Abstract:

Higher education institutions are singular, complex, and durable organizations, characterized by a multiplicity of conflictual interests and significant national differences. Worldwide, higher education is going through a period of big challenges and changes, in the midst of a profound economic crisis, and we can identify four main global forces propelling the academic revolution (Altbach et al., 2009): the massification of higher education, the emergence of the knowledge economy, demographics trends, and information and communication technologies.
It follows that academic institutions are asked by contemporary society to “do more and better with less resources” and have to find some innovative solutions to succeed despite this paradox.
Within the global scientific debate on governance and management systems in higher education, this paper focuses on benefits and criticalities of the development of strategic management.
To that end, we adopt the conceptual perspective of the best Italian tradition of Economia Aziendale (Business Administration), with particular reference to the institutional theory (Commons, 1934; Coase, 1937; Zappa, 1957, Masini, 1979) and the systemic theory (Von Bertalanffy, 1951; Boulding, 1956; Bertini, 1990). We ground our analysis on the International literature on governance and management, focusing on higher education. The case studies of two private universities in New England, Boston University and Brown University, show some similarities in the path to an integrated approach of strategic management, but also some open questions and relevant diversities, due mainly to a different key strategic orientation (Coda, 1988) and organizational culture (Weick, 1979; Schein, 1984). The historical and structural perspectives (Clark - Youn, 1988) are useful to understand the main effects of distinctive features and organizational levels on the development of governance and management systems.

Keywords:

Higher education, governance, management, Boston University, Brown University.