Top Managers or Marionettes? The Roles of University Presidents for Achieving Excellence

This panel addresses the question in how far university presidents make a difference when it comes to the question of organizational actorhood. Are they agents of organizational change in universities transforming into organizational actors or is their role to navigate universities through different negotiations with their stakeholders while protecting academic freedom and the individual interests of their members from external infringements? To answer this question, this research focusses on the role of German university presidents for making 'their' university fit for the German Excellence Initiative and gain a better position in competition. Based on 24 interviews with university presidents and 13 interview with representatives from the ministries, this research reconstructs different ideal types of university presidents’ roles from the data. Thereby, it understands ideal types according to Weber (1963) as a one-sided accentuation of characteristics as a unified analytical construct. The reconstruction of these ideal types allows this research to identify not only the different roles that can be taken by university presidents in a competitive environment but also to relate these roles to the question of organizational actorhood.