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Entrepreneurism from the ground up: entrepreneurism, innovation, and responsiveness in a start-up university

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Entrepreneurism from the ground up: entrepreneurism, innovation, and responsiveness in a start-up university

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ENTREPRENEURISM FROM THE GROUND UP:
ENTREPRENEURISM, INNOVATION, AND RESPONSIVENESS
IN A START-UP UNIVERSITY
by
Michael Paul Anthony Wong

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EDUCATION)

May 2008

Copyright 2008 Michael Paul Anthony Wong
ii

Acknowledgements
This dissertation could not have been written without the encouragement and
support of several people, most notably the following:
• Renee M. Payan Wong for her unwavering support for over a decade as well
as a great deal of copy editing and hand holding throughout, and Nicholas
Wong for giving up many weekends and evenings with his father
• Dr. William Tierney, my dissertation chair, for encouraging, supporting,
bullying, and, at the end, dragging me through this process
• The Cedillo, Hernandez, Moreth, Payan, and Wong Families, for their
encouragement, interest, and babysitting, all of which cannot be undervalued
• Several understanding and encouraging supervisors who provided a large
amount of release time for coursework, interviews, and writing: Dr. Julie
Wong, Dr. Thomas Klammer, Dr. Susan Allen Ortega, Dr. Patsy Oppenheim,
and Dr. David Fairris
• The many faculty, colleagues, and mentors at the University of Southern
California, the University of Vermont, California State University Los
Angeles, California State University Fullerton, the University of California
Riverside, the American College Personnel Association, the National
Association of Student Personnel Administrators, and Leadership Education
for Asian Pacifics, who provided timely inspiration, interest and support
iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
List of Tables v
Abstract vi
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Responsiveness, Innovation, and Entrepreneurism 3
A Start-up Entrepreneurial Higher Education Organization 6
Defining the Case 9

Chapter Two: Literature Review 14
Adapt or Perish 14
Corporate Entrepreneurism and Higher Education 19
The Same Tool But in a Different Context 24
Market and Customers 28
Different Approaches to Management 33
A Private Sector Solution to a Public Sector Problem? 35
Theoretical Frameworks 39
Birnbaum: Models of Organizations and Cybernetic Systems 43
Bolman and Deal: Multiframe Analysis 50
Shapers of Entrepreneurial Posture 56
Organizational Life Cycles 63
Conclusion 67

Chapter Three: Methodology 70
Introduction 70
Issues Associated With Case Study Design 71
Data Collection and Analysis 72
Validity and Storytelling 79
Transferability and Reading 84
Chapter Four: Running a University Like a Business 89
Building a Legacy 89
A Place to Fit In 91
Resolving Organizational Tasks 98
Entrepreneurism in Organizations 108
Entrepreneurism and Organizational Identity 111
“Choosing Hostility”: Shaping the External Environment 132
iv

Organizational Strategy: Linking Mission and Function 150
RGI’s Culture: Support for Entrepreneurism, and the “Real World” 175
Organizational Structure 208
Building Entrepreneurism from the Ground Up 218
Chapter Five: Privatization’s Promises Kept and Unkept 220
Introduction 220
Privatization and its Promises 221
Pursuing Increased Efficiency 231
Sustainability 235
Suggested Future Research 242

Bibliography 246
Appendices 256
Appendix One: Interview Protocol 256
Appendix Two: University Park IRB Human Subjects Approval 257
Appendix Three: Sample Consent Form 259
v

List of Tables

Table 1: Entrepreneurial Start-up and Traditional Higher 174
Education Institutions
Table Two: Entrepreneurial Culture in Industry and 176
Higher Education
vi

Abstract
Colleges and universities are under increased pressure from internal and
external constituencies for increased innovation and responsiveness. Entrepreneurial
private industry models such as start-up businesses, corporate ventures and spin-off
organizations have been recognized for their ability to quickly adapt to changing
business environments and rapidly innovate to take advantage of new opportunities.
This case study investigates these claims with regard to a start-up university founded
with the identity of an entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary institution that prepares
graduate level students for leadership careers as entrepreneurs in the bio-tech
industry. By interviewing twenty-four administrators, faculty, and members of the
Board of Trustees, including all but one of the founding full-time faculty, I present
an “insider’s” depiction of the lived experience of those most closely associated with
the founding and subsequent institution building of this unique higher education
organization. Initial chapters present a theory of higher education organizations,
derived from Birnbaum (1988) and Bolman and Deal (1991), as driven by two
primary tasks: resolving identity and establishing power and resources in relation to
that identity. I also present Russell and Russell’s (1992) theory of “entrepreneurial
posture” in relation to a higher education organization. Subsequent chapters analyze
the start-up university’s environment, strategy, culture, and structure within the
framework of the two primary organizational tasks and Russell and Russell’s (1992)
definition of an entrepreneurial organization.
1

Chapter 1: Introduction
American universities are in the midst of unprecedented change. For-profit and
corporate entrants to the “market” of higher education threaten to take over large sectors
of the “customer base” of traditional colleges and universities through better funding and
responsiveness to specific markets (Collis, 2001). While portions of higher education’s
customer base have departed traditional colleges and universities for new forms of
postsecondary education, the student population that remains is undergoing dramatic
demographic changes amid high expectations for their educational institutions to
incorporate rapid technological advances into all of their traditional functions (Tierney,
1999). Federal and state governments clamor for accountability while reducing financial
support during a period of rapidly rising costs (Levine, 2000). This resistance to funding
from government coupled with increased pressure from the public to control costs has
created an economic Scylla and Charybdis between which higher education organizations
will find it increasingly hazardous to steer (McPherson, Schapiro, and Wilson, 1993).
Truly, higher education has entered a period of adapt or perish. Responsiveness and
innovation are central to each of these crises. In each case, colleges and universities will
have to meet these challenges by responding innovatively to important constituencies.
Some of these constituencies include: current and potential students and their families;
employers and industries that hire graduates and sponsor research; federal and state
government officials and the electorate that votes for them; and other funding sources
like alumni and foundations. The capacity of higher education institutions to respond in
2

innovative ways to these constituencies will continue to play an increasingly important
role in the leadership of these organizations
Corporate entrepreneurism, the establishment of spin-off organizations from
preexisting firms, known as corporate ventures, is one way that for-profit firms and
industries have responded to rapidly changing market environments (Russell, 1999). The
adherents of corporate entrepreneurism claim that it has resulted in new sources of
funding and successful competition for market share. Small start-up entrepreneurial
organizations have been known for their responsiveness to specific markets and their
ability to innovate to take rapid advantage of opportunities (Burgelman, 1983; Kanter,
1984; Christensen, 1997). Although established for different reasons, corporate ventures
are powerful sources of innovation within existing organizations (Carrier, 1996),
establishing the culture of a start-up entrepreneurial organization within an established
firm (Pinchott, 1985). Corporate entrepreneurism is a way for established organizations
to gain the benefits of a small start-up entrepreneurial organization by responding to
emergent markets and taking advantage of a changing market environment without
abandoning the firm’s core customers. This innovative practice has been successfully
implemented in various industries (Meyer, Brooks, and Goes, 1990), as well as exported
across sectors (Nielsen, Peters, and Hisrich, 1985). Corporate entrepreneurism has been
identified as a potential source of innovation and transformation for a higher education
sector in dire need of renewal (Clark, 1998), but it is just one of many innovative
managerial practices recently imported from the business sector to higher education
(Birnbaum, 2000). Many of these imports have been charged with lack of fit with the
3

unique higher education environment (Buckley and Hurley, 2001), or for being
unresponsive to internal constituencies (Birnbaum, 2000).
Is corporate entrepreneurism a sustainable innovation for higher education
organizations? Can colleges and universities become more responsive and innovative by
adapting a corporate entrepreneurism model to the higher education environment? Can
higher education organizations create internal cultures of innovation that retain the
benefits without the drawbacks of corporate ventures? In the following sections I will
define some terms that are important to this study and briefly describe the study’s
context.
Responsiveness, Innovation, and Entrepreneurism
The concepts of responsiveness, innovation, and entrepreneurism are at the heart
of this study. Tierney (1999b) defines college and university responsiveness as a dramatic
departure from prior ways of interacting and communicating with higher education’s
different constituencies. He argues that change in colleges and universities needs to
occur, not on the margins, but at the core of their activities. Higher education institutions
need to develop new systems and structures for responding to external demands and
constraints (Tierney, 1998). Specifically, Tierney describes the responsive college or
university as one in the process of reengineering the academic community to reaffirm a
series of commitments that colleges and universities should make to these constituencies:
to an educational community, to academic freedom, to access and equity, to excellence
and integrity, and to inquiry (Tierney, 1999).
4

Higher education organizations commit themselves to an educational community
by keeping the education of all members of the community central. In their commitment
to academic freedom, colleges and universities equate the “common good” with the “free
search for truth and its free exposition” (American Association of University Professors,
1985). With a commitment to access and equity, members of the community subscribe to
a belief that a postsecondary education is an option for all individuals, regardless of
socioeconomic class. A commitment to excellence and integrity entails high expectations
for all members of the community and the institution itself. An organization that commits
itself to inquiry nurtures “the environment for intellectual inquiry and change” (p. 16).
Caught between rising expectations and sinking resources, colleges and universities could
benefit from change on the level of Tierney’s definition of responsiveness. But a mere
change in leadership or a new policy supporting innovation by administrative fiat would
not go far enough toward organizational transformation at every level. Tierney (1999b)
describes the kind of learning community that might result from this kind of
reengineering as “an environment that rewards experimentation and engagement with
society, rather than the maintenance of the status quo and a standoffish attitude” (p. 17).
What he is describing is a culture of innovation and creativity. In order to talk about
organizational culture, one must be clear about what we mean when we talk about this
term.
Geertz (1973) describes culture as the “webs of significance” that human beings
both create and live within. These “webs” are the meaningful structures within which we
create meaning from the various actions that we encounter within our communal life.
5

They are the shared understandings that tie together a particular community.
Organizational theorists often describe culture as being composed of multiple confluent
“webs,” or commonly held ways of looking at an organization that connect the members
of a particular institutional community in specific ways, such as through shared visions of
community (Birnbaum, 1988) or through shared frames of reference (Bolman and Deal,
1991). My perspective on the concept of culture in an organization paints a picture that is
more contested, consistent with Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) description of it as subject to
the often conflicting interpretations of its participants. Neither monolithic nor static,
culture is slightly less collaborative; a dynamic entity that is constructed through political
processes of hegemony and dominance, as much as it is co-constructed by equal partners.
As an analysis of a particular organizational culture, this study will explore how a
specific community of individuals creates meaning within their collective life so that their
actions in relation to one another make sense within their unique environment.
What makes this particular community unique is its singular commitment to
innovation and creativity within a framework of entrepreneurism. Schumpeter (1934)
describes an entrepreneur as one who innovates through the creation of new
combinations, resulting in new products, organizations, markets, customers served, or
services. Gartner (1990) describes entrepreneurism as simply the creation of new
organizations. Within the context of this study, I use the terms “corporate
entrepreneurism,” corporate ventureship,” and “intrapreneurism” interchangeably to refer
to the practice within which an established organization founds a new organization, under
its own auspices, usually to take advantage of an opportunity for market advantage over
6

competitors. This market advantage usually takes the form of exploiting a new
technology or addressing a customer that has not been a high priority for the
organization’s core industry. Sharma and Chrisman (1999) distinguish internal and
external corporate entrepreneurism. The former results in new organizational entities that
remain within the existing corporate structure. The latter result in new start-up or spin-off
organizations. Guth and Ginsberg (1990) add that corporate entrepreneurism has the
further function of strategic renewal, or significantly changing the organization’s
corporate strategy or structure. In the following section I briefly describe the context of
the study within the research site. In order to protect its confidentiality, I have changed
the name of the case study institution as well as the name of the higher education
consortium of institutions to which it belongs.
A Start-up Entrepreneurial Higher Education Organization
Founded in 1925, the Defarge University Consortium, also known prior to 2000
as The Defarge Colleges, is an alliance of 5 liberal arts colleges, a graduate university
(Defarge Graduate University), and a professional school (the Reynolds Graduate
Institute for Applied Life Sciences) in the Western United States. With 5400 enrolled
students, 600 faculty, 1400 staff, and facilities encompassing a square mile, the member
institutions of the Defarge University Consortium share many centralized functions,
including library resources, student services including a bookstore, financial services and
human resources, risk management, real estate, and physical plant.
In 1923 President Phillip Joad of Benchley College, the founding member
institution, envisioned, “a group of institutions divided into small colleges…around a
7

library and other utilities which they would use in common. In this way I should hope to
preserve the inestimable personal values of the small college while securing the facilities
of the great university” (The Defarge Consortium, 2002). About every ten years the
Defarge Consortium has added a new college, both to provide space for growth (by
agreement, the member institutions limit their size to under 2000 students, and in some
cases under 1000 students) and to keep up with new innovations in education. The
Defarge University Consortium members see themselves as on the cutting edge of the
future of higher education, collaborating to provide the resources and course offerings of
a major research institution while retaining the intimacy of each of the individual colleges
(Revised Constitution of the Defarge Colleges, 2000).
Established in 1997, the Reynolds Graduate Institute for Applied Life Sciences
(RGI) is the newest college in the Defarge University Consortium. After receiving a $50
million private grant from the Reynolds Foundation, Reynolds Graduate Institute
admitted its first class of 28 students in August 2000. At the time of this study’s data
collection, the institution had 58 students (30 men and 28 women). There were 10 full
time faculty and 5 adjunct faculty members. The institution offers just one official degree
program, the Master of Bioscience (M.B.S.), a terminal professional degree that
combines the “rigorous scientific training of the type usually associated with traditional
Ph.D. programs, with management, ethics and policy studies similar to those found in
M.B.A. programs” (Reynolds Graduate Institute, 2004a). Offering this degree is
considered the institution’s direct response to the bioscience industry’s need for “a new
8

