Introduction

Over recent decades, with the acceleration of globalization, various efficiency-driven ideologies such as neoliberalism, new public management, and managerialism have swept the world and significantly changed the landscape of global higher education (Lynch, 2015; Taberner, 2018). Universities around the world have been facing intensified competition for rankings and funding and increasing pressure to be more efficient and accountable while demonstrating excellence in research, teaching, and public service (Bradley, 2016; Pusser & Marginson, 2013; Torugsa & Puapansawat, 2022). In this highly competitive world, universities often find themselves facing a broad set of changing and even contradictory expectations. They need to meet multiple expectations with limited internal resources, pursue conflicting goals, and engage in inconsistent activities to address changing and contradictory expectations from various stakeholders (Nguyen, 2016; Pietilä & Pinheiro, 2021). In so doing, they have to embrace different institutional arrangements supported by multiple, but often competing, institutional logics to attain legitimacy (Mair et al., 2015). Such a situation has led to tension among academics and a heated debate on the nature of higher education and how to run universities and manage faculty members. Given the difficulty for such institutions in utilizing limited internal resources to meet multiple competing expectations, a pressing research question emerges: How do universities navigate and reconcile multiple institutional logics to meet different expectations and achieve competing goals?

Institutional logics refer to “the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p.804; Upton & Warshaw, 2017). They are underlying interpretive beliefs and values that shape the patterns of an organizational design (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993) and provide individuals with rules and expectations for behaving and making decisions (Greenwood et al., 2011). Without a better understanding of such underlying values, beliefs, and principles, it is difficult to fully understand an organization’s strategies, structure, and behavior. However, the existing mainstream literature has focused on examining multiple institutional logics in social enterprises or hybrid organizations. There is limited research on institutional logics in other types of organizations, especially in public sector institutions such as universities (Mair et al., 2015; Qi, 2022; Upton & Warshaw, 2017). However, universities are now increasingly “becoming hybrid organizations that combine the features of public sector organizations with those of private sector organizations” (Grossi et al., 2020, p.823). Given their unique features, public sector organizations including universities have proven to be “an appropriate setting in which to study multiple institutional logics because they are characterized by institutional complexity and sites of contestation between multiple logics” (Cai & Mountford, 2022; Grant et al., 2020, p.917; Zheng et al., 2018). Moreover, extant research on institutional logics has mainly been conducted in developed countries, with fewer studies focusing on emerging economies (Liu et al., 2016). In particular, there are limited studies applying the institutional logics perspective to examine Chinese higher education (Qi, 2022).

Since studies on institutional logics at the campus level are inadequate, the existing literature offers a limited understanding of how multiple institutional logics shape universities and how universities address competing institutional logics (Garaus et al., 2016; Papachroni et al., 2016). Specifically, we do not have adequate knowledge about how multiple institutional logics shape the human resource management (HRM) systems of universities, that is, how universities manage academic staff. The insufficient empirical studies also lead to a limited understanding of the consequences of multiple institutional logics within one organization, with some arguing that the coexistence of multiple logics may harm performance and result in the failure and demise of organizations (Greenwood et al., 2011), and others believing that incorporating multiple logics may help organizations become more resilient, agile, sustainable, and even more innovative (Besharov & Smith, 2014). Further theoretical and empirical studies are essential to generate much-needed insights into multiple institutional logics in higher education.

In this increasingly volatile and complex modern society, the need to deal with multiple and even conflicting institutional logics will be a constant challenge for organizations (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Papachroni et al., 2016; Pietilä & Pinheiro, 2021; Upton & Warshaw, 2017), particularly those in transitional economies where a greater number of old and new logics co-exist. Organizations must better understand how to incorporate and balance multiple or even competing institutional logics to survive and succeed. To narrow the gaps in the literature, this study chooses Chinese public universities as an empirical context to examine how public universities address multiple institutional logics through HRM innovations and talent management. Currently, the mainstream HRM literature has been dominated by the assumption that an organization usually follows a single institutional logic (Gamble & Huang, 2009). For example, the universalist perspective of HRM research assumes that organizations only adopt HRM best practices (e.g., the commitment-oriented high-performance work system) to elicit organizational commitment and high performance, ignoring the fact that organizations often have different types of employee groups with diverse needs (Boxall, 2012). As a result, although the perspective of institutional logics is a powerful and robust theoretical framework to help us understand organizational behavior and management practices, it is largely ignored in the HRM literature, with only a few exceptions (Martin et al., 2016; Meijerink et al., 2021). Although institutional logics and HRM are closely related, in that institutional logics, as a major source of legitimacy, structure the attention, sense-making, and decision-making of HR managers, provide HRM with goals, and determine HR structures and policies (Lewis et al., 2019), research on the relationship between institutional logics and HRM is rather limited (Hansen et al., 2019; Meijerink et al., 2021). The HR literature has furthermore paid little attention to conflicts of logic, and few studies have explored how institutional logics shape HRM systems and how organizations integrate competing institutional logics in order to achieve ambidexterity in the modern, turbulent, and rapidly changing environment (Garaus et al., 2016; Hansen et al., 2019; Lewis et al., 2019; Meijerink et al., 2021; Papachroni et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2022). Ambidexterity can be understood as a resilience strategy through which organizations explore new competencies while exploiting existing strengths (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009).

