This paper parallels the changes experienced by universities and science at the beginning of the new century in order to explore one relevant source of resilience and change inside the universities’ institutional fabric, which is its persistent dependence on the signs and norms produced by science as a nested institution. To a large degree, science is organized according to its own norms and values, and, nevertheless, it de facto exists inside the institutional environment created by the university. As such, it is a nested institution.
In the past, the old university model provided ample space for accommodating tensions arising from this peculiar arrangement. As a de facto arena, universities had weak autonomy vis-a-vis the presence of the many “invisible colleges” organising the university’s knowledge related core activities.
However, since the end of the 1980s, the successive waves of reforms try to emphasise universities’ organizational autonomy and actorhood. Under the new environment, universities are expected to have more control over individual behaviours, decisions and values which would enable them to successfully block the presence of divergent standards, values and norms coming from outside.
Nevertheless, a core goal for all universities is to stay relevant in the global knowledge economy, which cannot be achieved without counting with the parallel institutionallity created for science. Thus, this paper argues that preserving a degree of arena’s logics in the university’s institutional fabric is central to preserve its quality and relevance. Nevertheless, the changing nature of science and the emergence of new fields of knowledge, characterized by new institutional designs, also impose new severe stress over the institutional fabric of the universities and on the academic career. The paper explores these tensions, based on in-deep interviews conducted with leaders of research teams inside the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and the University of Tampere (Finland).
