Abstract
The concept of mindfulness can be very helpful to better understand what happens in organizational change, in general, and university reforms, in particular. The specific nature of university reforms in Germany consists of a re-balancing of irreducible functional antagonisms which has become necessary as a consequence of massive changes of societal demands directed at universities. But the constellation of actors involved in university reforms is a very difficult one. University leadership has to mediate between professors and the ministry, with both sides showing mutual distrust and contempt. To overcome this mutual blockade a special kind of mindfulness is required. University leadership has to engage in double talk to persuade professors as well as the ministry to show a proper consideration for the other side’s concerns which is the crucial precondition for a joint effort at re-balancing the functional antagonisms.
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Notes
- 1.
Not the University of Bremen where I am working now.
- 2.
A closer view could further distinguish between zero-sum conflicts and “mixed-motive situations” where a win-win solution can be reached. For a systematic exposition of these three archetypical situations of social interdependence based on game-theoretical models – “coordination games”, “games of pure conflict”, and “mixed motive games” – see briefly Schimank (2005, pp. 131–139) and more extensively Maurer and Schmid (2010).
- 3.
For an overview of the organizational peculiarities of universities see Meier and Schimank (2009).
- 4.
Functional antagonisms are not at all an exclusive feature of universities. The most prominent other case is modern society as a whole which is constituted by the functional antagonism of capitalism, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other (Schimank 2011).
- 5.
I speak here of ministries in the plural because in German federalism the federal states (“Länder”) are responsible for educational and science policy, so each federal state’s respective ministry is in charge of the universities on its territory.
- 6.
- 7.
To keep the analysis simple I abstract here from other academic staff below the professorial level. More than in many other countries’ university systems German research and teaching assistants or lecturers are subordinated to particular professors in the chair system and have no influential role of their own in the politics of their university – despite the introduction of their formal participation in academic self-government in the early 1070s.
- 8.
Guido Becke pointed out to me a very interesting parallel to university leadership: the role that works councils play within a firm in-between the employees, on one side, and the managers, on the other. As will be seen, today’s university leadership and works councils are indeed in quite similar positions especially in a country of “coordinated capitalism” (Hall and Soskice 2001) like Germany where works councils are legally supposed to be not just representatives of the employees but have to take care, together with the managers, of the firm’s well-being. Very good empirical material about what that means in the daily work of works councils can be found in a qualitative study done by Tietel (2006). A closer comparison of both kinds of intermediaries would surely be interesting. My speculation is that works councils also practice what I will later describe as double talk.
- 9.
See Scharpf (1997, pp. 84–89) for a brief outline of some simple “interaction orientations”. The relational orientation I see at work in German universities is a somewhat more complex blending of several of these simple types.
- 10.
See Nils Brunsson’s (1989) concept of a difference between “talk” and “action”.
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Schimank, U. (2014). Reforming the German University System: Mindful Change by Double Talk. In: Becke, G. (eds) Mindful Change in Times of Permanent Reorganization. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38694-7_12
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