic work and
workloads; . . . more emphasis on team work in
both teaching and research, partly in response to
external audit; the introduction of cost centres to
university departments or faculties; greater internal
and external surveillance of the performance of
academics; and an increase in the proportion of
managers, both career administrators and manager-
academics, in universities. (Deem and Brehony,
2005, p. 225)
No mention is found here of pervasive concern
with enhanced strategic performance. As the
authors conclude: ‘Empowerment was scarcely
mentioned by any respondents’ (Deem and
Brehony, 2005, p. 225).
Second, planning is put at the centre of the
strategy process, inviting adoption of a failed
private sector view of strategy into institutions
that had hitherto signally avoided the instabilities
and short strategic trajectories of private sector
organizations. Professional production and re-
view of the plan, with target measures of strategic
objectives, becomes the goal, imposing upon
strategy formation rather than analysing it (see,
for example, HEFCE, 2004).
Third, planning avoids consideration of fit with
the characteristics of universities as professiona-
lized, ‘loose-coupled’8 organizations. The latter
issue has been addressed widely in the US
literature on strategy and strategic change (e.g.
in Birnbaum, 1991, 2001, 2004; Clark, 1972,
2004; Davies, 1987; Dill, 1996; Eckel and Kezar,
2002, 2003; Hardy, 1991; Kezar, 2004; Sporn,
1999). It has not yet significantly penetrated the
analysis of strategic management in UK uni-
versities, although Jarzabkowski (2003) and
Shattock (2004) make some strides towards the
recognition of culture and context in strategic
management. Loose-coupled organizations have
a ‘cell’ structure for strategy, whereby interior
teams, individuals or segments can devise,
8
Loose-coupling describes organizations which operate
without fixed ‘machine’ relationships of their constituent
parts and where actions and processes across and within
the organization may change, progress (or decline),
without overt initiative or control from other, loose-
coupled parts (see Glassman, 1973; Weick, 1976); the
concept is taken up by Mintzberg, Hardy and others in
developing their critiques of the planning school in the
analysis of strategy.
528
innovate, implement and experience strategic
success or failure without coherence with or
compromise of other interior strategic units. For
example, there may be research teams attempting
breakthroughs in medical research, but within a
portfolio of loosely connected research initiatives
the success or failure of their work will not
compromise other teams’ abilities to strive for
novel strategy, nor is the degree of their success
related directly to the resourcing of continued
activity. The contingent and emergent nature of
their activities is such that teams are inherently
unable to articulate strategic outcomes, only
strategic potential; and the role of the university
is to shape, resource, support and manage such
strategic potential such that the loose-coupled
units thrive, deliver and reproduce themselves.
‘Unfortunately, organizations continue to think
that planning is a good thing, they spend much
time on planning, and actions are assessed in
terms of their fit with plans . . . administrators are
baffled and angered when things never happen
the way they were supposed to’ (Weick, 1976,
p. 4; also Orton and Weick, 1990).9
It may be that Weick’s analysis of loose-
coupling in the higher education business process
is not a universal, even necessary, element of our
understanding of a strategically sound university.
It might be argued that it is differentially
applicable to, say, the research-intensive institu-
tion, with less or low relevance for the teaching or
applied knowledge segments of higher education.
It might be argued that it was relevant merely in
conditions of resource abundance (as, for exam-
ple, in the era of the munificent treatment of UK
universities under the University Grants Com-
mittee: see Shattock, 2000; or Taylor, 2003). In
this perspective, loose-coupling is itself a con-
tingency; and it is the combination of funding
pressures and systemic complexity that necessi-
9
‘Loose-coupling’ implies, among other things, that the
strategy process must be bottom-up, albeit that resource
constraints impose selectivity at the ‘steering core’
amongst projects from the ‘academic heartland’. It
may well be that the imperatives to decentralization of
strategy are less acute in universities with less reliance on
research activities: for example, it might be argued that
teaching institutions are close(r) to ‘machine’ than to
‘loose-coupled’ knowledge-based organizations. Impor-
tantly, management structures do not cause loose-
coupling or the machine state: rather they should reflect
the underlying reality of the business process.
R. Buckland
tated a shift to planning and central leadership of
the strategy process (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007).