form of graduate science education.” In May 2002 the Reynolds Graduate Institute
celebrated its first commencement, graduating its entire entering class of 28 students.
As a start-up institution, Reynolds Graduate Institute presents an opportunity to
observe first hand how an organization in the process of cultural formation, and
organized around responsiveness to a particular industry – bio-tech – deliberately sets out
to create a culture explicitly dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurism, and
responsiveness to a particular industry. This study will explore how a start-up institution
attempts to respond to an important external constituency while creating an internal
environment that fosters and supports entrepreneurial activities. RGI makes a particularly
compelling organizational subject for this investigation because of its claim to the
innovative cutting edge, in terms of its close working relationship with an emerging
industry, the biosciences and bio-tech. Faculty and administrators have been specifically
selected for their close personal connections to the bio-tech industry, either through
personal experience working in that industry, past collaborative research or consulting
with bio-tech companies, or having participated in founding a bio-tech start-up company.
This tight coupling is implemented at the organizational level through frequent (formally,
three times/year and informally, several times/week) consultation with leaders from the
bio-tech industry and an additional advisory council made up of industry leaders. RGI’s
relationship with the bio-tech industry is intended to be reflected in institutional decisions
concerning every aspect of the institution, including curriculum, hiring, and faculty
rewards. Analyzed at the holistic level, this institution provides an especially interesting
9

case to better understand the intersection of innovation, institutional responsiveness, and
culture in a start-up higher education organization.
Defining the Case
The uniqueness that makes it such an engaging topic for a case study also makes
Reynolds Graduate Institute difficult to categorize. At various points of this study,
respondents objected to characterization of their institution as a start-up or a spin-off
organization. RGI does share qualities with a start-up entrepreneurial organization but
also shares characteristics with corporate ventures or corporate spin-offs. However, RGI
also has significant differences from both of these models in both structure and mission.
What kind of higher education organization does this case study represent? As we will
explore, there are problems with using either a start-up entrepreneur frame of analysis or
a spin-off intrapreneur frame of analysis to understand Reynolds Graduate Institute. In
the process, perhaps this discussion will help to clarify some terms that will be used
throughout this study.
A start-up organization is defined as a new business or organization that is
founded by an entrepreneur (Weiss, 1981). The sense of ownership and autonomy of the
organization (Peterson and Berger, 1971) and an entrepreneurial orientation toward
business, are understood to be responsible for the innovativeness, rapid growth, and sense
of accountability that characterize the culture of a start-up company (Lumpkin and Dess,
1996). Covin and Miles (1999) describe corporate entrepreneurship as one of three
situations: 1) an established organization enters a new industry or business; 2) an
entrepreneur within a larger organization “champions” a new product or direction within
10

the corporate context; and 3) an entrepreneurial outlook permeates an entire organization.
A spin-off company, understood as an example of the first type of corporate
entrepreneurism, is an offshoot of a larger corporation whose existence is initiated and
supported by the pre-existing entity (Antoncic and Hisrich, 2001). This practice is also
described variously as intrapreneurship, entrepreneurial management or posture, or
corporate venturing, although for the purposes of this study the author will follow the
distinction made by Covin and Miles (1999) to refer to spin-offs and the like as corporate
ventures and corporate entrepreneurism.
RGI differs from both of these models in that it is an independent institution that
is a also a member of a larger consortium of institutions, the Defarge University
Consortium. Although RGI shares much in common with traditional start-ups in its
ability to make independent strategic and financial decisions, as well as accountability for
institutional failure, it shares more in common with corporate ventures in its ability to use
the “brand name” of the larger Defarge University Consortium for instant name
recognition. It also shares access to some of the consortium’s campus resources, such as
common central services and real estate, and shared management and administrative
expertise. It differs from corporate spin-offs in its lack of a common reporting structure
with the other members of the consortium and the absence of explicit financial assistance
to start up the company (although the gift of consortium-owned real estate, initiation of
the organization’s founding by a strategic decision of the consortium, and the strong
presence of leaders from other consortium institutions on the start-up leadership team all
argue in favor of this institution’s status as a higher education corporate spin-off). One
11

final quality that makes this institution distinct from both start-ups and spin-offs is that
RGI encourages the creation of its own spin-off companies. In its organizational values
statement, the institution “encourages new ventures, both internal and external, and treats
them as learning opportunities” (Mission Statement, 2002). In fact, part of its financial
plan depends on successful spin-offs for long-term financial viability, and the
encouragement and assistance provided to faculty in the creation of spin-off venture
companies is a centerpiece of the new institution’s faculty recruitment strategy.
With the possible exception of charter educational institutions, the literature
written about corporate venturing and corporate entrepreneurism has, to date, all been
written about for-profit businesses; not higher education or other educational institutions.
The difference in mission between these kinds of organizations creates a lack of fit when
one considers the criteria for success that the literature employs in declaring these
organizations to be successful. A successful start-up company or corporate venture has
been defined as one that is able to offer a high return on investment, specifically, one that
generates more income than expenses, and that provides a high rate of sales growth, a
high return for its investors, good profit-to-sales ratios, and high investment intensities
(Weiss, 1981).
Upon analysis of these criteria within a higher education context, one finds that
defining success for higher education organizations is more problematic. For example,
when one calculates return on investment for a higher education institution, in addition to
the straightforward inclusion of tuition and state and federal aid, does one also include
grant income, income from philanthropy, other student fees not included in tuition,
12

income from auxiliary revenue generation, and endowment income from investments?
Calculating the “return” on the investment is even more complicated when one considers,
in addition to credit hours, degrees granted and scholarship produced, the institution’s
service mission, creation and preservation of knowledge, and extracurricular learning. A
high rate of sales growth could be translated into enrollment management terms but
college and university pricing of tuition often operates apart from the relative demand for
higher education’s “product,” and businesses usually aspire toward growth in number of
units purchased, rather than increasing the quality of their customers or the number of
customers turned away relative to the number of customers accepted, as often happens in
enrollment management. Investment criteria could be translated into income from
philanthropy, but income generated through a university’s development office does not
generally come from the donor with an expectation of later financial returns, as one might
find in a venture capital situation. On the other hand, higher education institutions do
expect returns on their endowment investments. When it comes to financial returns,
colleges and universities tend more often to be the investor than the investment.
The next section of this chapter consists of a look at the problem of
unresponsiveness in colleges and universities. Adaptation of the corporate
entrepreneurism model from business to higher education will be shown to offer solutions
to the problems of unresponsiveness through the nurturance of innovative cultures and
faster decision making. However, the corporate entrepreneurism model will also be
shown to have its detractors, who charge it, and private sector imports in general, with
overly emphasizing management interests (lower internal responsiveness) and a lack of
13

fit with higher education organizational cultures. Following this, I will discuss how
organizations both influence and react to the internal and external environment to support
entrepreneurial activities. Along these lines, I will discuss how the organizational life
cycle can describe conditions within both the organization’s internal and external
environment and the organization’s political environment that both support and thwart
entrepreneurial activities within organizations. Added to this discussion of theoretical
frameworks will be a description of cybernetic systems and multiframe analysis that
informs my assumptions about higher education organizations.
14

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Adapt or Perish
Much of the literature on corporate entrepreneurship points out that one of the
main factors influencing the presence of entrepreneurial activity within organizations is
the existence of a dynamic or even hostile market environment (Covin and Slevin, 1990;
Miller and Friesen, 1984; Russell, 1999,; Zahra, 1991; Zahra, 1993). If this is the case,
then higher education seems to be an environment that is ripe for entrepreneurism
(Kliewer, 1999). Higher education’s internal and external environments are characterized
by a multitude of demands, some new, and some old: economic pressure amidst shrinking
resources and increasing costs, expectations to deal with shifts in both the student
population and the nature of work for graduates, dramatic increases in technological and
information management needs, and demands for responsiveness from multiple
stakeholders within and without institutions (Tierney, 1999). The context of higher
education is changing, and institutions are hard-pressed to adapt to the new environment
and survive (Collis, 2001; Collis, 2002; Mullin, 2001). The methodical pace of traditional
higher education decision making through traditional governance structures makes it
difficult for higher education institutions to respond rapidly to these changing pressures
(Benjamin, Carroll, Jacobi, Krop, and Shires, 1993). Organizations from the private
sector (Collis, 2002; Drucker, 1996) and more entrepreneurial organizations in the public
sector (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993; Chafee and Sherr, 1992) are held up as responsive
models for higher education organizations to emulate. Higher education organizations are
15

warned to make sweeping changes to their ability to respond to important stakeholders
before they lose their students and research grants to competing education providers who
are assumed to be more responsive to demands from students, government, foundations,
and employers (Collis, 2001).
Collis (1999) analyzes rapid transformations to higher education’s operational
environment through the lens of a systematic industry analysis. He portrays the threats to
colleges’ and universities’ continued “profitability” as a series of changes in the structure
of the higher education “market.” The combination of new technologies for delivery of
higher education’s “product” and the inability of traditional colleges and universities to
keep up with demand (Collis, 1999) are responsible for revolutionary changes in the
market environment, what Meyer, Brooks, and Goes (1990) would call second-order,
industry-level change. The outcomes of these changes in market structure are
characterized by reduced barriers to entry into the higher education “industry,” intensified
and increased rivalry between firms, increased “buyer power,” for students, and increased
availability and demand for alternatives to traditional colleges and universities (Collis,
1999).
Meanwhile, calls for transformative institutional change (Collis, 1999; Levine,
2000; Tierney, 1999) are balanced by cautions to manage organizational change in a way
that is consistent with institutions’ internal cultures (Gumport, 2001; Mullin, 2001).
Scholars point toward the longevity and flexibility of traditional higher education
governance structures and collegial environments as a strength that has historically
enabled institutions to respond to change without betraying their foundational values
16

(Birnbaum, 1988; Gumport, 2001; Keller, 2001; Kezar, 2001). While conceding the
necessity for change, these authors argue that higher education organizations should show
restraint in transforming their structures and practices. They respond that reforms that
work in for-profit organizations may not always apply to higher education environments
that must contend with unclear goals and shared governance (Birnbaum, 2001; Massy,
1996). Further, reorganization of a college or university’s decision making apparatus may
not be the most effective way to improve governance (Baldwin, 2001; McGuinness,
Epper, and Arendondo, 1996). Changes should be consistent with an individual
institution’s needs and take into account historical swings between institutional autonomy
and institutional control (Gumport, 2001; Keller, 2001).
Higher education is confronting a teleological question: what is the purpose of a
college or university? This question leads us into other questions: why should innovators
found a start-up institution, beyond the desire to avoid the problems that have troubled
the old institution? And if adaptation to higher education’s rapidly changing environment
is important, should some greater purpose guide our reforms other than mere survival?
The ultimate criterion of the success of a reform or an institutional change is how the
reform improves the effectiveness of the organization. Given the many threats to the
relevance of higher education, one important criterion of effectiveness is institutions’
ability to respond to their many constituencies. Few people writing about higher
education today will disagree that change is necessary in our organizational decision
making. However, any systemic organizational change must be tied to institutions’ ability
to respond to their various internal and external stakeholders (Tierney, 1999), rather than
17

to alarmist predictions of impending disaster. One difficulty with this approach is the vast
array of constituencies that are ready to line up to receive their portion of the university,
amid calls to expand the number of claimants to a stake. Just whose university is it,
anyway? What follows is a summary of these claims to the “ownership” of higher
education.
Over the last thirty years, students have become more confident and vocal
concerning their centrality to college and university missions (Horowitz, 1988). Along
with demands for accountability to the collective student population, many have noted
students’ emerging consciousness as individual consumers who have choices about which
institutions they attend (Collis, 2002, Frank, 1995), the quality and types of services and
facilities they can expect (Chaffee, 1998), and the time and place of their instructional
activities (Levine, 2000). Despite claims to the contrary, it is hard to imagine a college or
university that does not at least claim to be responsive to the needs of students.
Another influential constituency is the internal one: faculty and staff who are
directly affected by institutional decisions. Along with their claim that they “are” the
university, faculty and staff tend to dominate university governance systems such as
committees, academic senates, and university administrations. Through shared
governance and the presence of unions, faculty and staff can leverage this influence to
have a tremendous amount of control over university decision making. However, higher
education institutions have other, less obvious, constituencies that expect accountability.
A constituency that is closely related to students is alumni, and other
philanthropic donors to the institution. This group may attach demands to their gifts, and
18

often directly benefit from the output of colleges and universities as employers who hire
the graduates of higher education institutions (Collis, 1999). Alumni, donors, and
employers of university graduates may also have direct input into institutions’ decision
making apparatus as appointed or elected members of institutional governing boards or
alumni advisory councils.
Ironically, as state and federal support for higher education institutions has waned
over the last thirty years, demands from legislators and other public entities for
accountability have risen (Ewell, 1990; McGuinness, Epper, & Arredondo, 1994). Often
members of governing and coordinating boards are chosen directly by elected
government executives or legislative bodies. Threats by elected representatives to
withhold budgets and by citizen groups to vote down bond measures to benefit public
universities have given ordinary citizens extraordinary influence over institutional
decision making and accountability (Benjamin & Carroll, 1998). As government and
private sector grants assume a greater portion of support for university-based research,
the governing bodies for those grants are also able to play an increasing role in the
decisions made by universities.
Adapting a corporate entrepreneurship model to higher education may help
colleges and universities to be more responsive to their constituencies, resolve competing
demands, and innovate to achieve their missions more successfully. In the next section I
will discuss some of the claims that have been made in this direction, mainly from studies
based in the corporate business environment.
19

