GRIFE Finnish Education and Global Perspectives Seminar Series XV
We are delighted to invite you to the upcoming GRIFE Seminar Series XV, titled " Intended and unintended change in university organizing – how university leadership is trying to navigate a complex landscape? ”.
Universities are often described as paradoxical organizations, balancing traditional characteristics like "loose coupling" with modern pressures to act as strategic, coherent entities. This seminar examines how university leadership navigates this complex landscape. Decades of reform have aimed to create more 'complete' organizations, yet universities' responses are frequently ambiguous and double-edged. We observe simultaneous trends towards both streamlined governance and new informal structures, towards stronger autonomy and deeper alliances, and towards internal capacity-building and increased outsourcing. These responses often create new administrative burdens and complexities, suggesting that universities are becoming "de-coupled bureaucracies." For leaders, the key challenge is to manage these inherent paradoxes by fostering coordination and recreating "organizational slack" to enable the flexibility and creativity needed to thrive. The presentation concludes that understanding these dynamics is crucial for effective leadership and research in contemporary higher education.
Please register from the following link for onsite and online participation!
| Moderator | Professor Yuzhuo CAI, Professor, Department of Education Policy and Leadership & Co-Director, GRIFE, The Education University of Hong Kong
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Speaker | Professor Bjørn Stensake, Professor of Higher Education, Former Vice-Rector for Education, University of Oslo, Norway
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Venue | B2-LP-23, The Education University of Hong Kong |
Date and time | 20 November 2025 (Thursday)
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| Recording |
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Stay tuned for more details! For the latest updates, visit the GRIFE website: https://grife.eduhk.hk/ .
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact us at grife@eduhk.hk .
We can’t wait to welcome you and explore these important discussions together!