However, this argument fails to explain the
historical persistence of the disaggregated, loose-
coupled model in such a range of systems
internationally; nor does it explain the research
evidence of its prevalence, ranging from the
mixed-economy US sector (Clark, 2004; Eckel
and Kezar, 2003) to the state-dominated Eur-
opean models (Meister-Scheytt and Scheytt,
2005; Pettersen and Solstad, 2007). The research
evidence on change at the strategic level in
universities also suggests firmly that the linear,
‘academic capitalism’ model is a poor tool for the
understanding of strategy and change (e.g.
Bleiklie, 2004; Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; Meis-
ter-Scheytt and Scheytt, 2005; Navarro and
Gallardo, 2003). That evidence rather shows
change to be ‘more or less accidental and chaotic,
by the notion that change processes in univer-
sities are basically paradoxical’ (Meister-Scheytt
and Scheytt, 2005, p. 88 – their italics): more,
rather than less, complexity of analysis is needed
(as argued, for example, by Pritchard and
Willmott, 1997; Trowler, 2001).
The contemporary UK environment is, rather,
informed by a consultancy-led approach, as
epitomized in the RSM Robson Rhodes survey
‘Instituting Strategy’ (2003) or the PA Consulting
Group report ‘Survival of the Fittest’ (2004). Here
the classic symptoms of the failure of the strategic
planning approach are noted: ‘the strategic
planning process, in such an environment, be-
comes more of a chore and a form-filling exercise
than a tool for real improvement’; and ‘Although
the quality of strategic thought was no doubt
high, we believed that institutions had failed to
engage in, or focus upon, the achievement of
those strategic goals’; ‘It is not sufficient for senior
management alone to be motivated towards
strategic achievement’ (all from Robson Rhodes,
2003, pp. 5, 12). The impetus for and the shape of
plans were seen as framed by funding council
demands and prescriptions, not by emerging
strategies or the horizons of activity (Robson
Rhodes, 2003, p. 8); strategy was self-reported as
a ‘high-level’ activity, perceived as separate from
the ‘day job’ by respondents in university
management as well as by the consultants
(Robson Rhodes, 2003, p. 13). Correctives in
the Robson Rhodes report are vague, however:
better communication; extended involvement of
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Strategies in Universities
management in the planning process (Robson
Rhodes, 2003, p. 7); better management informa-
tion systems (Robson Rhodes, 2003, p. 14; see
also Universities UK, 2004). At no point do these
documents address the core issue: that universi-
ties’ strategies arise and derive from the ‘day job’
itself, not from a superimposed activity of
‘strategy’; and that the critical organizational
imperative is to foster, nurture, corral and
implement the best and most robust such embryo
strategies, in internal and external competition.
It may appear that progressive thought on
strategic management in the private sector has
failed to transfer to universities, but this has to be
heavily qualified. As already noted, the strategic
planning perspective on strategy adopted so
enthusiastically by UK universities since 1985
harks back to a largely discredited ‘private sector’
analysis of strategy. It is, as Whittington noted in
early editions of his classic text, a ‘classical’
strategy model, now largely superseded in con-
temporary private sector strategy analysis by
more robust and sophisticated modelling (Miller,
Wilson and Hickson, 2004; Whittington, 2001,
ch. 2). Processual analysis has a great deal to
offer to universities. For example, the application
of configurative approaches to strategy in US
universities is of long standing (Hardy, 1991) and
has informed the thorough-going strategic ap-
praisal of systems such as that conducted for
the California State University (Hearn, 1996;
Rowley, Lujan and Dolence, 1997; Tierney,
2000). In the USA, the strategy debate is closely
bound together with continued awareness and
analysis of the ‘shared governance’ imperative,
which tends to bind all levels of the organization
into strategizing and accountability (see, for
example, Birnbaum, 2004; Clark, 2004; Dill,
1996; Kezar, 2004). In Europe, while Shattock
and Davies give cogent accounts of the centrality
of organizational culture in the development of
Clark’s entrepreneurialism (Davies, 2001; Shat-
tock, 2000), they provide no new research or case
base; other recent contributions focus on external
environmental pressures, rather than on internal
strategy process (e.g. Gornitzka and Maasen,
2000; Joyce, 2000). Some contributions are ap-
pearing, however, which embrace the complexity
of the strategy process in knowledge-based
organizations, as in Navarro and Gallardo’s
(2003) study in Spain, Bleiklie’s (2004) work on
Scandinavia, or Meister-Scheytt and Scheytt’s
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529
(2005) for Austria, constructing the strategy
process as an ‘organized paradox’.
