Actorhood and competition in German doctoral education

Higher education reform policies since the 1990s have promoted an increase in the autonomy of universities under the auspices of New Public Management. To varying degrees, leadership was strengthened, budget control was delegated, and output-related steering instruments were introduced. These reforms were interpreted as strengthening the universities’ organizational actorhood (Krücken & Meier 2006). From a new institutionalist perspective, actorhood is a central feature of the global diffusion and institutionalization of rationalized organization (Meyer et al. 2006). Actors are empowered to act for themselves ‘but … under constructed rationalized and universalistic standards’ (Meyer & Jepperson 2000, 116f). Competition appears as such as cultural construct that requires rationalized and goal-oriented actors (Hasse 2019). It furthers the expansion of formal structures and the professionalization of internal management. But competition reaches deeper: Organizations have to define themselves “through adherence to a societal meta-frame that fosters competitive behaviour, active positioning and entrepreneurship” (Hasse & Krücken 2013, 198). They simultaneously are constructed and construct themselves as “competitive organizational actors” (ibid., 184). Actorhood and competition seem to go hand in hand: Competition presupposes actorhood, and actorhood is performed competitively. This paper seeks to go beyond this apparently tautological relation by exploring three possible combinations: (1) actorhood and competition, (2) actorhood without competition, and (3) competition without actorhood. Empirically, the paper draws on five organizational cases studies of graduate schools at German universities, two of which were funded by the German Excellence Initiative. As part of an ongoing transition from rank equality to vertical differentiation (Stock 2018), graduate schools can be taken as a resource of universities to position themselves. The paper reconstructs from concrete organizational action whether and how universities do so. What do they compete for, and how do they compete? Beyond simply stating deviation from policy goals, the paper seeks to illuminate how universities perform as organizational actors and thereby co-construct the competitions in which they partake. Hasse, Raimund (2019): What difference does it make? An institutional perspective on actors and types thereof. In Hokyu Hwang, Jeannette A. Colyvas, Gili S. Drori (Eds.): Agents, Actors, Actorhood. Institutional perspectives on the nature of agency. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 23–41. Hasse, Raimund; Krücken, Georg (2013): Competition and Actorhood: A Further Expansion of the Neo-institutional Agenda. In Sociologia Internationalis 51 (2), pp. 181–205. Krücken, Georg; Meier, Frank (2006): Turning the University into an Organizational Actor. In Gili S. Drori, John W. Meyer, Hokyu Hwang (Eds.): Globalization and organization. World society and organizational change. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 241–257. Meyer, John W.; Jepperson, Ronald L. (2000): The “Actors” of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency. In Sociological Theory 18 (1), pp. 100–120. Stock, Manfred (2018): The Transition from ‘Rank Equality’ to Vertical Differentiation in the German Higher Education Sector. In Roland Bloch, Alexander Mitterle, Catherine Paradeise, Tobias Peter (Eds.): Universities and the production of elites. Discourses, policies, and strategies of excellence and stratification in higher education. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 149–170.