China has the largest higher education sector in the world. It currently has more than 2700 tertiary colleges and universities, most of which are public institutions, employing 1.8 million faculty members (MOE, 2021). Since the late 1990s, HRM and talent management in Chinese universities have undergone significant transformations in response to various demands and pressures, constituting an ideal empirical context to examine how higher education institutions make an effort to reconcile multiple institutional logics through reforming HRM and talent management for sustainable competitive advantage. We seek to answer this research question by examining the HRM transformation and innovations in Chinese public universities (hereinafter, Chinese universities) in recent decades.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section provides an extensive literature review on institutional logics to build a theoretical foundation for this study. Our research method, data analysis, and research findings are then explained, followed by a discussion of the theory and practice implications, its contributions to the literature, and the study limitations and future research avenues.

Literature review

According to Scott and his colleagues (2000, p.170), institutional logics are “belief systems and associated practices that predominate in an organizational field.” An institutional logic, as a socially constructed master principle, provides a “template for action” (Bastedo, 2009, p. 211), justifies values and rules, structures and legitimates behavior, and shapes interpretations of organizational reality (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). As shared beliefs legitimize goals and actions, institutional logics are relatively stable. Multiple institutional logics may co-exist within one organizational field, and clash, blend, or augment each other, enabling organizational actors to draw on them to justify policies and practices (Bévort & Poulfelt, 2015).

The established literature on institutional logics has been dominated by the seven ideal types of societal-level logics, namely those of the state, the market, the corporation, the profession, religion, the family, and the community (Thornton et al., 2012). To summarize the characteristics of these logics: (i) state logic emphasizes the legitimacy of using legal and bureaucratic hierarchies to rationalize and regulate human activity; (ii) market logic is based on transactions, commodification, and competition; (iii) corporation logic pursues high performance and managerial efficiency through hierarchical and bureaucratic management and precise measurement of outcomes; (iv) professional logic values collegiality, autonomy, scholarship, and professional engagement; (v) family logic endorses reciprocal obligations, patriarchal domination, and family honor; (vi) community logic legitimizes community trust, reciprocity, values, and ideology, and (vii) the logic of religion underlines the role of faith and sacredness (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton, 2004; Thornton et al., 2012). Based on these ideal types of societal-level logics, researchers have further developed more specific ideal field-level and individual-level logics (Cai & Mountford, 2022).

Over the past decades, with the spread of various efficiency-driven ideologies such as neoliberalism, new public management, and managerialism worldwide, it has been found that further institutional logics have infiltrated the global higher education sector and eroded its traditional ethos and commitment to logics such as the professional logic (Taberner, 2018). For example, influenced by neoliberalism, which advocates marketization, privatization, deregulation, free market competition, commodification, and a reduction in government spending (Peck, 2013), market and corporation logics have penetrated into universities and eroded state and profession logics. Market and corporation logics have been further entrenched in the higher education sector by the New Public Management (NPM) movement, which aims to modernize the public sector by sanctifying competition, efficiency, accountability, and incentivization (Dunleavy et al., 2006; Leišytė, 2016; Taberner, 2018). At the same time, the spread of managerialism, which extols enhancing efficiency through the use of professional managers, the application of corporate management techniques, and better management, also further endorses neoliberal ideologies and challenges collegiality (Al-Twal, 2022; Taberner, 2018).

Although the use of institutional logics to analyze organizational and employee behavior in higher education studies is still relatively new and limited (Cai & Mountford, 2022; Lepori, 2016; Qi, 2022; Upton & Warshaw, 2017), a recent extensive literature review has found that higher education studies have developed 18 ideal-type field-level institutional logics (Cai & Mountford, 2022). These include the academic logic (Gulbrandsen & Smeby, 2005), managerial logic (Deem & Brehony, 2005), business logic (Kallio et al., 2017), academic capitalism (Moore et al., 2017), economic logic (Giroux, 2002), and industry logic (Gumport, 2000). Nevertheless, while researchers tend to term institutional logics in the higher education field in different ways, some of them are similar and can be drawn upon interchangeably (e.g., academic logic and professional logic; and managerial logic and corporation logic). The most frequently used logics in higher education studies are academic, market, and corporation logics (Cai & Mountford, 2022).

In brief, influenced by notions of neoliberalism, new public management, and managerialism, the traditional state and professional logics have been weakened, and public universities in many countries have become neoliberal universities (Herschberg et al., 2018; Kidman & Chu, 2017; Lynch, 2015; Rothe et al., 2022), hybrid organizations (Grossi et al., 2020), dominated by performativity (Wilson & Holligan, 2013), and an audit culture (Burrows, 2012; Grossi et al., 2020). For example, based on interviews of academics in six English universities of different types, Taberner (2018) finds that neoliberal universities prioritize efficiency and quantity over effectiveness, stress managerialist ideology over academic autonomy, and emphasize instrumentalism over intellectualism, leading to the de-professionalization and work intensification of academics.

In this globalized world, it is impossible for Chinese higher education to be immune from the hegemony of neoliberalism, new public management, and managerialism (Hartley & Jarvis, 2022; Mok, 2021; Wei & Johnstone, 2020; Yang et al., 2022). Therefore, research has found that “neo-liberalism is strong in higher education policy in both the capitalist West and socialist China” (Marginson, 2011, p.421). Since China decided to abandon the planned economy and introduce market mechanisms in the early 1990s, and especially when China took action to build a number of world-class universities to catch up with the West in the mid-1990s, market and corporation logics have been increasingly gaining popularity among public universities. Market logic legitimizes notions of profit-making, market share, competition, and efficiency in public universities (Wei & Johnstone, 2020), while the corporation logic encourages public universities to pursue revenue growth, high performance, and market position through administrative control and the use of private sector techniques (Hartley & Jarvis, 2022; Pietilä & Pinheiro, 2021; Xu, 2021). Influenced by market and corporation logics, Chinese public universities are being increasingly managerialized, marketized, operated like enterprises, and redefined by rankings (Hartley & Jarvis, 2022; Mok, 2021; Pusser & Marginson, 2013).