Corporate Entrepreneurism and Higher Education
Calls for innovation and responsiveness have not been limited to universities.
American for-profit industries have also been portrayed as unresponsive and moribund
(Guth and Ginsberg, 1990). Within this context, the vitality and creative spark that are
associated with entrepreneurism have been touted as the solution to the inevitable decline
in profitability that follows a new business or industry’s initial success (Miller and
Friesen, 1984). Policy analysts and business leaders have long called for widespread
revitalization of corporations and called for greater emphasis on entrepreneurial activities
in large companies (Guth and Ginsberg, 1990).
The circumstances that make entrepreneurism thrive in the corporate business
environment may also create the conditions for corporate entrepreneurism to be
successful within the higher education context. Scholars writing about the specific
conditions that encourage the presence of entrepreneurism in organizations offer ample
claims that corporate ventures thrive in rapidly changing environments such as those
facing higher education. Zahra (1991) asserts that entrepreneurial activities are intensified
in dynamic, hostile, and heterogeneous market environments. Russell and Russell (1992)
correlate successful entrepreneurial ventures with environmental uncertainty. Nielsen,
Peters, and Hisrich (1985) maintain that intrapreneurship is best practiced in rapidly
evolving environments.
The corporate entrepreneurism model offers potential solutions to organizational
problems that the business and higher education sectors have in common (Clark, 1998).
A theoretical framework at the organizational level, regardless of whether these
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organizations are business organizations or higher education ones, seems helpful at this
point. Most of the claims of corporate entrepreneurism’s benefits have revolved around
secondary advantages that have less to do with economic returns and more to do with
organizational transformation and increasing the firm’s ability to deal with external
threats and opportunities. While not directly affecting an organization’s profitability,
these benefits may arguably increase the organization’s capacity to achieve its goals,
whether those goals are increased profits or increased responsiveness.
Corporate entrepreneurism may improve an organization's ability to respond to
environmental threats and opportunities. In a more established competitive market
environment, corporate entrepreneurism may help an organization to respond to direct
competitive threats from other organizations serving the same or similar markets. Collis
(2001) warns more traditional higher education organizations of the threat posed by more
innovative proprietary institutions that are more able to offer different kinds of services
that students prefer, or are more willing to serve underserved student populations.
Similarly, Levine (2000) predicts the emergence of “click” and “brick and click”
universities that use web based innovations to successfully compete against “brick”
universities.
In order to successfully compete with these new innovators, higher education
organizations may apply the lessons of corporate entrepreneurs from the business sector
to surpass their competitors. Carrier (1996) and Stevenson and Jarillo (1990) write of
corporate entrepreneurism’s unique mix of the large and the small in order to allow large
firms to capitalize on the advantages in this area generally associated with small,
21

entrepreneurial firms. These advantages are understood to be: flexibility (Birch, 1987),
rapid growth (Drucker, 1985), and innovation (Backman, 1983). Similarly, Christensen
(1997) adds that start-up firms are more able to exploit new technologies by importing
the technology from one industry, where it has already been developed and practiced, to
another, where other firms’ lack of familiarity with the technology will give an innovator
a strong competitive advantage. In a market environment characterized by intense
competition and decreasing overall market growth (Collis, 2001), these advantages may
allow an organization to make quick decisions and respond to demands in order to
compete successfully. Christensen (1997), Collis (2001), Dougherty (1990), Peterson
(1981), and Peterson and Berger (1971) all comment on the need for organizations to act
entrepreneurially in order to continuously defend against external competition. Dougherty
(1990) and Peterson and Berger (1971) credit corporate entrepreneurism with giving
firms the means for coping with competitive threats.
An additional subset of writers on this topic go into more detail on specifically
what corporate entrepreneurism does to increase organizations’ capacity to compete
successfully. In an important sense, they make the claim that corporate entrepreneurism
helps organizations to respond, not just directly to their competitors, but also to rapid and
sustained market-level changes in the competitive environment (Kuratko, Montagno, and
Hornsby, 1990; Miller and Friesen, 1985). According to Clark (1998), corporate
entrepreneurism helps organizations to deal with “demand overload,” the imbalance
between the ever-increasing demand for access, new training, accountability, and creation
of new knowledge and the institution's ability to respond. Peterson (1981) writes that
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corporate entrepreneurism gives organizations the means for absorbing the negative
consequences of environmental turbulence by improving their ability to respond quickly
to rapid change and take advantage of opportunities. This gives firms a measure of
“insurance,” against external threats.
Guth and Ginsberg (1990) point to corporate entrepreneurism as an effective tool
for managing organizational transformation and strategic renewal. Harnessing the
potential of entrepreneurial creation within the context of a large organization allows the
firm to retain staff and jump-start new ideas without having to face internal threats to the
firm’s strategic mission (Wild, 2000). In this way. corporate entrepreneurism seems to
help organizations to manage environmental change when it emerges from inside of the
organization, Peterson (1981) describes internal venturing as a “safety valve” against
internal pressure to create opportunities for growth. This safety valve prevents the
attrition of innovative employees from the organization due to bureaucratic frustration
(Kanter, 1984; Pinchott, 1985; Goddard, 1997; Kuratko, Montagno, and Hornsby, 1990).
In addition to allowing the firm to capitalize on opportunities that arise from the
inside, corporate entrepreneurism acts as a preventative to keep innovative employees
from leaving the firm and eventually emerging as new competitors (Wild, 2000). Large
organizations can attract and retain employees with entrepreneurial personalities, and can
experiment with different cultures and reward and recognition systems within the same
organization, ultimately transforming the larger firm (Wild, 2000). The pursuit of
innovation is perceived as an important means of establishing and maintaining
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competitive advantage for the firm, and initiating transformation and renewal of the
organization (Russell, 1999).
Many of the transformative properties of entrepreneurial business organizations
may be of great value to higher education organizations. An “entrepreneurial university”
has the potential to be more responsive to its stakeholders by gaining the ability to more
quickly resolve competing demands and innovate to achieve its mission more
successfully. In one vision of this new kind of organization, entrepreneurial universities
would actively seek to innovate, and intentionally seek to shift the organizational
character in both process and outcome, in order to adapt to change (Clark, 1998).
Entrepreneurial organizations may seek to transform themselves – and entire industries
(Chandy and Tellis, 2000) – in order to be more responsive to internal and external
demands and more successfully achieve their goals (Wild, 2000). Antoncic and Hisrich
(2001) and Hornsby, Kuratko, and Zahra (2002) found that innovation in organizations
led to still more innovative activity, and innovative orientations within the organization.
These gave rise to the development of new products and services, technologies, and
administrative techniques, new strategies and new competitive practices. Burgelman
(1983) found that corporate entrepreneurship was likely to lead to economic returns and
diversification in the existing firm. Within these firms, middle management played an
“uncertainty absorption” role to integrate innovation into determination of the firm’s
strategic context. According to Burgelman (1983), Merrifield (1993), and Dess,
Lumpkin, and McGee (1999), corporate entrepreneurship elaborates, explores, and
extends the firm’s existing technologies and “corporate capabilities,” through extending
24

the firm’s environmental support base and maintaining capabilities to pursue – or not to
pursue -- different avenues of corporate development.
Birnbaum (2000) has created an entire category of “management fads,” in which
strategies are imported from the business sector to higher education organizations with
little reflection on whether the management practice would solve problems – or even
create new ones -- within a higher education context. Birnbaum continues by describing a
“management fad life cycle,” in which a business practice is first lauded as the solution to
a college or university’s management problems, then enthusiastically adopted with little
study and unsupported claims of amazing success, and, finally, quietly forgotten until the
next big thing comes along. Most would agree that business organizations and higher
education organizations share a number of management problems in common. However,
translation of a management practice from one sector to another has the potential to
create new problems to replace the ones it solves, or at least to have no effect at all
because of the incompatibility of the two different kinds of organizations (Birnbaum,
2000,; Marginson and Considine, 2000; Buckley and Hurley, 2001). What follows is a
discussion of the possible obstacles to supporting corporate entrepreneurism within
higher education organizations.
The Same Tool But in a Different Context
The main obstacle to using a business tool like corporate entrepreneurism within
the higher education context is the differences between higher education and business
organizational approaches to their internal and external environments. One must question,
at the outset, whether a management practice can be successful when imported into a
25

sector in which the assumptions regarding the organizational context vary so greatly from
their original context. Colleges and universities differ from business organizations in the
ways that they respond to their external environments through the different assumptions
that they make regarding goals and strategic planning, and how organizations approach
their customers and markets. These two kinds of organizations also have important
differences regarding their internal approaches to governance and management issues. In
addition to the differences between contexts within which business and higher education
organizations operate, corporate entrepreneurism is relatively rare within higher
education, ad even within a business context only works in specific kinds of situations.
Finally, within the business literature, there is some ambiguity around whether this
practice actually works.
Colleges and universities are particularly different from business organizations in
the way that they respond to the external environment, especially in the areas of strategic
planning and goal setting. Colleges and universities present some significant differences
from commercial organizations in the areas of goals (Schapiro, 1993), governance
(Council for Aid to Education, 1997), and decision making style (Schuster, Smith, Corak,
and Yamada, 1994). These differences may all contribute to the difficulty in translating
any management practice from one sector to the other, as well as slowing or even
preventing the organization from responding to the external environment. Schapiro
(1993) contrasts business firms’ profit-based standards of success with the more complex
goals found in colleges and universities. Although colleges and universities may share the
standard of good financial management with commercial organizations, higher education
26

institutions might add multiple internal and external stakeholders that may all have claims
to the institution’s priorities. Of course, primary to the existence of higher education
organizations have been the more altruistic goals of creating new knowledge and teaching
students. Furthermore, most colleges and universities add the pursuit of research funding
and a nonprofit fundraising element to these goals. The primary difference here, for
Schapiro (1993), is that businesses have a clear and unambiguous goal to satisfy the
customer who might buy their products, while colleges and universities must pursue
multiple goals and satisfy multiple customers whose interests may not always be in
alignment.
In addition to having multiple concurrent goals, colleges and universities differ
from businesses because of the necessity of contending with a governance structure that
may slow or even prevent the organization from responding effectively to the external
environment. In “Breaking the Social Contract,” the Council for Aid to Education (1997)
describes how higher education’s traditional governance structure actually prevents
colleges and universities from asking the same kinds of questions that businesses ask
themselves when engaging in formal strategic planning. For example, the authors point
out how most institutions have separate budgeting and accountability systems, which
inserts a barrier between the organization’s planning function and its internal
management. Birnbaum (1991) accedes in the title of his essay that academic senates do
not work, but they, nevertheless, will not go away. He does this in order to make greater
points about their important latent functions, although few of these functions have much
to do with steering the institution or dealing with impending crises. Birnbaum’s
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description of university governance contrasts sharply with prior descriptions (Lee and
Piper, 1988) of business organizations’ governance to achieve the organizations’ strategic
goals.
In the same vein as governance, Schuster and Associates (1994) differentiate
business and higher education institution decision making. To the authors, process and
outcome are almost independent of one another in the decision making process in higher
education institutions. The central conflict in this context is between making good
decisions and making legitimate decisions. Although Schuster et. al. acknowledge the
complexity of the higher education planning environment, when the quest for
acceptability replaces the search for the best decision, the performance of the overall
organization is likely to suffer. For the authors, within the context of trying to respond
appropriately to the organization’s external environment, planning and governance
processes are asynchronous and unlikely to affect one another.
These differences in both kinds of organizations’ approaches to the external
environment can combine to impede application of common business tools to the higher
education environment. For example, Lewis and Dundar (1998) describe the many
difficulties of applying cost-benefit analysis within colleges and universities because of
differences in the higher education environment, such as, for example, unclear definitions
of costs; unclear outcomes, undefined production processes, and differences within the
industry in the quality of outputs. Similarly, Leslie and Fretwell (1996) describe the
difficulties that institutions had in developing a comprehensive strategic plan to deal with
a specific crisis. Even faced with a hostile environment and pressure for change and
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increased performance, most higher education institutions in their study did not choose
formal strategic planning to deal with a specific problem. Rather, within an “internal
decision making culture,” the strong emphasis on democratic participation actually
impeded institutions’ ability to come to closure about specific decisions. “Simultaneous
tracking,” the change process that did emerge, was more similar to Wieck’s (1979)
description of an “organized anarchy,” parallel autonomous efforts by several
uncoordinated sub-units to respond to the same problem. In the next section I discuss
differences between higher education and business’ approaches to their market and
customers.
Market and Customers
One way of looking at higher education and its external environment is to see it as
an industry situated within a market for its services. Collis (1999, 2001, 2002) has written
much about the higher education industry and its competition, customers, branding, price,
and income. In Collis’ analysis, these variables function within the context of higher
education organizations’ continued prospects for retaining value within this market. This
analysis collides with more traditional perspectives of higher education as fundamentally
distinct from business organizations. The approaches of each type of organization to the
concept of the customer highlights – but does not necessarily support -- these differences.
Much has been written on the differences between business and higher education
approaches to their customers. According to Chaffee (1990), within the context of
business and industry, the term, “customer,” is synonymous with “public.” In business,
the customer is often unambiguous, defined as the purchaser of the organization’s
29