The public sector and strategy within New Public
Management
If private sector modelling has proved inadequate
as a modelling toolkit for universities, there may
be scope within analyses of strategizing and
management in the public sector. The reappraisal
of models for the public sector parallels the
evolution of strategic modelling for private sector
organizations. The administrative bureaucracies
of the public sector in the early and mid twentieth
century have been challenged and superseded by
innovative approaches to marrying public activ-
ities with private contracting of services; and by
management of public sector objectives rather
than political negotiation and direction of their
activity. Such challenge to the settlement of an
administrative solution to organization across
public sector activity is known now as the ‘New
Public Management’ (NPM; see Ferlie, 2001;
Hood, 1995; Pollitt, 1993; Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2000). NPM would seem to be apposite to the
traditional, administered organization in higher
education, the more so where the state is
historically more closely and directly involved in
the system, as in continental Europe. There is
certainly much carry over of contextual detail,
such as the multiple and diffuse stakeholders,
widespread market failure and the endemic issues
of problematic outcome measurement.
On the other hand, the centring of NPM on the
reform of contracting and on the promotion of
efficiency and effectiveness by the stimulation of
competition, market exposure and performance
targets takes its relevance primarily from line-
managed, close-coupled, ‘machine’ organizations.
NPM is thus often described as neo-Taylorist
(Pollitt, 1993, p. 188), operating by tightening
line management and by using market forces and
incentive structures to squeeze out slack. In this it
has close affinity to ‘managerialism’ (Deem, 1998;
Deem and Brehony, 2005; Reed and Deem, 2002;
Trow, 1993). NPM is top-down and aprocessual
and it is thus inherently poorly equipped to
inform management at the level of strategy, or
the strategy process (see Ferlie et al., 1996,
especially chapters 5 and 6 on the ‘strategic apex’
and NPM). In contrast, empirical investigation of
change in public sector organizations emphasizes
530
the need for processual understanding rather
than for the effectiveness of planning procedures
(Pettigrew, Ferlie and McKee, 1992). Ferlie sums
up this facet of NPM as ‘quasi-strategy’ and it fits
with Whittington’s suggestion that the formaliza-
tion of ‘strategic management’ in the public
sector may be a systemic move, buttressing the
legitimation of professionalized management,
rather than a reflection of the development of
those organizations’ underlying strategic pro-
cesses (Ferlie, 2001; Whittington, 2001). Pollitt
suggests that the public sector has specialized
needs within strategic planning (Pollitt, 1993, p.
159; see also Backoff and Nutt, 1988): needs
which are characteristically more processual than
those in private sector planning, and where the
balance between formal and relational contract-
ing lies further towards the relational (Lewis,
1988). Reed and Deem’s analysis of NPM in the
universities context suggests that the marriage of
NPM and the university context has also been
dysfunctional for the strategy process: ‘cultural
re-engineering of UK higher education has
clearly been attempted but . . . it may be that it
restricts the thinking potential of university staff
rather than freeing them up to think about new
ways of running higher education’ (Reed and
Deem, 2002, p. 144).
Entrepreneurialism and the European context
Paradoxically, the development in ‘entrepreneur-
ial’ strategy in the private sector – built around
leadership and power cultures and often associated
with individualistic, visionary managers, domi-
nating a subservient organization (Mintzberg,
Ahlstrand and Lampel, 1998, ch. 5) – is mirrored
by a contemporaneous emphasis on entrepre-
neurialism as a core strategy for universities.
Here, however, the private and university sector
interpretations could not be more different. For
Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel the entrepre-
neur is quintessentially a visionary leader, a loner
who carries the strategy of the organization by
force of leadership (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and
Lampel, 1998, ch. 5). Davies, on the other hand,
has devised a concept of the ‘entrepreneurial
university’ as a reconciliation of the shift to more
active ‘management’ with the maintenance of
‘bottom-up’ strategy formation, through systemic
devising, resourcing, implementing and delivering
R. Buckland
of visionary strategy (Davies, 1987; also Clark,
1998).