On the surface, scholars tend to argue that top-tier Chinese universities increasingly look like their counterparts in Western countries, where market values are coming to dominate the academic system (Hartley & Jarvis, 2022; Mok, 2021; Postiglione, 2015). However, universities in China are still “part of the bureaucracy” with an administrative rank and are highly regulated (Zha & Hayhoe, 2014, p.51). As a formerly socialist country with decades of socialist practices, some socialist concepts such as the idea that employees are the masters of organizations, commitment to lifetime job security, and equitable distribution are still taken for granted in the public sector. At the same time, Chinese culture has long been characterized by paternalism, collectivism, egalitarianism, and harmony (Westwood, 1997). Such cultural mindsets constitute fertile soil for socialist logic. Due to the influence of cultural traditions, institutional inertia, and path dependency, how academics should be managed is still shaped by the socialist logic, which is known as the “iron rice bowl,” a dominant personnel management system in China’s public sector prior to the late 1990s (Xia et al., 2020b; Zhu & Warner, 2019). The major features of this system include “centrally regulated job allocation, high job security, egalitarian pay systems, and cradle-to-grave social welfare systems” (Chen & Wilson, 2003, p.398). Under the “iron rice bowl” scheme, employees of public sector organizations were centrally recruited and allocated by governments, and their salary was predetermined by the central government based on qualification, position, length of service, and region, with little relationship to their effort and performance (Xia et al., 2020b). Employees enjoyed a steady income, guaranteed lifetime employment, and various social benefits such as Medicare and public housing (Huang et al., 2016). Although the state as an employer has over-invested in employment relations, the “iron rice bowl” system has been criticized for failing to motivate employees and for low efficiency (Warner, 2014; Zhu & Warner, 2019).

In brief, the existing literature shows that Chinese universities are shaped by multiple logics of socialism, market, and corporation, heading along the neoliberal and managerial route while being shaped by local social-cultural tradition and strong state regulations. Table 1 summarizes the legitimate values, means, source of legitimacy, and the theoretical bases of major institutional logics in Chinese universities.

Table 1 Characteristics of major institutional logics in Chinese public universities
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Given that universities face multiple and even competing institutional logics, it is crucial that they handle pressure from the various institutional demands to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. According to the mainstream literature, organizations can employ two solutions to address the issue, involving the reduction of either the centrality or the incompatibility of the conflicting logics (Gümüsay et al., 2020). Specifically, structural separation can decrease the centrality of institutional logics since different logics dominate in different sectors rather than the whole organization. Conversely, a blended strategy that combines different logics throughout an organization can help it go beyond “either-or responses” to “both-and” ambidexterity and hence reduce the incompatibility of institutional logics (Gümüsay et al., 2020, p. 126; Perkmann et al., 2019). Managing tensions between competing institutional logics and goals can help organizations achieve ambidexterity (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009). Ambidextrous organizations are able to combine “exploitation” and “exploration” strategies to “[exploit] current competencies and [explore] new domains with equal dexterity” (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009, p.696). Ambidextrous organizations can be more resilient by achieving “a balance between running current operations while also innovating to remain competitive” (Jackson & Leung, 2018, p.29).

In conclusion, given the environment of continuous change that characterizes contemporary society, universities must have the capacity to balance and combine multiple logics to achieve ambidexterity. To gain much-needed insights into the role of HRM in addressing multiple institutional logics and achieving organizational ambidexterity and resilience, this study examines the process of HRM reforms in the Chinese higher education sector in recent decades to understand how they have sought to maintain existing competencies while developing new competencies through managing the multiple logics. Given the limited number of empirical studies into this issue in the public sector (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2020; Qi, 2022; Tyskbo, 2019), this study can contribute significantly to the literature.

Research method

According to Yin (2014), the nature of the research questions posed in a study determines the research method which will be appropriate. The focus of this study, examining how Chinese universities reconcile competing institutional logics through HR innovations, indicates that the qualitative method is the appropriate methodology to employ since the study topic is under-researched and lacks sufficient empirical information (Garaus et al., 2016). In keeping with this approach, this study therefore employed interviews and documentation as the main approaches to collect data. To ensure a representative sample and maximize variation of conditions, we collected data from different sources by interviewing both academic staffs with different professional ranks and managers (such as HR managers, deans, and heads of departments), asking them to describe the history and major milestones of their universities, how their universities reformed the traditional personnel management process, and the current HRM policies and practices employed in order to gain an understanding of the underlying logics and universities’ strategies.

We used a “snowballing technique,” asking initial informants to recommend interviewees who could offer further information so as to ensure the most knowledgeable informants were interviewed. In order to enhance methodological rigor, key informants were interviewed on more than one occasion, either in person or by phone. By the conclusion of the data collection process, 50 in-depth interviews had been conducted in 16 universities by the first author within 2 months, including 25 managers and 25 academic staff. The age of the interviewees ranged from 25 to 60 years old. Most had worked at the university for more than 10 years and were familiar with university and faculty policies and practices. The profile of the interviewees is presented in Table 2.

