Professional higher education institutions as organizational actors

Abstract

Organizational actorhood is a term that has gained prominence in literature about higher education as a way to describe some of the key global change processes with emphasis on organizational accountability, formalization of structure, focus on goal definition and managerialism. At the same time, there is less knowledge about how organizational actorhood is constructed in professional higher education institutions. Based on over 100 interviews and document studies of two case institutions, this article argues that professional higher education institutions show many characteristics of aiming to construct organizational actorhood, while their understanding of accountability is broader than would be in traditional comprehensive universities.