In the private sector, this form of entrepre-
neurial behaviour would be analysed as ‘intra-
preneurship’ (Oden, 1997) and it would be
focused on the fostering of the corporate culture:
management of a process, not of a structure or
plan. Davies goes so far as to identify his notion
of entrepreneurialism with the commercialization
of the university, suggesting that the cultures
must coincide if strategy is to be truly entrepre-
neurial (Davies, 2001, p. 29). In universities, the
conditions for ‘success’ of the entrepreneurial
model, as proposed by Davies and as reviewed
since by others (e.g. Clark, 1998, 2004; Shattock,
2000, 2004; Sporn, 1999), have focused upon
 facilitative structures of central decision (stra-
tegic appraisal and project support);
 access to resourcing (an internalized ‘venture
capital’ function fed by a diversified funding
base); and, strongly,
 the fostering of strategy formation at the
academic periphery.
The private sector does again provide models
for universities here: the centralization of re-
source and its use in selective financing of the
periphery, familiar elements in strategic manage-
ment of the M-form corporation, invites a cross-
over to the setting of the university. However,
there needs to be more research into how far
intrapreneurship in the relatively close-coupled, if
multi-divisional, private corporation is a relevant
model for the entrepreneurial nature of strategy in
the loose-coupled university. (Or, indeed, how
intrapreneurship in private-sector knowledge-
based enterprises can be informed by study of
the strategy process within loose-coupled uni-
versities.) Clark argues strongly that examples of
leading, beacon universities across Europe, in-
cluding Warwick in the UK and Twente in the
Netherlands, demonstrate the validity of his key
conditions for success (Clark, 1998). However, as
Shattock (2000) argues, strategic planning has
become a vital activity for all universities as
(government) funding has shrunk and become
more responsive and competitive. It remains to
be seen whether this results in better strategy in,
or merely leaner management of, the sector.
r 2008 British Academy of Management.
Strategies in Universities
Three key areas of concern: context,
leadership and contingency
In drawing the threads of this argument together,
three key areas of concern over strategic thinking
in universities are highlighted. The first has
already been widely foreshadowed above. To
date, the development of universities’ strategizing
has been largely devoid of the incorporation and
analysis of context and process, analysis that is
known from private sector studies to be vital in
the effectiveness of strategic analysis. The most
glaring aspect of this contextual blindness is in
the sector’s extensive adoption of a planning-
centred model that now defines UK universities’
depiction of strategy. The blandness, similarity
and empty content of mission statements, visions
and aspirations across the sector noted by
Watson (2000) is one product of this: masking
the variation in institutional contexts, histories,
resources and capabilities by an almost universal
search for ‘excellence’ in all things.10 Whitting-
ton’s typology of strategy would suggest that this
results from the use of strategic planning in the
search for legitimacy and meaning by key internal
stakeholders in the system: by the evolving
managerial tier in universities, by the bureau-
cracies of funding councils and of collective
bodies such as Universities UK.
A second – and more hopeful – concern lies
with the centrality of leadership to the formation,
choice and implementation of strategy. Leader-
ship has always been fundamental to universities’
strategic success, but in the context of academic
leadership and its responsibility for the progres-
sive innovation of thought, research, teaching
and learning that would build the university’s
reputation in areas of study and advance its
reputation amongst peers and stakeholders. The
management of university leadership has, of
course, varied widely across systems. Continental
European models of professorial patronage,
natural science models of research teams, the
UK humanities’ focus on the lone, reflective
researcher, the archetype of the tyrannical
departmental professor-head, the habitual selec-
tion of university vice-chancellors/principals
10
In a survey of 46 UK universities’ website statements
of their vision, mission and strategy, ‘excellence’ appears
as the key element 29 times; ‘international recognition’
13 times; ‘world-class’ appears nine times.
r 2008 British Academy of Management.
531
from established academics: all such stereotypes
reflect an unresolved search for effective strategic
leadership within the loose-coupled, professiona-
lized university.