Table 2 Profile of interviewees
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Such a relatively large sample size helps reduce information bias. Apart from the interviews, which were each 60 to 120 min in duration, the researchers also collected documents to triangulate data. As much relevant documentary information as possible was collected, including central and provincial government policies concerning higher education reforms, university-level or college-level regulations, and HRM policies such as performance appraisal arrangements, remuneration reform outlines, performance-related pay schemes, workload calculation measures, and academic promotion assessment methods, as well as news reports and other relevant information on official websites.

Interview notes and documents were then analyzed using the multi-step coding and memo-writing method suggested by Charmaz (2014). To understand the logics followed by universities in reforming their HRM systems and how universities deal with multiple and even conflicting expectations and demands, we first conducted initial coding to identify and label “units of meaning” relevant to the research question. Then, we conducted focused coding to understand the relationships of initial codes and identify concepts and thematic categories. By so doing, we identified the multiple logics involved, such as the exploitation and exploration logics and the corresponding HRM practices. During this conceptual coding phase, categories were combined based on theoretical connections into aggregated dimensions, such as “double-track employment relations” and “ambidextrous HRM strategy.” Through coding, memo-writing, and constant comparison with the literature, we gradually developed our understanding of the patterns and relationships in the data and obtained a coherent explanation of the process of HRM reforms, the solutions applied to conflicting institutional logics, and the consequences of institutional plurality. The first two co-authors conducted data coding after carefully reading the interview notes and documents. At each stage, the two co-authors first coded the same documents independently. They then compared the coding results and discussed the differences. After achieving agreement on the coding, they moved on to the next stage. All co-authors participated in meetings during the coding process to discuss and evaluate the coding results and interpretations. Table 3 offers examples of our coding process.

Table 3 Examples of data coding and data analysis
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Findings

Over the last several decades, as China has moved away from a planned society to a market-oriented economy, its employee management scheme has gradually been transformed from the traditional egalitarian approach to a more Westernized approach that manages employees as a resource. We unpack our fieldwork findings which follow and highlight this trajectory to reveal how Chinese universities struggle to reconcile competing institutional logics through HR innovations for ambidexterity.

Lessening the centrality of the “iron rice bowl” socialist logic

As discussed earlier, before the mid-1990s, the “iron rice bowl” system, which followed socialist logic, was the only logic dominating traditional employee management throughout China’s economy. According to the socialist logic characterized by the “iron rice bowl” system, the employee was the master of an organization, and the government as the employer had unlimited obligations towards employees while employees, in general, did not reciprocate with high levels of commitment and performance (Warner, 2014; Xia et al., 2020a; Zhu & Warner, 2019). Under this egalitarian system, all employees were treated equally and enjoyed lifetime job security and generous welfare benefits. Given that this logic failed to elicit high levels of employee commitment and performance, the Chinese government dedicated itself to reforming this system in the early 1990s by introducing the market logic, aiming to reduce the centrality of the “iron rice bowl” logic. For example, the government ended the practice of centrally regulated job allocation in the mid-1990s, and university graduates have been pushed to the labor market to look for jobs since then. This reform decentralized recruitment and selection to public organizations (Sun, 2010; interview with T-A02). Subsequently, in the early 2000s, the government required public-sector organizations to stop providing welfare housing to employees and commercialized the housing supply (interview with TR-M05). In the early 2010s, the government replaced the traditional free Medicare (at state expense) with contribution-based medical insurance (interview with TR-M02). In recent years, the state council has replaced the seniority-based pension scheme with a contribution-based scheme (interview with T-A02). In brief, the Chinese government has gradually reformed the “iron rice bowl” system and drastically reduced the welfare benefits for employees in the public sector. All interviewees agreed that although the “iron rice bowl” has not been completely abolished in universities, it has changed significantly. As TR-M05 commented:

The media still argues that the “iron rice bowl” in the public sector should be eliminated as soon as possible. However, the current “iron rice bowl” differs from the traditional version. Most of the employee benefits have gone.

TR-A08 echoed this comment and claimed that:

Nowadays, there are not many welfare benefits of the “iron rice bowl” left. Perhaps job security and stable income are the primary advantages for those on the state payroll.

After years of effort, the Chinese government and universities have successfully reduced the centrality of the once-dominant “iron rice bowl” socialist logic. This has opened the door for universities to introduce neoliberal HR policies and practices based on market and corporation logics to achieve multiple goals.

Reducing incompatibility of multiple logics by constructing a new employment relationship

While the “iron rice bowl” has not been completely abolished in universities, its coverage has dramatically diminished over the past 2 decades. Before 2000, the “iron rice bowl” system covered all university faculty members (Wang et al., 2019; Xia et al., 2020b). This has changed in the years since September 1999, when the government decided to replace lifetime employment with an all-member contract system in higher education institutions (Sun, 2010; Zhang et al., 2016). Although this reform has failed to transform faculty members on the state payroll into contract employees (Xia et al., 2020b), it has enabled universities to introduce flexibility and non-socialist logics into the workplace. Since then, universities have made substantial efforts to build a new employment relationship system based on market and corporation logics outside the “iron rice bowl” system. In order to reduce logic conflicts, all universities have followed the principle of “old rules for old staff and new rules for new employees.” By so doing, universities have gradually incorporated market and corporation logics into employee management. One manager explained the double-track employment relations based on different logics in his university:

Our university has adopted a double-track employment system following the principle of “old rules for old staff and new rules for new employees” since the early 2010s … For faculty members recruited before the reform, they are on the old track, paid and evaluated using the domestic criteria. New academics recruited after the reform are mainly employed on the tenure track. These staff are assessed using a standard similar to that in American universities with a focus on research achievements. They receive an annual salary with similar remuneration standards to American universities. If they fail to meet the research performance requirements in six years, their employment will be terminated (TR-M11).

