Chaos in Higher Education: Analysing Organisational Behaviour through the Concepts of Complex Adaptive System Theory

In this conceptual paper, we intend to develop a framework under which higher education organisations are examined as agents within complex adaptive systems. A complex adaptive system is one which consists of many agents, interacting in a disorderly, or non linear way, and resulting in a robust organisation with the capacity to learn, adapt and innovate relative to each agents’ internal structure (Marion 2008). The theory holds that agents, and in our case, higher education organisations, are collection of structures, immersed in greater structures (systems) and this structure is complex, a dynamic integration of relationships, which adapts to the environment, evolves, learns and improves. This complexity makes the behaviour of one agent highly unpredictable by studying the structure alone. This means that complexity arises as higher education organisations are immersed within environments populated by different actors (Robbins et al. 2003) with different expectations and changing environmental demands (Arbo and Benneworth 2007). As environmental demands change, higher education organisations must respond, adapt and initiate the process of learning to cope with the new situations to greater or lesser extents (Jongbloed et al. 2008). Understanding higher education systems as complex systems allows for explaining for instance why recent policy developments in higher education (HE), including changes in governance (e.g. Sporn 1996; Amaral et al., 2003; Olssen and Peters, 2005), funding allocation, quality assurance (Rhoades and Sporn, 2002) and human resource management (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Teixeira et al., 2004; Musselin 2005; Ferlie et al., 2009; Teixira, 2013) have fostered different organisational outcomes (Sporn 2003). In other words, while there is an observable convergence towards similar trends in higher education in Europe (Schmidt, 2002), there is a clear differentiation in the way higher education organisations, universities and universities of applied sciences alike, have responded to these challenges within national contexts (see Sporn 2003; Musselin 2005; Hazelkorn and Ryan, 2013). The responses usually vary across nation states either due to differences in the degree of complexity of external environmental demands (Greenwood et. al., 2011; Villani and Phillips 2013), or the very nature, availability and source of internal organisational resources (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Pfeffer and Salancik,2003). In this line, responses are somewhat dependent on the leadership skills (Sporn 1999), vested interest of stakeholders (Jongbloed et al. 2008) and opportunities or abilities of teams and departments to engage into strategic action (Oliver 1991; Roxas et. al. 2007). We explore the basic concepts of complex adaptive systems theory as a possible ontological framework for the analysis of how organisations in higher education experience, respond and adapt to system complexity. In other words, complex adaptive system theory is used as a magnifying glass to unpack the mechanisms behind organisational behaviour in higher education systems.