product or service. For Lee and Piper (1988), from an executive management perspective,
the power of the customer is espoused as the means by which a business organization can
continue to successfully negotiate market forces and make a profit. The old maxim, “the
customer is always right” neatly sums up the business organization’s approach to
customers. This perspective also most often positions the customer external to the
organization, able to influence the firm through one’s purchasing decisions. If a business
organization fails to effectively respond to its customers it will quickly cease to exist
(Dougherty, 1990).
It is an old adage within higher education that the customer is the product, yet this
statement is light years away from a business perspective in which the customer is
external to the organization and the product is changed to respond to the customer’s
demands. For Bargh, Scott, and Smith (1996), higher education’s “customers” associate
with colleges and universities in order to undergo personal transformation and to
internalize certain academic values, rather than merely to consume the organization’s
products. Within higher education one may encounter multiple internal and external
customers, who may bring concurrent conflicting demands, and an equal number of
“products” as “customers.” Buckley and Hurley (2001) distinguish higher education
organizations as being driven by academic excellence, rather than “customer
expectation,” and being part of a “quality based” culture, rather than a profit based one.
Collis (1999) characterizes the recent market environment in the higher education
industry as having low “buyer power” due to the combination of high demand for low
supply of service, and minimal competition among rival firms or from new market
30

entrants. Lee and Piper (1988) use the analogy of the British National Health Service as
an analogy to describe higher education’s management style as one in which
professionals use their expert knowledge and skill to determine the best way to care for
their clients, whose role is to trust in the professionals’ expert authority. Similarly,
Buckley and Hurley (2001) downplay students’ participation in the design of their
education when they describe their primary task as “learning to learn,” as if learning were
nonexistent prior to their college experience.
Chaffee (1990) depicts the distaste of many working in higher education for the
use of the word, “customer,” to describe students. Chaffee and Sherr (1992) instead
employ the term, “beneficiary,” to “customer” in order to incorporate business
management and higher education management perspectives on customer responsiveness,
as well as to encompass the higher education phenomena of multiple concurrent
customers and both internal and external customers. Bargh, Scott, and Smith (1996)
portray the change in terminology from “student” to “customer” in colleges and
universities as a shift in values from a public service standpoint to a business or
management approach. For the authors, use of this term is one symptom of what they
consider an insidious global “massification” and “marketization” of colleges and
universities. To Bargh et. al., (1996) higher education organizations are governed by
altruistic principles such as: the legitimacy in themselves of the growth and transmission
of knowledge; authority based upon the quality of one’s work as evaluated by one’s
academic peers; participative decision making; commonality among equals; and
accommodation of differences between and within academic disciplines. For the authors,
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the shift to a “customer service” approach to student responsiveness signals emergent
business values applied to higher education, such a: the importance of the pursuit of
profit over other organizational goals; the superiority of entrepreneurial knowledge to
expert or professional knowledge; high value assigned to competition and
decentralization; and the appeal of a more autocratic managerial style. Buckley and
Hurley (2001) agree with this assessment of the differences between the cultures of
higher education and business. For these authors, higher education’s essential nature is a
place of teaching liberal knowledge (knowledge plus the understanding of ethics) within
an “adaptive epistemology” (learning to learn) and characterized by academic excellence.
When colleges and universities substitute customer expectation for academic excellence,
they argue, the likely outcomes are fragmented learning, teaching what is certain and
known only, and mechanistic program delivery.
However, along with Chaffee (1990), Chaffee and Sherr (1992), and Lee and
Piper (1988), Collis (2002) disagrees with the contention that the divergent approaches to
their respective customers add up to an insurmountable obstacle to the free flow of ideas
across these two sectors. Collis concedes that the concept of the “customer” has become
more complicated in recent years by the emergence of new kinds of customers in concert
with new technologies for educational service delivery. Nevertheless, he contends that
higher education can be evaluated by the same standards as any other industry, and in fact
higher education risks losing significant market share to new competitors from other
industries and early adopters of new technologies unless it adopts a more entrepreneurial
and competitive approach toward meeting customer needs. Principally, Collis (2002)
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argues that higher education has done a poor job of targeting its primary audience, which
has changed from primarily traditional students to include corporate purchasers of
professional education and training, distance education students facilitated by new
technology, and a growing international market for American higher education.
Although they acknowledge the antipathy that many who work in colleges and
universities feel for the application of a business perspective to what they do, Chaffee
(1990) and Chaffee and Sherr (1992) nevertheless support a focus on responsiveness to
the organization's customer and a dedication to high quality in the work of the institution.
The authors argue that the complexity of the concept of a higher education customer
should not move college and university leaders to simply abandon their organizations’
obligations to meet the needs of their customers. Rather, they persist that colleges and
universities should take an active role in identifying these customers -- multiple, internal
and external – in order to show continued relevance in a rapidly changing environment.
Likewise, after their descriptions of consensus management, accounting
management, administrative management, executive management, and professional
management, Lee and Piper (1988) conclude that, given their limited resources,
universities should pursue and strengthen executive management, the form of
management most closely connected to commercial perspectives on management. To the
authors, within the context of threats to higher education’s relevance and the need to
prove high performance and accountability to its funding bodies (government), executive
management alone has the ability to set and meet clear goals for effectiveness and
efficiency.
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How colleges and universities approach their “beneficiaries,” whether as
“customers” or “clients,” is at the core of higher education organizations’ ability to
compete in a rapidly changing market. More than just semantics, this difference in
outlook signals the difference between an approach to students as active consumers or as
beneficiaries of a college or university’s professional expertise. This important
relationship, or set of relationships, has a significant impact on an institution’s overall
approach to the external environment. Whether one sees students as customers or clients
comes with a whole set of assumptions about the external environment and the
organization’s role within it, including the parameters of success, tolerance for
competition and entrepreneurial behavior, and constraints on organizational
responsiveness to various stakeholders. Higher education organizations’ approaches to
the external environment are just one way in which they are distinct from business
organizations. Their relationship with the internal environment, beginning with the role
of management in the institution, also highlights some significant differences.
Different Approaches to Management
A primary area of difference between businesses and postsecondary institutions is
in their respective approaches to management. Johnstone (2002) defines privatization of
colleges and universities as the tendency for institutions to take on the characteristics or
operating procedures of private enterprises. In his description of the more specific
characteristics associated with this phenomenon are “decisive decision making” and
support for “top-down management.” Johnstone describes the argument of the opponents
of privatization of higher education as having distorted and subverted higher education’s
34

core academic mission. To privatization’s opponents, he continues, privatization elevates
the goals of managerial efficiency and vocational relevance over the goals of academic
quality and learning for its own sake, and is contrary to the norms of shared governance
and the academic profession. Although within the business context the creation of a
successful entrepreneurial organization has been linked to strengthening the role of
management, within the university context these same practices have been perceived as a
threat to the democratic governance process within higher education. Jones (1986) and
Hopper (1986) also warn against the potential damage to democratic processes in
colleges and universities that may accompany some of the cultural shifts that come with
privatization.
Marginson and Considine (2000) warn that the “enterprise university” is
incompatible with the collegial management style often associated with universities. The
authors depict an “enterprise” management culture as having a mission and governance
highly centralized around executive management, with definitions of quality and
accountability based on private sector concepts of economic consumption. Marginson
and Considine argue that within this environment, traditional higher education forms of
governance are supplanted by advisory committees accountable to executive management
and other less democratic forms of decision making. To the author, the general trend in
the management of the “enterprise university” is strengthening, increasing the flexibility,
and centralization of executive power and control, and the removal of control of
strategically important areas of the university from traditional governance structures.
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Lee and Piper (1988) also highlight incompatibilities between higher education
and enterprise management approaches in their comparison of executive/commercial and
consensus/professional management cultures, especially in the areas of financial
accountability, control, and management style. Although they acknowledge the presence
of both executive management and consensus management cultures in universities and
the public sector in general, the authors caution the reader about the vast differences
between the assumptions about organizations underlying each of these cultures. For
example, the authors describe the purpose of an organization operating under executive
management assumptions to achieve goals that are set by the management’s sponsors
and carried out by the management. In contrast, an organization operating under
consensus management assumptions is composed of many professionals all trying to
make the best decisions for their clients and their profession, many of which will not
agree. Strategic planning for this kind of organization will be accomplished, to a large
extent, through argument, discussion, debate, negotiation, and politics. Although Lee and
Piper conclude that running an organization under the more publicly accountable yet
more authoritarian executive management style is preferable, they also warn against the
potential zero-sum game involved in the calls for increased accountability underlying the
executive management style and the demands for increased autonomy underlying the
consensus/professional style.
A Private Sector Solution to a Public Sector Problem?
When considering importing corporate entrepreneurism into higher education, an
important cause for concern is that using this practice in the higher education
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environment and getting it to work there may not be the same thing. For all of the claims
of its supporters and the raft of literature devoted to it, there is no unambiguous
consensus about whether corporate entrepreneurism is a solution to all of the business
world’s problems or that it even works at all. Certainly, the large amount of work written
about the specific circumstances in which corporate entrepreneurism is likely to thrive
tells a story, not just about the importance with which business leadership approaches the
topic, but also about the difficulty that business leaders have had in creating the right
circumstances to make corporate entrepreneurism work. Even within the business
context, corporate entrepreneurism does not necessarily work or apply to all
organizational environments.
There are few clear, unambiguous statements of the tangible benefits of corporate
entrepreneurism. Zahra (1991) claims that at the end of the day there is a lack of
compelling evidence that corporate entrepreneurism contributes to organizational
performance. After comparing traditional start-ups to internal ventures, Weiss (1981)
agrees, finding that the traditional start-ups performed better on rates of sales growth,
profit to sales ratios, return on investments, and investment intensity. Nielsen, Peters, and
Hisrich (1985) caution us that, although corporate entrepreneurism contributes best to
organizations’ overall performance in environments similar to those being experienced by
higher education, what gains there are from corporate entrepreneurship apply more to
secondary, in-house activities such as nurturing creativity, rather than to contributing to
the bottom line. Although the most elaborate criticisms have been cultural in nature,
claims of the incompatibility of a business-based approach to higher education may be
37

joined to possible legal constraints and challenges from powerful interests opposed to
giving more authority to university management, such as unions, academic senates, and
state legislatures.
Joined to these obstacles are claims that corporate entrepreneurism requires
specific kinds of conditions in order to contribute to increased organizational
performance. Higher education has the right external environment (hostile, competitive,
shrinking resources, a large number of creative people looking for solutions), but other
conditions must also be met for the venture to be successful. MacMillan, Block, and
Nurasimha (1986) cite unrealistic expectations and inadequate corporate support as the
main obstacles to the success of new corporate ventures. Kuratko, Montagno, and
Hornsby (1990), Quinn (1985), and MacMillan, Block, and Nurashima (1986) point at
the new corporate ventures’ market and entry timing and approaches as a possible barrier
to their success. Schuler (1986), Shatzer and Schwartz (1991), Kuratko, Montagno, and
Hornsby (1990), and Stevenson and Jarillo (1990) all caution that the right internal
mixture of accountability and flexibility must exist within the organization for corporate
entrepreneurism to generate the expected high level of creativity and innovation. The
authors all describe this internal environment as one that gives leaders the ability to make
mistakes without negative consequences, yet balancing this open structure with a high
degree of accountability to central leadership and close supervision of the venture’s
financials and achievements. Quinn (1985), Rice (1999), Russell (1999), and Stevenson
and Jarillo (1990) emphasize that the right individual leadership must exist in the
organization. A common leadership profile can be constructed from all of these
38

descriptions: risk taking, energetic, self motivated, creative, possessing strong negotiation
skills, financially savvy, experienced with project management, supported by a network
of specialists, generalists and the right middle management.
There are also disagreements within the literature about what kind of
organizational structure works best for corporate entrepreneurism to succeed: highly
structured or open; large or small. Antoncic and Hisrich (2001), Hisrich and Peters (198),
Sykes (1986), Kuratko, Montagno, and Hornsby (1990), Sykes and Block (1989), and
Joni, Bell, and Mason (1997) all emphasize the importance of strong support for
management initiative and discretion in the success of corporate ventures. Picking the
“right” senior leaders with the right leadership characteristics, the existence of a more
formal structure and set of rules to support management decisions, and individual
accountability for success and failure are all identified as ingredients for successful
corporate entrepreneurs. The assumption is that leaders will be in a position to act
entrepreneurially when they have the autonomy and the supportive structure to do so.
Conversely, Russell (1999), Schuler (1986), Rice (1999), Carrier (1996) and Stevenson
and Jarillo (1990) all suggest that a loose organizational structure, mutual open
communication between different levels of the organization, informal networks, and
autonomy all contribute to spontaneous idea generation and innovation within
organizations, thus creating entrepreneurial cultures within the organization. The
assumption here is that organizations must create an entrepreneurial environment that
sends a message throughout the firm that innovative behaviors will be rewarded. Kanter
(1985) takes a middle stance, supporting organic idea creation at all levels of the
39

organization, but a high amount of formal structure at the implementation stage. In the
next section, I discuss my assumptions about organizations that will guide this study.
Theoretical Frameworks
One assumption of this study is that start-up higher education organizations will
be faced with competing expectations from internal and external constituencies, and their
environments. On the one hand, they are expected to respond rapidly to ever-changing
threats and opportunities to the institution from the external environment. On the other
hand, they are expected to act as democratic spaces in which competing claims to
ownership of the institution can be resolved in a manner that allows as many stakeholders
as possible to participate. The problem here is not that responsiveness is necessarily in
conflict with democracy. The creation of open systems in which information and ideas
flow up and down the organizational chart seems to be one way to support
entrepreneurism in organizations. Rather, democracy takes time, and the lethargic pace at
which traditional university governance systems address issues makes it difficult to make
rapid decisions. Unfortunately, these competing expectations for speedy responsiveness
and maximum involvement result in criticisms of the organization from both internal
stakeholders who expect to be consulted when decisions are made, and external
stakeholders who expect the institution to remain relevant and adapt to a rapidly changing
society.
Recent scholars of higher education organizations have begun to address how
colleges and universities reconcile various stakeholders’ competing visions of
institutions’ underlying purpose. To these authors, multiframe analysis offers the ability
40