A manager in another university described their double-track employment relationship system, which led to the division of academic staff:

Our university introduced a double-track system in 2003, much earlier than other universities. We now have two types of faculty members. Those who were employed before 2003 are permanent staff with an open-ended contract. They enjoy lifetime employment if they do not violate laws. Those employed after 2003 are required to sign an employment contract with the university. They are governed by the “up-or-out” [i.e., be promoted or quit] policy … if they are promoted to be an associate professor or professor, they will be on the state payroll and have little employment pressure (R-M07).

In universities that do not have the “up-or-out” policy, faculty members may have different employment statuses. An informant explained:

Our university has two types of academic staff, some have a staffing quota [bian zhi], and some have not. Those who have a staffing quota are permanent employees; those who have not are recruited as contract employees. If their publications are good enough, these contract staff might get a staffing quota and become permanent staff (R-A03).

A deputy vice-chancellor of a university explained the rationale for constructing double-track employment relations within his university:

Even though the central government encourages universities to abolish the “iron rice bowl” scheme completely, we have not done so for the sake of stability and employee well-being. Indeed, many existing faculty members are not good at publishing papers in international journals, but many of them are competent in teaching. More importantly, they have a family to support. Therefore, our university ensures the job security of existing staff and relies on them to undertake teaching tasks. At the same time, we employ new staff who are good at research to improve our research performance. These research-oriented staff should be on the tenure track to ensure that they are productive … Different types of employees can achieve different goals, i.e., one group with stable and satisfied teaching staff while the other with productive researchers, both groups are assets of our university (TR-M09).

Currently, the co-existence of different categories of employment relations has gained favor among universities. Universities follow the former socialist logic to manage permanent employees with a staffing quota and manage new staff following the market and corporation logics, which emphasize competition, flexibility, and outcomes, indicating that higher education institutions have shifted away from the single-logic pattern to logical plurality. This enables universities to be more resilient by maintaining existing competencies while developing new competencies to address competing demands from the increasingly complex institutional environment.

Introducing a neoliberal high-performance work system (HPWS)

The traditional Chinese personnel management approach in the form of the “iron rice bowl” system based on socialist logic is different from the modern HRM and talent management paradigm based on market and corporation logics. Since the early 2000s, Chinese universities have imported various HRM “best practices,” aiming to build a Western-style HPWS to motivate faculty members and improve competitiveness (Xia et al., 2020a). Our findings revealed that all major HPWS “best practices” based on market and corporation logics could be found in Chinese universities when examining HRM functions such as recruitment and selection, training and development, compensation, and performance appraisal, which will be presented below.

Conducting rigorous and selective staffing

This is an essential building block of the high-performance work system (Takeuchi et al., 2007). It can help organizations obtain staff with the proper competencies and values that fit their needs. Under the “iron rice bowl” system, selective staffing was impossible since recruitment and selection were centrally controlled by the government and universities had little say in staffing (Xia et al., 2020b; Zhang et al., 2016). Since the mid-1990s, recruitment and selection in universities have transformed from central allocation to autonomous selection, and from close organizational retention to open recruitment and strict selection (interviews with R-M09; TR-M05; TR-M11). One interviewee (R-M09) explained these changes:

Before the 1990s, university lecturers were allocated by the government. Since the 1990s, universities can recruit academic staff by themselves. In those years, our university hired a lot of our graduates. It is not good practice, so we stopped this practice ten years ago. Nowadays, getting an academic job is very difficult. You have to overcome various hurdles such as qualifications, publications, interviews, and the eligibility examination.

A faculty manager told the researchers:

To get an academic job in our university, a PhD degree is a must but not enough. Actually, candidates with successful postdoctoral experience are more welcome. Some faculties recruit academic staff only among those who are graduated from the top 100 international universities, have overseas working experience, and have a strong track record of publications in top-ranked international journals (TR-M05).

A similar scenario of selective staffing was described by another interviewee (TR-M11):

We recruit academic staff globally based on their overseas educational background and academic achievements. Most of the Deans in our university are foreigners, and one-third of academics are overseas returnees. In our faculty, this ratio is 40 percent.

From the perspective of talent management, adopting rigorous and selective staffing processes represents a significant paradigm shift from the inclusive talent philosophy to the exclusive talent management approach (Meyers & Van Woerkom, 2014). The “iron rice bowl” system based on the socialist logic was an inclusive talent management approach, assuming that every employee on the state payroll had talent and hence was treated equally. Under the high-performance work system which embraces market and corporation logics, only those who have obtained a Ph.D. degree from top universities and are good at publishing papers in leading international journals are considered talented. As “special talent,” they are eligible for preferential treatment. Although the exclusive approach was found to have been adopted by all types of universities, it was more prominent in the recruitment and selection processes of top universities (R-A03).

Conducting extensive training

As a widely accepted HRM best practice, extensive training is a proven method to continuously enhance the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees (Takeuchi et al., 2007). From the mid-1990s, both the Chinese government and universities began to attach increasing importance to the training and development of academic staff in order to build first-class universities. For example, since the 1990s, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) has required all university academic staff to participate in compulsory training and obtain the teacher’s qualification certificate. Many universities have increasingly emphasized the training and development of academic staff. One interviewee (R-M01) explained how her university organized staff training:

Our university has set up a Staff Development Centre to improve the competencies of academic staff. We adopt many strategies to train staff, including induction, mentorship, visiting scholar programs, career planning, etc. To help overseas returnees achieve a successful adjustment, we send them to government agencies or companies for half a year to gain some practical experience. To broaden the horizon of faculty members with no overseas study experience, we encourage them to apply for a state or university scholarship and go abroad for 6 to 12 months as visiting scholars. Our university currently has 1861 academic staff. In the past five years, 233 went overseas as visiting researchers.