Amongst the current fad for strategic planning,
the UK sector’s concern for enhanced leadership
skills, training and involvement for staff is
welcome and timely11 (see, for example, Bargh
et al., 2000; Cutright, 2001; Middlehurst, 1993;
Ramsden, 1998). It can also be informed by
experience with the involvement of professionals
in management in other sectors, notably in
healthcare, where there is a long history of
clinical and practitioner involvement in the
management as well as the delivery of services
(see, for example, Alimo–Metcalfe and Alban–
Metcalfe, 2003; McKee, Marnoch and Dinnie,
2000; McKee et al., 1997). This mirrors the shift
from administration to management of activity
and of strategy. The interaction with the capacity
to develop the university as a Clark-style
entrepreneurial organization is clear and urgent.
However, as yet there is little attention in the
sector literature on the importance of the parallel
concept of followership: ‘leadership is also about
followership’ (Pettigrew, 1998, p. 285) and ‘there
is no bad leadership without bad followership’
(Kellerman, 2004). The issues are not only how to
encourage, train, reward and manage good
leaders, but how to enable teams with followers
and leaders to operate, generate succession and
deliver and implement strategic change (see also
Mallon, 2004; Schein, 1985; Schneider, 2000, for
more discussion, in both private and university
settings). One also awaits evidence of the
systematic and thoroughgoing implementation
of staff development in intrapreneurship, team-
working and strategic management within uni-
versities’ human resource practices.
The third aspect highlighted here is the most
neglected of the three critical concerns: the
importance of contingency. Strategies are not
merely contextual in their management, they are
contextual in their formation, relevance and
impact. ‘Good’ strategy derives from the history
of resources, from the field of competitors and
from the future decisions of the organization, its
11
As in the creation of the Leadership Foundation, or
the priority given to initiatives such as HESDA’s Top
Management Programme on Strategic Change (HES-
DA, 2004).
532
competitors and its clients. Thus contingency of
action is pervasive and hugely significant at the
strategic level. It makes strategy ‘difficult’, of
course, by contributing to the analytical and
computational excess that Barnett characterizes
as the ‘supercomplex’ environment of the modern
university (Barnett, 2000). However, as Arthur
(1989) first showed, it is strategies’ path depen-
dence that is central to any understanding of their
dynamics and to strategic management.
Contingency, indeed, might be said to be what
sets strategy apart from mere decision: the ‘higher
level’ consists of the influence that a strategic
decision has upon future opportunities and
choices, its determination of later fields of
potential action, its effects on client attitudes
and on competitor behaviour. Contemporary
university strategizing displays little, if any,
consciousness of the importance or implications
of the analysis of contingency, however. Where
plans are not determinist and of short horizons,
they are aspirational and largely formless; eva-
luation is minimal and attenuated. In the strategy
literature, on the other hand, there is a burgeon-
ing tradition of contingency analysis that can
inform and enhance universities’ strategic think-
ing, planning and action.
It is not only the RBV of strategy considered
above that is relevant here. The formalization of
contingency into strategic analysis is effected by
regarding actions as containing derivative or
option elements. One can decompose all conse-
quences into (a) those which are predictable (costs
of operations, revenues from students and research
projects, for example), plus (b) those which are
contingencies (such as revenues from licensed
intellectual property rights, or future research
directions built on a team’s accumulated knowl-
edge, for example). Those option values contain
the strategic merit of an activity. Strategic manage-
ment, therefore, rests upon the extent to which the
organization can generate, manage, exploit and
reproduce option elements from its activity.
Implicit in the RBV approach to strategy, such
contingency analysis is increasingly explicit in the
analysis of strategy in the real options literature
(Amram and Kulatilaka, 1999; Myers, 1984;
Sanchez, 1993; Smit and Trigeorgis, 2004; see
also Dixit and Pindyck, 1995, for an example of
application in practice). Contingency and path
dependence are vital to the strategy process in
two major ways. First, they focus the enormity of
R. Buckland
complex environments into the pragmatic oppor-
tunities that are identifiable within the constraints
of endowed and attainable strategic resource. In
other words, feasible strategies need be consid-
ered, not all strategies.
Second, strategic thinking and evaluation must
focus upon the value of the flexibility retained for
future action: what advantages lie in the creation
of options in, say, intellectual or physical infra-
structure (e.g. in constructing a bio-genetics
laboratory or in assembling a research team).
Further, what is the balance of valuable oppor-
tunities lost by committing to decisions, such as
an appointment to a professorial vacancy,
compared with the valuable opportunities that
are being created, of exploiting the new appoint-
ment by future, contingent investments.