to better understand multiple identities within organizations. They argue that, instead of
highly integrated systems with singular purposes, higher education organizations are sites
where different conceptions of organizations’ purposes, cultures, and functions are
pursued, as if several separate institutions are inhabiting the same geographic space. By
looking at organizations from these discrete perspectives, or frames of analysis, one can
begin to explain the existence of multiple cultures, functions, or communication patterns
competing within the same organization.
Multiframe analysis uses the concept of frames as a heuristic device to describe
the overlapping organizations that combine into an uneasy alliance within one
organization. A frame is a lens through which one can look at a specific approach to an
organization that highlights a particular aspect or aspects of the organization in order to
identify the distinct ways that different constituencies perceive the same organization.
Frames are a helpful way to view an organization because they allow us to understand
how the various perceptions of a university can make a single organization seem like
several institutions inhabiting the same space. In some cases these overlapping
institutions dovetail into a coherent whole, creating synergy and allowing the institution
to meet the demands of a wide variety of constituencies whose interests are not always
complementary. At other times, the separate conceptions of the organization come into
direct conflict, producing inefficiencies and nonproductive competitive behavior between
different camps pursuing their individual institutional goals.
These scholars present a picture of higher education institutions in which
competing demands and expectations of the university are more the norm than the
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exception. They present these coexisting visions of the organization through archetypes
of institutions that approach leadership and organizational change in distinct ways, and
through frames of analysis that address the underlying functions of colleges and
universities. The authors develop a series of lenses for the reader through which to view
the university. These lenses become a shorthand way to describe a particular vision of the
university that is also shared by a specific stakeholder or set of stakeholders of the
organization. By studying the organization through one of these lenses, one is able to
understand the institution through that perspective’s unique culture, institutional raison
d’être, internal structural logic, and communication strategy. What follows is a short
description of how multiframe analysis approaches different aspects of organizations,
such as culture, purpose, and structure.
Although a college or university may be said to have a specific institutional
culture, according to multiframe analysis one might describe several cultures within the
same organization. Geertz (1973) describes culture as the “webs of significance” that tie
together a particular community. Multiframe analysis of organizations posits multiple
confluent webs that connect the members of a particular institutional community in
different ways. Neither monolithic nor static, culture is more consistent with Lincoln and
Guba’s (1985) description of it as subject to the often conflicting interpretations of its
participants. According to this perspective, culture becomes slightly less collaborative
than Lincoln and Guba might imply; a dynamic entity that is constructed through political
processes of hegemony and dominance, as much as it is co-constructed by equal partners.
On the other hand, multiframe analysis is helpful to explain the relative lack or surplus of
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influence that a particular constituency within an organization might have on its dominant
culture.
Just as multiframe analysis describes culture as a dynamic process wherein
discrete constituencies compete and collaborate to construct the organization,
organizational purpose is a shifting target that is itself co-constructed by its participants.
Different groups of people approach organizations with different ideas of what is real and
important. Similarly, different groups of supposedly rational people may disagree about
the purpose of the organizations over which they all claim ownership. Birnbaum (1988)
describes a major task of organizations as “sense-making.” Regardless of the different
expectations placed on an organization, it must make sense to its inhabitants in order to
persist as a useful construct that shapes the perceptions and activities of its constituencies.
Prior definitions of organizations have described them as groups of people sharing
common roles, objectives, and formal social structure (Birnbaum, 1988). Multiframe
scholars describe organizations as accommodating multiple overlapping purposes. Keller
(2001) describes the multifunction aspect of higher education organizations as both a
weakness and a strength. Ambiguity of purpose makes it difficult to establish clear goals
and to assess the organization’s achievements, but it also allows the organization to
balance the influence of the various constituencies while reducing direct conflict. The
lack of a clear, unifying function for the organization also provides a balance for
institutional leadership between tradition and innovation.
It is often said that form follows function, so given the ambiguity of
organizational purpose, multiframe analysis also allows us to have a clearer
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understanding of organizational structure. Organizations are ultimately systems of rules
and relationships created and sustained by their participants. These written and unwritten
networks, and the extent to which organizational practice reflects more on the written or
unwritten relationships, can be better understood by analyzing the influence that various
stakeholders have on the organization – and on one another. The sets of assumptions
driving an organization dictate the relationships between organizational participants. To
scholars of multiframe analysis, when various constituencies within the organization have
differing assumptions regarding organization purpose or what it means to be in the
organization, one finds multiple structures operating concurrently within the
organization. This helps to explain why an organization might have a mission statement,
an organizational chart, and a strategic plan, yet have a prevailing operating practice that
is in conflict with all of the above. The operation of multiple structures also helps us to
understand the presence of “official” and “unofficial” leaders within organizations, and
corresponding flows of communication and information, regardless of the institution’s
organizational chart. I intend to use the particular approach to frames of two of the more
well known multiframe scholars as a theoretical framework for this study. What follows
is a description of each approach.
Birnbaum: Models of Organizations and Cybernetic Systems
In How Colleges Work (1988), Robert Birnbaum describes four “models” of
archetypal organizations. Each model is, “an idealized version of an institution as seen
through the lens of a specific cognitive frame” (p. 84). Birnbaum uses these “lenses” as a
heuristic device to understand the set of assumptions and networks that blend to create a
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particular view of the organization. To the author, different kinds of organizations have
their own unique assumptions, cultures, structures, rules, and styles of leadership and
interaction. At times, these different kinds of organizations can exist within the same
institution, either through smaller sub-communities within the larger institution, or in
direct conflict with one another.
For Birnbaum, since organizations are social constructs that are created and
maintained by those who inhabit them, the main work of the institution’s participants is
to make sense of the organization. In this way participants and leadership labor in a
shared attempt to “impose order and meaning on equivocal events and thereby help us
believe we truly understand the internal operations of colleges and universities” (p. 175).
In other words, the lenses through which we view organizations allow us to create a
coherent picture of the institution that arranges seemingly random events into a story that
we can understand. Like Burton Clark’s (1970) concept of the organizational saga writ
large, Birnbaum’s archetypal organization reorganizes the organization into a
recognizable “story” that is more understandable to participants than the arbitrariness and
“organized anarchy” of large organizations. The story that Birnbaum tells represents each
of the model organizations through lenses that differ in several respects: their
organizational culture and structure, rules, and styles of leadership and interaction. What
follows is a short description of each of the model organizations through each of these
lenses.
Birnbaum presents each model organization in the form of a fictional case study.
The collegial organization, given the name Heritage College, emphasizes egalitarianism,
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face to face communication, consensus, and shared power and purpose in its culture. The
shared community history, common backgrounds of its participants, and prolonged
participation from its members allow the collegial organization to have a strong and
distinctive culture with its own “traditions, symbols, and rites” (p. 91). “Heritage
College’s” structure is non-hierarchical, with decision making accomplished through
consensus and dialogue in an atmosphere of equals with maximum participation from all
members of the community. Likewise, the collegial organization’s members view
organizational leaders as the elected servants to the community, rather than as their
“bosses.” Birnbaum describes the leadership role within this model organization as the
“first among equals.” Consistent with this role, leadership emphasizes consultation and
consensus, and decisions are seldom made without careful consideration of input from
the faculty. Interaction and communication among the organization’s members are
congenial and lacking much of the contentious direct conflict found in other kinds of
organizations. Although there are disagreements, the organization’s members are willing
to defer to the authority and status gained through expert knowledge and seniority, rather
than position.
Birnbaum next presents a case study of another fictional institution, People’s
Community College, to demonstrate the model of what he describes as a bureaucratic
institution. Taking care to present the term “bureaucracy” in a non-pejorative sense, the
author describes bureaucratic organizations as emphasizing efficient coordination of tasks
and individuals to achieve goals, standardization of roles, the importance of levels of
authority, and predictable rules and regulations. Within this organization, structure takes
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on greater importance than in other organizations. Shared meaning of the participants’
roles, often clarified in writing and formal job descriptions, is characteristic of
organizations like “People’s.” Rules also take on greater importance in this type of
organization, allowing the institution to both ensure predictable responses to common
situations, and protect participants from undue ambiguity. Decision making and goals are
determined within a rational paradigm: precise, measurable, and data-driven.
Organizational leaders are chosen through a meritocratic system, and their authority is
based on one’s rank and position within the organization’s hierarchy. A participant’s rank
is tied to a history of promotion based upon consistent demonstration of competence and
performance.
Interaction between the organization’s participants are based on feedback loops
between superiors and subordinates. Superiors issue directives, and subordinates respond
with an action or actions and a report. Superiors respond to subordinates’ reports with
more directives. These loops of interaction are determined and reinforced by the
hierarchical structure of the bureaucratic organization, which cements these vertical
relationships through organizational charts and job descriptions.
In the fictional Regional State University, Birnbaum presents a model of the
political organization. The political organization is characterized by multiple member
groups that compete for resources, status, and power. The size and complexity of the
political organization prevents it from developing a strong coherent culture. Accordingly,
the culture that it does present emphasizes, “uncertainty, dissension, and conflict” (p.
132). Nevertheless, Birnbaum describes the political organization as a “kaleidoscope” of
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interdependence and coalitions. Group membership and participation change as new
issues come to the fore.
When viewed through a political lens, the organization’s structure takes on less
importance than in other organizations. The influence of interest groups often has less to
do with an individual’s rank in the administrative hierarchy than with that person or
group’s ability to have access to power. Different participants or alliances of participants
gain power through a variety of means, including access to information, legal authority,
specialized expertise, or informal contacts. Formal organizational leadership at “Regional
State” declines in importance relative to other kinds of organizations. Although leaders
like the university president hold and wield power, other individuals and groups also hold
and wield power. Building coalitions and negotiating with different interests are the
major roles of both formal and informal leaders in a political organization. Leaders tend
to approach their role by pursuing what Birnbaum calls “mediated progress,” designing
alternatives from which participants can choose, developing systems to deliver relevant
information to help participants to decide, and creating incentives to maximize
participation of all interest groups in decision making.
Birnbaum’s final model organization, Flagship University, is presented as the
archetype of the anarchical institution. The anarchical organization is characterized by
“bounded rationality,” in which issues of attention and meaning take precedence – how to
decide which element n the organization will receive attention, and how to construct
meaning from the many equivocal events surrounding the organization. He describes this
type of organization according to three defining characteristics: “problematic goals, an
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unclear technology, and fluid participation” (p. 154). Contrary to the assumption that
organizations act rationally based upon predetermined goals, the anarchical organization
often develops goals based upon what it has already accomplished, or on the makeup and
relative influence of the organization’s departments. Although “Flagship University” may
have used the same “technology” to educate students for a long time – long lectures,
small discussions, laboratory sessions, seminars – it is not clear whether these
technologies work or which is the most effective at educating students. Part of the
problem with the anarchical institution’s issues of attention and meaning are the unstable
participation of various individuals and interest groups in institutional decision making.
Different issues are chosen for attention or different interpretations are made of events
depending on who is participating in organizational leadership at any given time.
Leadership in an anarchical institution declines in importance even below that of
the political organization. The appearance of competence and effectiveness are often
more important than the actual traits. The organizational leader’s role is to manage
organizational symbolism, and the interpretation of equivocal events, in order to persuade
the institution’s participants to perceive the organization and its environment in the same
way as the leader.
In an anarchical organization, organizational leadership acts based upon how the
system really works, rather than on how one would like it to work. Accordingly, in his
description of “Flagship,” Birnbaum describes a leadership style that shares three
assumptions about anarchical organization’s goals, technology, and participation. In an
organization in which it is difficult to identify –or mandate – goals, leaders in an
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anarchical organization make sure to be perceived by their members as spending the most
time on issues that are most important to them. Leaders pursue several goals in order to
guarantee successful implementation of a few of them, and pursue achievable goals in the
organization in order to leverage larger organizational change later. When the
organization’s technology is unclear, leaders spend time interpreting history for their
members so that their actions will be perceived as effective. In response to fluid
participation, leadership in an anarchical organization persists in pursuing decisions until
the combination of participants can ensure successful implementation. Meanwhile,
leaders blunt the opposition of other participants by facilitating their participation in
governance and providing “garbage can” issues to distract them.
Birnbaum makes two additional contributions to our understanding of
organizations: loose and tight coupling, and the concept of the cybernetic organization.
An organization can be described based upon the relative looseness or tightness of the
coupling between its systems. An organization which functions according to rational
assumptions with strong top-down control of organizational behavior and decision
making, such as the bureaucratic organization, might be described as being more tightly
coupled. An organization that had ambiguous or multiple goals with little direct
relationship between the hierarchical leadership and its members’ actual behavior, such
as the anarchical organization, might be described as being more loosely coupled. Other
organizations, such as the collegial and political organizations, might be described as
having a combination of loose and tight coupling.
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Although some organizations may be looser or tighter relative to one another, in
general, higher education organizations can be understood as loosely coupled cybernetic
systems that respond more to a complex system of inputs and internal feedback loops
than to outputs or their own stated goals. Birnbaum’s conception of collegial,
bureaucratic, political, and anarchical organizations are an important addition to our
understanding of academic organizations. However, he cautions that the shifting and
contested nature of reality in higher education institutions makes each of the four models
of organizations only partially complete. Birnbaum asserts that rather than describe an
organization as a collegial, bureaucratic, political, or anarchical, it is more helpful to
think of a higher education institution as a cybernetic thermostat that regulates the
behavior of its members through a series of internal feedback loops. Rather than
monitoring its own outputs compared to its goals, the cybernetic organization responds to
a limited number of inputs with small adjustments and corrections to maintain its
equilibrium. Like a thermostat, the organization regulates itself with two kinds of
feedback loops: structural controls such as rules, regulations and structures; and social
controls such as a shared concern for group cohesion. The next section discusses another
theoretical framework important to multiframe analysis.
Bolman and Deal: Multiframe Analysis
As in Birnbaum’s conception of model organizations, Lee Bolman and Terrence
Deal have constructed a series of frames to describe variable assumptions, theory bases
and approaches to change in organizations. In Reframing Organizations (1991), they
describe how these frames shape organizational participants’ understanding and sense-
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making of events in organizations. Like Birnbaum, Bolman and Deal use a conceptual
device to examine higher education institutions from multiple perspectives. However,
rather than using model organizations to highlight the differences and similarities
between organizations, and how they maintain stability, Bolman and Deal (1991) use the
concept of frames to show different aspects of the same organization, and how they
respond to change.
Each frame develops the theoretical basis for decision making and its unique core
assumptions. Each frame also has its own unique responses to organizational change and
ambiguity that those who approach the organization from that perspective might pursue.
The authors also predict where problems may occur when organizational players use that
frame exclusively to understand their organization. The authors advocate “conceptual
pluralism” in response to rapid organizational change and ambiguity within
organizations. Successful organizational leaders use various frames of reference to
understand the multiple interpretations that might apply to a given scenario, “framing and
reframing” until they better comprehend the situation.
Bolman and Deal maintain that higher education organizations can be understood
through structural, human resources, political, and symbolic frames. What follows is a
short description of each of the frames according to the authors’ defining characteristics:
theoretical foundation; core assumptions; specific responses to organizational change and
ambiguity; and potential threats of adhering solely to this frame. The structural frame has
its origins in sociology and a rational approach to organizations. It emphasizes formal
roles and relationships in its picture of organizations. The core assumptions of the
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structural frame are that organizations exist to accomplish their own established goals,
and that they are most successful when the organizational structure is well designed to fit
its form to the organization’s circumstances. Successful organizations using the structural
frame use a rational approach through specialization and coordination to minimize the
environment and the personal preferences of their participants. Within the structural
frame, organizations allocate relationships to participants, and create rules, policies, and
hierarchies to coordinate their participants’ activities and reduce uncertainty. Problems
occur when the organizational structure does not fit the situation of that organization. The
assumption is that a perfect structure will yield a perfect organization, and that,
conversely, organizational problems originate from problems within the organization’s
structural relationships, rules, and policies. When using a structural frame of reference to
understand an organization, the response to the kind of ambiguity that might result from
rapid organizational change or ambiguity within the organization is to change the
structure itself through reorganization.
The human resources frame has its origins in organizational social psychology
and a human development approach to organizations. Within this frame, organizations
are inhabited by individuals with unique needs, feelings, prejudices, skills, and
limitations. The core assumptions of the human resources frame are that organizations
exist to serve human needs, and that organizations and people need each other to be
successful. The human relations frame emphasizes the fit between an organization and
the individuals who inhabit it. When this fit is poor, both the individual and the
organization suffer; when the fit is good, both benefit. Successful organizations pay
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attention to the issue of fit, and make adjustments to the organization and the individual
to improve integration. Problems occur when individuals within an organization defend
old attitudes and beliefs that are no longer consistent with the organization or the
individuals that inhabit it. When using a human resources frame of reference to
understand the organization, the response to lack of fit between the organization and the
individual is to make changes in the organization to better support its participants. The
ideal organization is tailored to each individual who inhabits it.
Like Birnbaum’s concept of the political organization, the political frame stems
from the study of political science, and a view of organizations that emphasizes
understanding power and the competition for scarce resources. For those who view
organizations through a political frame of reference, a core assumption is that
organizations are arenas where interest groups compete for influence and control of
limited resources. The enduring differences based upon different participants’ and
participant groups’ needs, perspectives, and lifestyles create an environment in which
conflict is ubiquitous. Bargaining, coercion, compromise, and coalition building are
everyday realities in organizations that must make decisions about the allocation of
scarce resources when seen through a political frame. Organizational goals and decision
making are often the result of coalitions between interest groups. When viewed through a
political frame, organizations do not seek to eliminate and resolve conflict. Rather, in an
environment where conflict and ambiguity are taken for granted, successful leaders
concentrate on the strategy and tactics of conflict in the organization, using agenda
setting, networking, coalition building, bargaining, and negotiation to accomplish their
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goals. Problems occur in the political frame when those who inhabit the organization
focus on politics to the extent that the rational and collaborative aspects of organizations
are forgotten, with too much emphasis on the more cynical aspects of operating within an
organization. Problems also occur in the political frame when power is too concentrated
or too dispersed, creating inequity or destructive gamesmanship. Successful leaders using
this frame of reference use political skill and acumen to create coalitions and
collaborativeness.
The final frame that Bolman and Deal present is the symbolic frame, which has its
origins in social and cultural anthropology. A core assumption of the symbolic frame is
that in organizational life, meaning and events are loosely coupled. Humans create
symbols to reduce uncertainty and unpredictability in organizations. The meanings of
most events in organizations are ambiguous, and the assignment of meaning to an event
is, to a certain extent, arbitrary. A given event is important more for its symbolic meaning
than for what actually happened. Just as conflict is a ubiquitous aspect of organizations