One department head (R-M05) explained how his university trained young academics through a postdoctoral mentoring scheme:

Like some other top universities, our university has launched a Postdoctoral Mentoring Scheme since 2012 to help early career staff improve themselves. All new lecturers must join a part-time postdoctoral program to do research for two years under the supervision of a professor. By doing so, new staff can quickly get familiar with the policies and procedures of our university and avoid detours in research.

Universities have recently developed various staff training programs, including on-the-job and off-the-job training. Table 4 summarizes the major staff training and development methods used by the universities of the interviewees in this study. From the perspective of talent management, the emphasis on extensive training for all academic staff reflects the belief of Chinese universities that talents are not born but are capable of being developed (Meyers & Van Woerkom, 2014). Every academic has the potential to become a high performer through training and development. Since top-tier universities have more resources, they have usually invested more in training and development than non-elite universities (TR-M09).

Table 4 Major staff training methods in Chinese universities
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Implementing performance-related pay

After years of effort, universities have built a double-track employment relationship and established multiple-tier compensation systems to motivate faculty members. Table 5 summarizes the current compensation structure, which reflects multiple institutional logics. As can be seen from Table 5, the double-track employment relationship approach has involved different pay schemes, one of which was designed for the ordinary track academics covered by the “iron rice bowl” system (tier 1 in Table 5) and another for the tenure track staff covered by the American-style “up-or-out” scheme (tier 3 in Table 5). Faculty members on different tracks have been covered by different compensation systems based on different institutional logics. For example, although it varies across faculties, universities, and regions, the remuneration of a professor on the ordinary track has been around RMB 200,000, including post-wage, grade-wage, and various subsidies. By contrast, in order to attract overseas talent (mainly returnees), the remuneration scheme designed for tenure-track faculty members was intentionally geared to international markets and hence has involved compensation levels much higher than those for ordinary track professors.

Table 5 The basic compensation structure in Chinese universities
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At the same time, universities have introduced various performance-related payment schemes, such as extra workload incentives, publication rewards, research grant incentives, allowances for academic leaders, and various outstanding contribution awards. Such merit-based pay programs (tier 2 in Table 5) have mainly been financed by universities’ own-raised funds. These programs have linked pay to staff contributions and introduced incentives into the traditional uniform pay structure (tier 1 in Table 5). The three-tiered wage structure has widened the income gap for faculty members. As a manager explained,

In our university, the salary of the ordinary track staff is much lower than that of the tenure track faculty members ... Faculty members can get more income through teaching and research. For example, if a lecturer has finished the annual teaching workload, the person may receive an RMB ¥60 subsidy for each teaching load; for lecturers who teach more than the prescribed hours, they may receive an RMB ¥90 subsidy for each extra hour; if a lecturer publishes a paper in a top-tiered international journal, the person will receive RMB ¥100, 000 rewards; if a faculty member gets a national research grant, he/she will receive a reward which is worth around ten percent of the grant (R-M09).

In recent years, universities have increasingly linked various government and university subsidies with performance. A manager told the researcher:

According to government policies, a large portion of income is various subsidies for ordinary track faculty members ... Now, we only keep some of them, such as transportation subsidies. Most of them have been unified into the performance-related pay scheme since 2014. Currently, the wage of ordinary track staff comprises two parts: 60 percent is based on post and professional rank, and 40 percent is based on the university, faculty, department, and individual performance. By doing so, academic staff are encouraged to contribute more to the university (T-M02).

Market and corporation logics have played an increasingly important role in reforming the reward system. As an HR best practice in the private sector, performance-related pay is now common practice in Chinese universities. The significant difference among universities is that elite universities have more resources and hence more generously reward publications in top journals than non-elite universities (TR-M01).

Implementing formal performance appraisal

As the foundation of various HR functions, performance appraisal has been considered a central HRM process that helps align employee behavior with organizational goals (DeNisi & Pritchard, 2006). Under the “iron rice bowl” system, universities did not develop a strong demand for systematic performance evaluation (Wang et al., 2019; Xia et al., 2020b). As part of the effort to build a modern strategic HRM system, universities have, in more recent years, been exploring ways to establish performance appraisal systems.

Table 6 summarizes the major features of the typical performance appraisal system in universities in China. In general, faculty members have been evaluated mainly in terms of ethical performance, teaching, and research. It has been a common practice for universities to assess the political stance, regulatory compliance, interpersonal relationships, and moral behavior of faculty members. The purposes for which such assessments have been used include administrative appointments, academic promotions, granting honorary titles (e.g., model teacher), and discipline. For example, political correctness, a good performance record of professional ethics, and a good relationship with colleagues have usually been the prerequisites for administrative appointments to positions such as dean or head of the department.

Table 6 Features of performance appraisal in Chinese universities
Full size table

Teaching has been a significant aspect of performance evaluation in almost all universities. Both teaching quality and quantity have been evaluated each year. The methods used to assess teaching quality include student evaluation, peer review, expert review, and self-evaluation. However, the primary purpose of teaching evaluation has been for accountability, not for improvement. Faculty members who have failed in their teaching evaluation have received a lower post-allowance (R-A01). Similarly, faculty members who have failed to teach a sufficient number of units have been penalized through a reduction in their workload allowance, while those who have undertaken an extra teaching load have been rewarded (R-A02).