Path dependence, contingency, real options
thinking focuses on the value of adaptation,
flexibility and future actions: as such it is quintes-
sentially strategic in scope. The approach highlights
the importance of flexibility, adaptation, the
analysis of reversibility and appraisal of opportu-
nities. It demands the articulation of vision, the
identification of the sources of comparative advan-
tage and the isolation of opportunities for future
development. All are core features of a decision
support tool for Clark’s ‘expanded developmental
periphery’, an appraisal framework for his ‘central
steering core’, a coherent stimulus to the ‘academic
heartland’ and a mechanism for integrating aca-
demics’ natural intellectual entrepreneurialism with
the delivery of value and return from the funds
available. Contingency, therefore, offers the
prospect of reconnecting management with the
strategy process of the periphery; and of accelerat-
ing and supporting the generation, implementation
and further exploitation of coherent strategy across
the organization.
Conclusions: the place of strategy in the
successful university
The first recognizable strategic analysis of the
university found it to be anarchic and ambiguous
(Cohen and March, 1974). ‘Garbage-can’ strate-
gizing was identified, with activity seeking out an
appropriate model of strategy rather than activity
organized under a coherent umbrella of vision
and plan. As the understanding of strategy itself
has advanced, so the reasons for this ‘organized
r 2008 British Academy of Management.
Strategies in Universities
paradox’ (Eisenhardt, 2000) patterning of uni-
versities’ strategy has become explicable. Uni-
versities operate in a complicated environment,
with porous boundaries between outcomes and
markets; they survive by the collective intellectual
innovation and activities of dispersed staff, whose
intellectual assets rapidly become obsolete unless
they choose appropriate avenues of renewal by
further research and scholarship.
The key contributions to understanding this in
organizational terms are the concepts of loose-
coupling (Glassman, 1973; Mintzberg, 1994;
Weick, 1976) and the shift from ‘classical’
strategy to ‘processual’ or ‘systemic’ models of
the strategy process (Chandler, 1962; Mintzberg,
Ahlstrand and Lampel, 1998; Whittington, 2001).
In light of these insights into the strategy process,
it is apparent that present UK universities’
strategizing has a good deal of ground to make
up in devising appropriate strategic management
styles and techniques. It must move away from
the present obsession with strategic planning and
must find ways of reconnecting university man-
agement with the roots of strategy formation,
which lie in the academic life of the modern
university.
Both private and public sectors have contribu-
tions to offer in this respect. Research on private
sector strategy processes has moved forward to
more sophisticated understanding of the process,
of its links with organizational form and context
and particularly with the contingent dimension of
strategy (Arthur, 1989; Pascale, 1999; Pettigrew
and Whittington, 2002; Smit and Trigeorgis,
2004). The public sector also offers cogent
examples, in the NPM literature, of the benefits
and hazards of introducing formal contracting,
measurement and performance targets into the
management of areas of profound market failure
(Ferlie et al., 1996); and also in the literature of
the modernization of the management of profes-
sionalized organizations (McKee, Marnoch and
Dinnie, 2000; Pettigrew, Ferlie and McKee,
1992).
Universities, however, are organizations that
require to be understood in their own histories
and contexts. No model of strategy will transfer
to them without dissonance: rather it is required
that universities acquire models and systems of
strategic awareness, management and progress
that recognize the issues, contexts and processes
which actually shape their strategic change.
r 2008 British Academy of Management.
533
Models such as Clark’s entrepreneurial university
set out to achieve just that; and they constitute
considerable progress in strategic understanding.
However, Clark’s model should be reconnected
with the parallel worlds of strategic thinking from
other sectors. This paper has sought to establish
such reconnections, through the avenues of
context, leadership and contingency, where other
traditions offer major enhancement of our
capacity to understand the problems of strategiz-
ing in the complicated contexts and environments
of the university.
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Roger Buckland is Professor of Accountancy, University of Aberdeen Business School, Scotland. He

has held academic posts at the Universities of Aberdeen, Aston and York and visiting appointments
at Bordeaux Business School and Western Kentucky University. His research ranges from the
analysis of regulated industries’ risk to problems of university governance and management.

r 2008 British Academy of Management.