when understood through a political frame, ambiguity and uncertainty are a constant part
of organizational life when understood through a symbolic frame. Those who use the
symbolic frame of reference, “interpret and illuminate basic issues of meaning and faith
that make symbols so powerful in every aspect of human experience, including life in
organizations” (p. 244). Like the political frame’s use of the metaphor of the organization
as an arena, the symbolic frame represents organizations as theaters where participants
play prescribed roles. The emphasis is placed less on actual events and more on what
those events express. Another way Bolman and Deal describe organizations viewed
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through a symbolic frame is as cultures. Each organization has its own rituals,
ceremonies, stories, heroes, and myths that drive the organization’s culture more than
rules, policies, or managerial authority. Problems occur for those who use the symbolic
frame of reference when the organizational “actors” play their roles poorly, and symbols
lose their meaning. In this situation the link between ambiguous events and
organizational leaders’ assignation of meaning becomes less legitimate than other
competing meanings. Organizational participants lose morale because their attention to
organizational ambiguity and uncertainty is heightened. In these environments, successful
leaders use symbol, myth, and even magic to cement their authority to assign meaning to
events, and to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity.
Both Birnbaum and Bolman and Deal approach higher education organizations as
complex, multidimensional entities. These authors are able to account for organizations’
seeming ability to maintain coherent existences for a diverse population of participants
with often conflicting expectations and conceptions of the same organization. On the
other hand, analyzing higher education organizations through multiple frames of
existence also helps us to understand why the same organizations – and the people that
inhabit them – can behave at times in ways that are at cross purposes with their own
stated missions, or in ways that are blatantly harmful to their own constituencies. Up to
this point, I have outlined a theory of organizations apart from their entrepreneurial or
innovative behaviors. In the next section I will discuss how organizations create a
dynamic social context that supports entrepreneurial behavior within the organization.
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Shapers of Entrepreneurial Posture
Covin and Slevin (1991) define entrepreneurial posture as a combination of top
management risk taking, extensiveness and frequency of product innovation, and the
firm’s propensity to initiate competitive behavior with industry rivals. These factors are
influenced by the company’s environmental characteristics, its business and mission
strategies, and organizational variables such as resources and competencies, structure,
culture, and management values (Russell, 1999). Russell (1999) describes entrepreneurial
posture as a dynamic social process involving environment, strategy, and organizational
structure and culture. In this section I will examine organizational environment, strategy,
structure, and culture in detail.
For the purposes of this study, environment refers to the external context of the
organization, including outside influencers and external stakeholders of the organization.
While much attention in writing about entrepreneurism is paid to the role of leadership
and other internal sources of innovation and change, writers like Kliewer (1999) and
Carrier (1996) locate the sources of organizational change outside of the organization.
Kliewer (1999), in a study of how innovative postsecondary institutions retain their
distinctiveness, found in each case that the sources of institutional reform were externally
driven. Russell (1999), Zahra (1999) and Russell and Russell (1992) attribute an
entrepreneurial posture to external environments that are dynamic, heterogeneous, and, to
some extent, hostile. Antoncic and Histrich, (2001), Zahra (1993) Covin and Slevin
(1989, 1991) and Zahra (1991) go so far as to cite an environment that is hostile to the
firm’s current goals and mission, and intense competitive rivalry as one factor in spurring
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an entrepreneurial culture. In other words, the type of environment that may be perceived
to be threatening may also stimulate the conditions for corporate entrepreneurism to
thrive by intensifying internal entrepreneurial activities (Zahra, 1999) and creating an
environment in which innovation is an acceptable response to the unsupportable demands
facing the organization (Russell and Russell, 1992). Antoncic and Hisrich (2001) and
Hobson and Morrison (1983) concur, describing an environment that supports innovation
and entrepreneurism as one that is dynamic, in which technological opportunities exist,
the industry is perceived to be in decline, and high demand for the product exists.
An external environment that is characterized by constant change and threats to
the organization’s existence seems to mandate different kinds of behaviors by managers
and other organizational leaders. Dynamic and heterogeneous environments provide
opportunities, and hostile environments provide incentives (survival) to innovative in
order to gain competitive advantage. Innovative institutions survive because they are able
to adapt to constant change. There is little discussion of whether it is constant change that
necessitates constant adaptability in these organizations, or that constant adaptability is
merely a core characteristic of successful distinctive institutions. Clark (1998) writes that
in reaction to numerous external demands from multiple stakeholders, successful higher
education organizations strengthen their steering cores to be quicker, more flexible, and
more focused. Similarly, Weiss (1981) writes that, comparing the environments of
traditional start-ups and corporate start-ups, the harshness of the traditional start-up
environment explains higher performance because it forces the internal players to
accentuate ends over means. For Weiss, the harsh traditional start-up environment also
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forces managers to internalize organizational goals rather than individual goals. This
encourages organizational leaders to work toward the rapid success of the organization
rather than meeting individual goals based on historical corporate performance.
Burgelman (1983) describes the role of environmental uncertainty as the catalyst to
organizational change. To Burgelman, in the face of constant environmental change, the
current strategic context can no longer work to define the organizational context and filter
strategic behavior toward the existing organizational strategy. Incremental change will no
longer work, so autonomous strategic behavior (innovation and entrepreneurism) can
redefine the organization to create renewal. The external environment can play a
significant role in creating the conditions for internal entrepreneurism to thrive in
organizations. However, to attribute too much power to this aspect of entrepreneurial
posture is to abdicate the responsibility of organizational leadership to effect the
conditions for entrepreneurism to thrive within their organizations.
In order to create an internal environment in which entrepreneurism can thrive,
organizations have to create a strategy that explicitly focuses on supporting and
rewarding innovation. Burgelman (1983) defines strategy as a firm’s theory about the
basis for past and current successes and failures. Strategy serves as a filter for
organizational behavior and defines the parameters in which actors within the
organization can make decisions. For Burgelman, strategy creates a context within which
the organization can induce behavior, but also reduces the diversity of behavior within
the firm. Autonomous strategic behaviors, or innovation, is behavior within the
organization that does not fit into the categories created by the organization’s current
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strategy. As alternative explanations for the firm’s success or failure become more
dominant, the organization’s context gradually is redefined and a new organizational
strategy emerges. In order to create an entrepreneurial organization, an organization must
create a strategy that successfully balances diversity and internal communication within
the firm, what Burgelman calls “autonomous strategic behavior,” with a set of understood
categories that defines and gives direction to the working environment, or what
Burgelman calls “induced strategic behavior.” In Burgelman’s organization,
organizational strategy creates the context and resources within which the organization
can do business, but it also creates an internal environment that supports the autonomous
creation of initiatives. These initiatives are the raw materials, without which
organizational renewal cannot occur. Strategy is closely connected to culture, in which
the values and assumptions of the organization support the creation of an entrepreneurial
environment.
Covin and Slevin (1991) point to culture as an important part of creating an
internal environment that supports entrepreneurism in organizations. Russell and Russell
(1992), Sykes and Block (1989), Quinn (1985), Shatzer and Schwartz (1991), Stevenson
and Jarillo (1990), and Kuratko, Montagno, and Hornsby (1990) all indicate an
organizational culture that values innovation and creativity as important to supporting
entrepreneurism. Russell and Russell (1992), Antoncic and Hisrich (2001), Siegel and
Carchidi (1996), Stevenson and Jarillo (1990), Russell (1999), and Kuratko, Montagno,
and Hornsby (1990) all describe cultures in which norms encourage openness, sharing of
information across the organization and consideration of new ideas. Once those ideas
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emerge, a culture that includes norms that focus on individual achievement and
implementation of innovations, regardless of the level in the organization at which the
idea was generated, are indicated by Antoncic and Hisrich (2001), Rice (1999), Quinn
(1985), and Russell and Russell (1992).
Furthermore, many descriptions of organizational cultures in which
entrepreneurism thrives portray a culture in which the organization as a whole is pushing
or struggling against something that is considered a norm in other organizations. For
example, Dougherty (1990) describes entrepreneurial start-up companies that see
themselves as pushing against the corporate environment and breaking out of established
procedures and communication. Russell and Russell (1992) and Stevenson and Jarillo
(1990) depict organizations that offer an alternative to the bureaucracy, inflexibility, and
failure to retain talented employees that are perceived as the norm in traditional larger
organizations. Kliewer (1999) and Grant and Riesman (1978), in their studies of
innovative colleges and universities, describe organizational cultures that are designed
around opposition to a particular aspect of traditional higher education institutions, such
as the multiversity model.
If an organization’s culture provides the values and assumptions that form the
foundation of its entrepreneurial posture, that organization’s structure provides the
framework in which that strategy can be carried out. That framework forms the
organization’s rules and policies that support corporate entrepreneurism. In the discussion
of what kind of structure best supports entrepreneurism within the organization, a tension
emerges between tightly coupled and loosely coupled organizations (Weick, 1979), and,
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similarly, between “large” and “small” organizations. Russell (1999), Shatzer and
Schwartz (1991), Carrier (1996) and Schuler (1986) support increased autonomy for
managers below the executive level, more discretionary control of resources, informality
of communication within the organization, and high participation in decision making at
all levels of the organization in pursuit of ventures. The willingness to experiment and
implement new ideas is supported by rules that promote tolerance of failure and risk
taking, as described by Russell and Russell (1992), Stevenson and Jarillo (1990), Shatzer
and Schwartz (1991), Kuratko, Montagno, and Hornsby (1990), Antoncic and Hisrich
(2001), Carrier (1996), and Sykes and Block (1989). This vision of the open
organizational structure is organic, not mechanistic; decentralized, not formalized.
In contrast to this vision, Joni, Bell, and Mason (1997), Clark (1998), Kanter
(1984), and Hisrich and Peters (1986) focus on the role and importance of strong
management. For example, the characteristics of entrepreneurial leaders have been well
documented in research on corporate entrepreneurism. Shatzer and Schwartz (1991),
Sykes (1986), Kuratko, Montagno, and Hornsby (1990), and Sykes and Block (1989)
describe entrepreneurial leaders as risk takers, self motivated, creative, and energetic. The
early identification of these entrepreneurs, their placement in the right location within the
organization, and ensuring their proper training are suggested by Shatzer and Schwartz
(1991), Souder (1981), Fry (1987), and Kanter (1985). Shatzer and Schwartz (1991)
encourage training new entrepreneurial leaders in motivation, financial processes, and
project management. Sykes (1986) and Stevenson and Jarillo (1990) focus on the
selection of the right entrepreneurial leaders who possess experience and willingness to
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pursue entrepreneurial ventures. Beyond selection and initial training, Rice (1999),
Kliewer (1999), Kuratko, Montagno, and Hornsby (1990), Sykes and Block (1989),
Carrier (1996), Quinn (1985), Stevenson and Jarillo (1990), and Antoncic and Hisrich
(2001) suggest that ventures are successful when organizational leaders follow a clear
road map, have good timing and sense of the market, conduct regular evaluations, screen
innovations for impact, and support management through resources, rewards, and
realistic expectations. These authors encourage tight coupling to increase individual
accountability for management, such as formal controls to closely monitor
entrepreneurial activity.
Rather than argue the merits of one kind of organization over the other (as if an
organization could be completely “open” or completely “closed”), writers have endorsed
different mixtures between the two. Exactly where to maintain the tension between a
tightly coupled organization and a loosely coupled organization (Weick, 1979),
epitomizes the tension in the structural aspects of innovation and entrepreneurism. For
example, Dougherty (1990) and Joni, Bell, and Mason (1997) advocate a combination of
organic interpersonal relationships and highly structured interdepartmental relationships.
These authors encourage open internal processes such as informal internal networks and
challenging of established routines of internal interaction. Nevertheless, they also
encourage high structuring of specific kinds of “interop” procedures, the rules that govern
relationships between departments, such as decision rules, face-offs, and clear
relationships between venture leaders and their corporate counterparts. Kanter (1984), on
the other hand, suggests an organic idea creation process, but structured implementation.
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Environment, culture, and structure, the elements that combine to determine an
organization’s entrepreneurial posture, unite in different ways depending on the stage in
the organization’s growth. In the next section I will address the development of
entrepreneurial organizations through the stage theory of organizational life cycles.
Organizational Life Cycles
As new organizations come into being, grow, develop, and, in some cases, decline
and cease to exist, they go through predictable stages that share evident characteristics
(Quinn and Cameron, 1983, Miller and Friesen, 1984a, Gray and Ariss, 1985, Kimberly,
1979). This series of stages is known as the organizational life cycle. The organization’s
position within the organizational life cycle can help to determine its internal and external
environment and political environment for fostering and supporting intrapreneurial
activities. Organizational change from stage to stage is sequential, hierarchical,
progressive, and non-reversing, involving a broad range of organizational activities and
structures (Quinn and Cameron, 1983). These stages or phases show how an
organization’s internal environment changes over time, especially with regard to the
organization’s response to environmental change, internal cultural and structural changes,
and guiding organizational tasks. This section will describe a set of general stages in the
life cycle that seem common to most of the models, followed by a discussion of the
elements that distinguish most of the major organizational life cycle models. I will end
the section by integrating the description of organizational life cycle with prior depictions
of organizational environment, structure, decision making style, and strategy.
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Although there are multiple competing models, all of them have a rough set of
stages in common (Quinn and Cameron, 1983): an early entrepreneurial stage, an early
growth stage, a formalization stage, and, for some authors, a stage characterized by either
decline and death or organizational renewal. Originally conceptualized using a metaphor
based on the development of a biological organism or the psychological development of a
human being, the stages are distinguished by changing organizational tasks or concerns,
depending on the focus of the author (Quinn and Cameron, 1983). Downs (1967) and
Greiner (1972) distinguish the stages based on the tasks that an organization must
complete to motivate growth. Similarly, Lippitt and Schmidt (1967), Adizes (1979) and
Lyden (1975) lay out their stages based on changing critical management concerns or
problems. Miller and Friesen (1984), Kimberly (1979), and Katz and Kahn (1978) model
their stage theory on the changing concerns that management must address in order to
integrate the structure of the organization with its changing strategy. Torbert’s (1974)
stages address management’s efforts to address the changing psychological profile of the
organization’s members. Gray and Ariss (1985) construct their set of stages based on
management’s interest in the changing political environment of the organization, and how
best to predict it. However, although the concerns of each of the stages change with the
interests of their creators, there are a number of consistencies that allow us to lay out a
general set of stages that incorporate all of these approaches.
The entrepreneurial, or birth stage, is characterized by innovation, niche
formation, and creativity, as the new organization attempts to establish its identity (Quinn
and Cameron, 1983). The collectivity or growth stage is dominated by process issues, as
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the new organization concentrates on internal relationships and begins to develop some
rules and procedures. The energy of the organization in this stage is focused on high
cohesion and commitment (Quinn and Cameron, 1983). Next, the formalization and
control stage is marked by attempts to establish stability and institutionalization (Quinn
and Cameron, 1983). In this stage, the organization is attempting to establish some
predictability and consistency in the way that it handles recurring situations. Some
authors (Adizes, 1979; Gray and Ariss, 1985; Miller and Friesen, 1984a) add a structural
elaboration and adaptation stage, or a decline, redevelopment, and death stage. To these
authors, as the initial excitement and innovation of the entrepreneurial stage decreases,
the organization faces the choice of organizational renewal or eventual decline (Miller
and Friesen, 1984a). The competitive environment becomes increasingly heterogeneous
and hostile, so the organization can focus on innovation and transformation, or it can
focus on efficiency (Quinn and Cameron, 1983) and the management of challenges to the
status quo (Gray and Ariss, 1985).
Although many of the major concerns of the organization change as it moves
from stage to stage, there are identifiable themes that it approaches regardless of life
cycle stage (Miller and Friesen, 1984a). Throughout all of the stages, a concern with the
organization's situation, structure, management decision making style, and strategy
persists. In their description of contingent influences on entrepreneurial posture, Lumpkin
and Dess (1996) also address these concerns in their discussion of market environment,
“organicness” of organizational structure (structure), management tolerance for
ambiguity (management decision making style), and management need for achievement
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(strategy). In his process model of systems supporting corporate entrepreneurism, Russell
(1999) substitutes “situation” with “environment,” but otherwise uses the same
categories. In addition to looking at these categories within the context of corporate
entrepreneurism, Miller and Friesen’s (1984) work gives us an opportunity to look at
them within the context of the organizational life cycle.
Across the life cycle, an organization’s situation, or environment, becomes more
heterogeneous and the number of stakeholders increase as direct control of the
organization by its founders decreases. As stages change, administrative tasks become
more complex, along with the increase in the size of the organization. The original
entrepreneur’s concentrated activity and influence decreases, as simultaneously the
influence of customers on organizational decision making increases, and the influence of
the board on organizational decision making decreases. As market competitors catch up
to the initial innovations that drove initial creation of the organization, the market
environment becomes more heterogeneous and hostile.
Organizational structure is also a major aspect of the firm that changes as the
organization proceeds through the stages of the life cycle. Organizational structure
becomes more sophisticated to deal with the increased size and complexity of the
company. This growing sophistication may include more information processing
procedures and progressive decentralization of authority for strategic decisions.
Departments become more differentiated as the increased size of the organization
mandates delegation of authority in order to accomplish sophisticated tasks.
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Decision making style also increases in complexity as the organization develops.
Decisions begin to involve more analysis to incorporate more points of view. Simple
decisions give way to multiple complex decisions, and the organization must find ways to
integrate multiple concurrent decisions. As the organization increases in complexity,
innovation and risk taking change, and in some cases reduce, as the sheer number of
decisions must incorporate some element of predictability and integration across different
departments.
As the number of individual decisions proliferate, strategy takes on a more
significant role in the organization. In earlier stages, attempts to renew organizational
strategies are more prevalent, and in later stages, attempted strategic shifts to capitalize
on efficiency are more common (Miller and Friesen, 1984a). At the same time, the
organization’s criteria of effectiveness change with stages (Quinn and Cameron, 1983),
as does the political environment in which strategies are generated and abandoned (Gray
and Ariss, 1985).
Conclusion
In this chapter I have introduced the problem of rapid and unprecedented change
in higher education’s environment, including increasing demands from multiple
stakeholders and reduction of support from its traditional sources of funding. I make the
argument that college and university responsiveness and innovation may be increased
through the introduction of a corporate entrepreneurism model within the higher
education environment. The question is raised whether colleges and universities can
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achieve the benefits of a corporate venture while avoiding the drawbacks of the corporate
business environment.
The Reynolds Graduate Institute for Applied Life Sciences was introduced as a
case of a new higher education organization that has been founded as a corporate start-up
organization from the larger Defarge University Consortium. This institution has been
created as a corporate venture that is designed to support ongoing innovation,
entrepreneurism, and creativity among its students and faculty. RGI was presented as
both an example of a higher education corporate start-up and a completely unique
organization because of its status as a start-up institution committed to entrepreneurial
values and culture, but also one that has the founding of start-ups as part of its founding
values,
I have presented a number of theoretical frameworks in order to situate this study
within a set of assumptions about organizations, entrepreneurism, and organizational
development. I have discussed Birnbaum’s (1988) “lenses” as heuristic devices with
which to understand organizations as shared sets of unique assumptions, cultures,
structures, rules, and styles of leadership and interaction that, blended together, form a
“story” which the members of the organization use to make sense of the institution.
Similarly, I have presented Bolman and Deal’s (1991) “frames” as heuristic devices that
we can use to understand organizational participants’ differential approaches to the same
organization through their unique assumptions, theory bases, and approaches to change. I
followed this with a discussion of entrepreneurial posture as an organization’s risk taking,
innovation, and approach to competition and opportunities (Covin and Slevin, 1991). The
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construct of entrepreneurial posture is influenced by a number of internal and external
environmental variables that can be encompassed within the categories of environment,
strategy, and organizational structure and culture (Russell, 1999, Lumpkin and Dess,
1996). Lastly, I presented the organizational life cycle as stage theory to understand
change within the context of organizational tasks at different points within their
development. Each of the developmental stages shares categories of concerns of
situation, structure, decision making style, and strategy. In the next chapter I will discuss
my methodological assumptions and describe the design of the study in more detail.
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Chapter 3: Methodology