Research has become increasingly important in the performance appraisal of academic staff in Chinese universities. Research evaluation usually involves research outputs (e.g., journal articles and patents) and successful research grant applications. The objective of research evaluation has been mainly for accountability and discipline. One interviewee (R-A05) explained the research evaluation policy for professors in his university:

Our university pursues “management by objectives” and sets clear goals for faculty members. For example, in our faculty, professors are required to publish one paper in top-ranked international journals indexed in SSCI (the Social Sciences Citation Index), or three articles in the top-tiered 100 Chinese journals indexed in the Chinese SSCI every year. They also should obtain one provincial or national research grant each three or five years. Bad performers have to explain their performance to the university’s HR department. They will suffer allowance cuts or demotion.

In many universities, especially top-tier universities, there has been a tendency to overemphasize research in recent years. As TR-M01 explained:

In our university, research is more important than teaching. For example, an excellent teacher might be rewarded 5,000 yuan at the end of the year. However, if a faculty member publishes a paper in a journal indexed in SSCI, he will be rewarded from RMB ¥20,000 to ¥100,000. If an academic staff obtains an external research grant, they will be rewarded RMB ¥50,000.

Some top universities have Americanized their research evaluation of tenure track staff as explained below (TR-M12):

Our university has modeled itself after only the elite universities of the United States. We recruit only Ph.D. graduates from top international universities. For some courses, we deliver lectures in English, not in Chinese. As for research evaluation, our business school only recognizes publications in the 24 leading journals used by the UT Dallas’ Naveen Jindal School of Management to rank the top 100 global business schools.

Performance management practices in Chinese universities represent a hybrid-logic model involving socialist, market, and corporation logics. For example, paying attention to political attitudes and the professional ethics of academics is a feature of socialist logic, while privileging research over teaching for university rankings and pursuing revenue growth through external research grant applications are typical reflections of market and corporation logics.

The Chinese government has noted some issues with performance evaluation in universities. The 2016 Guideline for Performance Appraisal criticized the tendency of appreciating research over teaching and valuing publications over social significance. It reminded administrators that the output-oriented performance appraisal practices and research-focused incentives had led to an unhealthy climate in universities where scholars had published papers for the sake of obtaining bonuses and academic promotions. Therefore, the 2016 Guideline called for reforming performance management in the higher education sector and emphasizing ethical performance, quality teaching, professional services, and actual social contributions, and not research outputs alone. However, it is never an easy task to change an institutional logic.

Discussion and conclusion

This study seeks to close a research gap in the literature on the issue of how Chinese universities seek to reconcile competing institutional logics through HR innovations to achieve ambidexterity. We answer this question by examining how universities have decreased the centrality of the traditional “iron rice bowl” socialist logic, reduced the incompatibility of multiple logics through constructing a new employment relationship, and tried to build a neoliberal high-performance work system for ambidexterity. The findings reveal that university staff management has changed dramatically over the past several decades. Although the “iron rice bowl” system has not been abolished completely, its importance and scope have diminished considerably. At the same time, universities have set up a new type of employment relationship system outside the “iron rice bowl” scheme, resulting in a scenario of “one university, two systems.”

During the process of rebuilding employment relations, universities have imported many Western-style high-performance HRM practices such as rigorous staffing procedures, performance-related pay, and formal performance appraisal. Some trends have emerged during the transformation of workforce management. The first is that the HRM system has shifted from following a single logic to embracing multiple institutional logics. A second trend is that universities have tended to build an HRM system similar to those in business enterprises. For example, by introducing “management by objective” and result-oriented performance-related pay, universities have been trying to manage faculty members in the same way as companies manage production workers. The third development is that Chinese universities have increasingly modeled themselves after elite universities in the USA when building a modern HRM system. For example, the “up-or-out” tenure track policy has been ever more frequently adopted by top universities, leading to a “publish or perish” performance culture. The fourth development is that the talent management philosophy in Chinese universities has been shifting from an inclusive approach to a hybrid one, involving both inclusive and exclusive strategies. Such a “one-university-with-two-systems” approach has been used by universities to reconcile multiple institutional logics in HRM and talent management.

The influence of globalization and marketization on the shift of institutional logics is evident in the process of HRM reforms in Chinese universities. Before the mid-1990s, following the socialist logic characterized by the “iron rice bowl” system, universities in China viewed themselves as creators and disseminators of knowledge, whose mission was to train qualified talent for social and economic development. Following this logic, universities operated as a self-contained and independent system; faculty members taught units in Chinese and published papers in Chinese journals. However, since the mid-1990s, when the Chinese government called for building world-class universities (Wang et al., 2019), top universities have been increasingly operating following market and corporation logics, aiming to compete in the international higher education market dominated by global rankings and the English language. To improve rankings in the international higher education market, top universities in China have tried hard to attract faculty members who are good at publishing papers in top-tier international journals and teaching units in English.

Furthermore, before the mid-1990s, higher education institutions were funded by the government (Wang et al., 2019; Xia et al., 2020b) and hence focused on serving the interests of the state and providing public goods. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese government has transformed the funding regime from state funding to diversified financing, including tuition fees, industry funding, and donations. The shift in the financing system has introduced market and corporation logics advocated by adherents to the new public management philosophy. The market and corporation logics emphasize efficiency and flexibility and support “more managerialist approaches associated with commercial objectives” (Alexander et al., 2018, p. 552). The co-existence of multiple institutional logics has resulted in a complex employment relationship within each university, challenging the conventional HRM notion that organizations usually adopt a single, unitary institutional logic (Gamble & Huang, 2009).

