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Sino-Finnish Education Research Centre

Sharing Chinese and Finnish experience of addressing global education challenges

Investigating change and continuity in higher education – Organizational identity as a concept for understanding university dynamics, lecture [November, 24]

Welcome to the 3rd lecture of Peking-Tampere Lecture series on Organisation and Management in Higher Education! The Lecture Series is initiated and organized by the Department of Economics of Education and Administration, Graduate School of Education (GSE), Peking University (China) and Higher Education Group, Faculty of Management of Business, Tampere University (Finland). The Series is aimed to promote and advance the application of organization and management theory in higher education by inviting distinguished scholars to share their expert views and interact with researchers and students in the fields.

Title: Investigating change and continuity in higher education – Organizational identity as a concept for understanding university dynamics

Time: November, 24 at 13.00-14.30 Helsinki time (19.00-20.30 Beijing time)

ppt slides

recording of the lecture

The aim of the lecture is to illustrate how we can apply analytical concepts – such as organizational identity – to build broader theoretical understandings of change and continuity in higher education. As a case in hand, the lecture will i) demonstrate the many theoretical underpinnings of organizational identity as a concept, ii) show how analytical concepts may stimulate to theoretical diversity when conducting empirical research on universities, iii) discuss how we might advance research in higher education by developing and applying analytical concepts that offers rich possibilities for interpretation and further theoretical development.

Recommended reading list:

  • Albert, S. & Whetten, D. (1985) Organizational identity. Research in Organizational Behaviour 7(2), 263-295.
  • Gioia, D., Schultz, M. & Corley, K.G. (2000) Organizational identity, image and adaptive instability. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 63-81.
  • Stensaker, B. (2015) Organizational identity as a concept for understanding university dynamics, Higher Education, 69(1), 103-115.

Speaker’s bio: 

Dr. Bjørn Stensaker is a professor of Higher Education at University of Oslo, and the current Vice-Rector for education. He is also a research professor at NIFU – the Nordic Institute of Studies in Innovation, Research and Education in Oslo, Norway. His educational background is political science, and he received is PhD from University of Twente in the Netherlands on a study of organizational change processes in Norwegian higher education. Dr. Stensaker has an interest in the policy reform, governance and organizational change in higher education – in Scandinavia, Europe and beyond – and he has published widely on these issues in a range of academic journals and international book series. His latest publication is: Maassen, P., Stensaker, B. & Rosso, A. (2022) The European university alliances—an examination of organizational potentials and perils, Higher Education, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-022-00951-4

 

Cover Photo by Oscar van Gend on Unsplash