Introduction
This study is a case study of a start-up higher education organization undergoing a
process of privatization. For the purposes of this study, higher education privatization is
defined as a tendency for a college or university to take on the operational norms
associated with private enterprises (Johnstone, 2002). In this particular case, the
organization has been created on a foundation of principles and goals usually associated
with private enterprises: innovation, .entrepreneurship, and responsiveness to customers.
As a higher education organization that uses a business model, there are few, if any,
examples that can predict whether this is a model that will work. Creating an effective
research design to evaluate this case has to do with asking a limited number of basic
questions of the case. Does this business model work for this institution? Does it do what
it was designed to do? Does this case have relevance beyond its immediate environment?
More particular to this case, this study seeks to determine how this institution
compares to its business start-up and corporate spin-off models. It asks whether the
model stimulates entrepreneurship and innovation, leading to greater responsiveness. The
study seeks to determine how the organization’s environment, strategy, and structure
affect its entrepreneurial posture, as defined in the business literature (Covin and Slevin,
1991 and Russell, 1999). Finally, the study questions the organization’s relationship to
the larger world outside of this particular case, by exploring how this organization
embodies or refutes some of the promises and threats of privatization in higher education.
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In this chapter, I begin with a general discussion of case study design and some of
the issues associated with case studies. This is followed by a description of the data
collection and analysis methods used in this study. A discussion of the study’s
assumptions regarding validity and storytelling follows, with a concluding section of the
study’s assumptions about transferability and reading.
Issues Associated With Case Study Design
In his overview of case study research, Stake (1995) divides the types of case
study into intrinsic and instrumental case study design, based on the purpose of the study.
In the former case, intrinsic case study is pursued because of the uniqueness of the case
being studied and general interest in the case. It is research that is pursued for the sake of
learning more about the particular case being studied, and not necessarily research that
teaches us about anything outside of the parameters of the case itself. On the other hand,
instrumental case study is pursued because of a specific aspect of the case about which
one wants to learn. In the case of the Reynolds Graduate Institute, this research design
has a combination of Stake’s two approaches to case study research. Although it is the
uniqueness of the case that is most compelling, theoretically the case is most useful for
what insight can be gained into the specific issues of privatization, innovation,
entrepreneurism, and responsiveness in organizations. Consequently, for the purposes of
the study’s focus, this study attempts to balance the competing purposes of an intrinsic
case study and an instrumental case study.
On the other hand, because both spin-off and start-up organizations are relatively
rare in higher education, much less organizations that dedicate themselves to themes
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borrowed from the commercial sector, one must be careful not to imply too much
transferability into the case being studied. This institution has organized itself around a
number of themes that distinguish it from other higher education institutions, and even
from other higher education start-ups. It would be equally problematic to make claims of
transferability to other kinds of start-ups and spin-offs outside of the immediate higher
education sector, even though this organization looks to those institutions as an
organizing model.
I have chosen a case study method for this research, rather than a comparison
study, because of the distinctiveness of this institution and the difficulty in finding other
institutions that match it on most levels but the area being studied. The differences in
goals, culture, organization, and finance between higher education organizations and
business enterprises, for example, might prevent the findings from the study from
transferring completely to the business environment.
Data Collection and Analysis
I initiated contact with the Reynolds Graduate Institute through a faculty member
who was in the process of beginning work at the institution. I began with an
informational interview with this individual, which helped me to identify an influential
person within the organization who might play the role of a gatekeeper if I could
convince him of the value of the study. This turned out to be fairly easy, as he had been
looking for someone who could document this particular moment in the organization’s
history. His concept of the study fit well with my intent to capture a multidimensional
snapshot of a unique new organization. However, this did create some role conflict for
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me, in that the temptation always existed to play the role of an organizational insider who
was writing an internal study to document the history of the institution. In this case,
Institutional Review Board procedures created a natural way to insert into the
conversation some discussion of my actual role as a researcher who was interested in
seeing both the positives and the negatives of the institution, as an outsider. This also
worked out positively for the purposes of the focus of the study and the authenticity of
the data, since every contact with respondents began with a conversation about my exact
role, what kinds of information and stories that I wanted the respondent to share, and the
“rules” that dictated what I would include and what I would omit. For example, although
I was closely connected to an influential member of the institution in making initial
contact with respondents, this initial conversation allowed me to distance myself from
him. This may have freed respondents to give different kinds of stories, responses, and
comments to my questions, or to refuse to be interviewed altogether.
An influential gatekeeper turned out to be especially beneficial to this study.
When the study began he was a founding executive officer who was, for the most part,
responsible for the concept around which the organization was founded. He personally
chose all of the founding executives and was closely involved with selection of all of the
founding faculty and the initial fundraising effort that made the institution’s founding
possible. By the end of data collection this person had retired, but continued to be quite
active in the affairs of the institution as a member of the Board of Trustees. He occupied
the role of a beloved figure in the life and recent history of the institution, and one whose
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opinions were highly valued both by the remaining administration and by those who
replaced him.
Having such a well regarded figure as a gatekeeper for the study made access to
respondents very easy. Early in the study we identified a list of faculty, trustees, and
administrators who would have particularly useful insight into the organization. He was
especially helpful in suggesting the order in which I should interview people based on the
length of time the person had been affiliated with the organization and their ability to
give “interesting” answers to interview questions and have good stories to tell about the
organization’s founding. He also took another look at my list and helped me to formulate
an approach strategy for different individuals who might be difficult to access based on
their busy schedules or large number of responsibilities. We then drafted a letter together
that eventually went out to all faculty, trustees, and administrators whom we had
identified to be interviewed. We used a method for contacting potential respondents that
initially involved this letter going out directly from the gatekeeper to five potential
interviewees. When I completed those interviews I signaled to him the names of the next
five potential interviewees and he sent the letter to them shortly afterward. We proceeded
in this order until all of the interviews were completed.
As a start-up higher education organization, Reynolds Graduate Institute has a
small number of faculty, administrators, and staff. The original objective of the design
was to interview all faculty and major administrators, and professional staff who were in
charge of significant areas of the institution, such as career planning and admissions. I
also interviewed several people who represented the founding Board of Trustees of the
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institution and former presidents of other institutions in the larger consortium who were
present when the decision was initially made to found a new institution. Some of the
respondents were still involved with the institution as current members of the Board of
Trustees. These additional respondents were there to give my analysis an historical
context, and to reflect on key decisions that were made early in the life of the
organization that might continue to influence its culture.
Since one of the aspects of Reynolds Graduate Institute’s organizational culture
that became immediately clear was a pervasive sense of urgency and a feeling of having
more things to do than time allowed, my access to respondents was expected to be
limited. I tried to make up for less time with each respondent and less potential
respondents overall with comprehensiveness by interviewing everyone to whom I could
gain access. Given this study’s focus on policy and organizational culture formation, I
wanted to gain access to all of the faculty and everyone who had a role in shaping the
incipient organization’s policies and culture relating to entrepreneurism, innovation, and
responsiveness. Although several faculty have been hired and two have left the
organization since I completed interviews, at the time of the completion of interviews I
had interviewed all of the full time faculty except for one, the main administrators
(President, Vice Presidents, and Chancellor/Chief Scientific Officer), several staff who
coordinated essential services at the institution (the Coordinator for Career Development
and Placement, the Admissions Officer, and the Development Coordinator), and a very
limited sample of the Board of Trustees, past and present. In all, I interviewed 6
administrators and staff, 5 former and current members of the Board of Trustees, and 15
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faculty members. Only one of the institution’s full time faculty members declined to be
interviewed for this study. The rest of the faculty were either part-time faculty or recent
hires. In both cases, I decided that their total or day-to-day time spent at the Institute did
not give them enough knowledge to comment on the success or failure of this
organization’s efforts at supporting entrepreneurism and innovation. So although the
overall number of interviews was small, the sample of the overall full time faculty that I
interviewed approached 100%.
I designed the research questions to specifically address the respondents’
experiences around a culture of entrepreneurism, innovation and responsiveness, and
their awareness of specific policies or cultural cues that supported or detracted from these
themes in the everyday life of the organization. These questions are as follows:
What attracted you to come to work at Reynolds Graduate Institute?
What were some of your expectations about working in a newly-founded
higher education research organization, and have those changed at all
since you’ve been here?
What are some of the differences and similarities between the
entrepreneurial culture of Reynolds Graduate Institute and other higher
education institutions or other organizations, universities or otherwise, at
which you've worked?
How does RGI support innovation in your teaching and research?
How are you evaluated? Or, how do you know that you’re doing a good
job?
How do you know that RGI is doing a good job, that this organization is
performing optimally?
RGI has defined its core constituency as the bio-sciences industry. Its
stated mission is to practice leadership in this industry through innovative
teaching and research, and an entrepreneurial culture. How does RGI stay
responsive to the bio-sciences industry?
How does the bio-sciences industry affect your work at RGI, on a day-to-
day basis?