At first glance, one might argue that Chinese universities have successfully managed these multiple and even competing institutional logics by adopting an ambidextrous strategy to address the continuously changing environment. On the one hand, they have not completely abandoned the socialist logic but have adopted a strategy of “old rules for old staff and new rules for new employees.” Such a strategy can reduce resistance and retain existing competencies. On the other hand, building a new type of employment relationship enables universities to attract and motivate fresh blood, develop new competencies to address pressures from global competition, and help top universities compete in the international higher education market. The achievement of ambidexterity through institutional plurality and the incorporation of competing institutional logics seems to make Chinese universities more competitive.

However, the HRM reform process in Chinese universities is still in its early stage and far from mature. It is still too early to conclude that Chinese universities have successfully reconciled the multiple institutional logics. In general, except for the practice of “old rules for old staff,” the HRM reform process in Chinese universities has simply followed that of their Western counterparts in introducing market and corporation logics, without any further consideration as to whether operating universities like enterprises based on market and corporation logics is appropriate or not. This may lead to the replication of problems and tensions of Western organizations in the Chinese context. For example, the introduction of the rigid “up-or-out” tenure scheme might damage academic well-being, leading to tension and division among staff. Redefining universities based on English-language-based global ranking systems might ignore local relevance and marginalize indigenous knowledge and cultural identity (Hartley & Jarvis, 2022). Moreover, as discussed earlier, the output-oriented performance appraisal approach and research-focused incentives might generate an unhealthy academic climate, damage research quality, and erode the spirit of the university (Wei & Johnstone, 2020). Future research might focus on exploring issues encountered in the HRM reform process conducted by Chinese universities to generate much-needed insights into how to address such challenges.

This study makes several contributions to the institutional logic and HRM literature in the context of higher education studies. First, it challenges the dominant single-logic assumption in mainstream literature. Our findings reveal that multiple logics, or institutional complexity, do not just exist in social or hybrid enterprises. Organizations such as universities tend to incorporate multiple logics into their organizational fabric to achieve resilience and agility in dynamic and turbulent environments. Second, given that there has been little research on institutional logics in the HRM literature and we know little about the relationship between HRM and institutional logics (Lewis et al., 2019; Martin et al., 2016; Meijerink et al., 2021), especially in the higher education sector, this study contributes to the nascent research on the links between HRM and institutional logics (Garaus et al., 2016; Hansen et al., 2019). It offers much-needed insights into how institutional logics shape HRM thinking and practices and how HRM systems help to manage multiple logics for ambidexterity by integrating, for example, exploration and exploitation strategies. Third, given that few studies have examined how institutional logics unfold at the micro level (Cai & Mountford, 2022), this study sheds light on how competing institutional logics work with each other and interact to shape HRM policies and practices. Fourth, this study offers a fine-grained understanding of various HR practices with Chinese characteristics and empirically demonstrates how institutional logics have shaped managerial practices. Finally, given that there is little empirical research on HRM and talent management in the public sector (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2020; Thunnissen & Buttiens, 2017; Tyskbo, 2019), this study helps narrow the gap by elaborating on how talent management unfolds in practice in public universities.

This study has several implications for research and organizations. First, the mainstream HRM literature usually assumes a single, unified employment arrangement within one organization, and this has become an implicit assumption in many extant HRM studies (Gamble & Huang, 2009). When conducting surveys on employees to examine the effect of HRM on employee outcomes, scholars rarely check the respondents’ employment status, assuming that they are covered by the same employment relations. Our study reveals that employees in one organization might be covered by different employment relations. Ignoring such a variable in surveys might lead to biased results. Second, our study reveals that it is not only social enterprises that are shaped by competing institutional logics, but rather that any type of organization may encounter multiple and even competing institutional logics and be required to manage them effectively. Given that institutional environments in modern society have become more dynamic, complex, and pluralistic (Besharov & Smith, 2014), organizations should increase their ability to manage multiple logics so as to survive and succeed in a constantly changing environment.

Third, this research demonstrates that organizations embracing multiple logics might have the potential to exploit their existing competencies and explore new ones so as to attain a range of beneficial organizational outcomes. In particular, organizations may benefit from our findings and become resilient and competitive by embracing logic plurality and adopting hybrid organizational forms and practices. In recent decades, universities in many countries have been experiencing increasing pressures from conflicting institutional logics, and our findings might inspire them to seek to manage institutional complexity in ways that can enhance the prospects of realizing these benefits.

The study is not without limitations. One limitation lies in our research design. In this study, we have used purposeful sampling to select universities and a snowballing technique to secure interviewees. Although purposeful sampling is a common practice in order to select information-rich cases, its subjective and non-probabilistic nature may damage the representativeness of the sample (Cohen et al., 2007). Similarly, the snowballing technique can help researchers obtain knowledgeable informants, but it also can lead to information bias (Atkinson and Flint, 2004). A longitudinal research design would be appropriate to reveal the trajectory of personnel management reform in Chinese universities in greater depth. Future research could systematically examine the transformation of HRM policies in Chinese universities based on longitudinal archival data and interviews. Future research might also explore the influence of HRM reforms on staff well-being and performance using a mixed-methods approach. In modern society, organizations have to serve multiple stakeholders and pursue multiple and even conflicting goals for sustainable development. How people management goes beyond the traditional strategic HRM, which focuses on performance, to sustainable HRM through the successful integration of multiple institutional logics is an important topic for future research.