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The interviews themselves followed a structured protocol of questions determined
in advance, and differing slightly based upon the position that the participant held within
the organization. For example, for members of the Board of Trustees I substituted, “what
attracted you to get involved as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Reynolds
Graduate Institute?” for “what attracted you to come to work for the Reynolds Graduate
Institute?” Accordingly, the protocols were slightly different based upon the following
categories: full time faculty; administrators; and trustees, advisory board members, and
other leaders.
I generally conducted the interviews in the respondent’s office or a conference
room, depending on the respondent’s preference. In 2 cases, the respondent preferred to
conduct the interview in a coffee shop or the respondent’s own home. The interviews
lasted between 60 and 90 minutes, although when the interviews went beyond the agreed-
upon 60 minutes I made a point of pointing out that the original 60 minutes had passed
and checking with the respondent that it was permissible to continue the interview. With
the permission of the respondent, I audio recorded the entire interview. In every case, the
respondent agreed to have the interview recorded.
Within a few days of conducting the interview, I transcribed the audio recording
and then destroyed the recording and my written notes. I then sent a copy of the transcript
to the respondent with a request for that person to read the transcript and share any
corrections or additions with me. I gave respondents the option of sharing their feedback
at a follow-up interview, via electronic mail, or via handwritten notes on the hard copy of
the transcript. In almost every case, the respondent chose the least intrusive method of
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sharing feedback with me: either via electronic mail or handwritten notes on the hard
copy. Almost every respondent sent me some kind of comment or feedback on the
transcript. In one case, a respondent sent me a written document reflecting on the issues
that I raised in the interview, and 2 articles about the organization that had been written
by other students. In another case, a respondent sent me the transcript of an interview that
another student had done with him for a class.
Analysis took the form of journaling throughout the study, from research design
through data collection and finally throughout the writing stage. Immediately following
each interview, I spent 15 minutes summarizing the interview and writing down themes
and sub-themes that seemed to be generated by the interview. The themes and sub-themes
became the foundation for the findings section of the overall study. I also made notes of
incidents and quotations that did not make sense or did not seem to fit in context with the
responses of other respondents to the same question. This practice was partially a form of
validity checking by consciously looking for “outliers” to the themes that I was
developing based upon other respondents. This was also a way to prevent myself from
missing out on themes that might be generated later but had not coalesced into a clear
concept.
Another analytical method used was looking for patterns in the interviews. I
consciously looked for similar quotations, phrases, or common language across
interviews. As with generation of themes and sub-themes, I concurrently looked for data
from interviews that specifically contradicted these patterns. While noting patterns, I
made note of contradictions and concurrences between the organization’s stated
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philosophies and their policies and actions. I looked for similar relationships between
respondents’ understanding of policies and their intent, as described by the administrative
leaders and founders. The respondents’ use of language became particularly important
here, as I looked in the interview data for confirmation or contradiction of the values and
culture that the leadership and the organizational literature claimed.
Finally, as I communicated with respondents through sharing of interview
transcripts, I also shared some of my initial themes and sub-themes with some of the
respondents. This was done both to member check with respondents to confirm the
validity of my initial findings with insiders who “lived” in the organization, and as a
means to generate more themes and sub-themes. Respondents who agreed with my initial
themes also tended to elaborate on things that they had said in the original interview that
confirmed the themes, or shared anecdotes or examples from their everyday life within
the institution that served as further confirmation of the themes. Respondents who
disagreed with my initial themes suggested alternative concepts and shared examples to
confirm those alternate themes. As I began to construct themes from the data, and
encountered various incidences of support or contradiction of those ideas, the concept of
“good data” and the validity of the various stories came to the fore. In the next section I
will discuss the various methods and assumptions surrounding the concept of “good data”
and good storytelling – validity, reliability, and, authenticity.
Validity and Storytelling
Earlier in this chapter I stated my intent in writing this case study to create a
multidimensional snapshot of an emerging higher education organization at a particular
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point in its history and development. I should modify this metaphor somewhat to clarify
what I mean by “snapshot” and “dimension.” In the process I will get at my specific
assumptions regarding validity and the processes that I have followed to ensure that this
study has it.
The mechanical image of a “snapshot” implies an objective stance outside of the
object being studied, implying an objectivist or essentialist approach to research. I modify
the snapshot with the “multidimensional” descriptor to imply a number of contrasting
assumptions about epistemology and the nature of reality. First, I use the term
“snapshot,” not to imply that I position this study outside of the lived reality of the people
who inhabit this organization, but, conversely, to emphasize the constant moving and
changing nature of this organization. If organizations have anything approaching an
essential nature, it is in the defining characteristic of change. By translating an element of
motion into a static device such as writing, I approach this study with all of the
limitations of a photographer approaching a subject in constant motion. One can only
hope to present an account of the lived realities of this organization that, like the
photograph, lacks the motion and extra-dimensionality of having lived within that
particular subjective time and space. At the same time, one can hope to present an
account that offers some insight into the organization that might not be evident in the
moving version. Like a photograph that shows certain aspects of the moving subject that
might not be evident when in motion, one hopes to generate some insight into the
organization with this limited format that might not be evident from just visiting the
organization oneself.
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Second, I approach organizations as co-constructed from multiple shared realities.
Accordingly, I am skeptical of any account of an organization that exists outside of the
experiences of the people that inhabit it and interact with it. Within the context of this
study, moving from the metaphor of the photograph to a Cubist painting, one might hope
to get a picture of the organization that offers a glimpse of it from several perspectives at
once. One hopes to create an account that does more than just give one a sense of having
been there and experienced it, but offers the insights of many respondents approaching
the organization from many perspectives at once. By incorporating multiple perspectives
into the description, I hope to give the reader some insight into the shared reality of this
organization that one might not even get from having been there.
Although this sounds very much like triangulation, it differs to a lesser degree in
the physical act of collecting data from several different sources and to a greater degree
in the reasons for doing this, and how one treats different kinds of data with respect to the
overall study. The word “triangulation” implies a physical location where the objective
ground can be found, as if with the addition of enough voices and kinds of data one can
rise above multivocality toward the truly real. My approach to triangulation assumes that,
with the addition of more voices and kinds of data, rather than cordoning off possibilities,
the account becomes richer and more sophisticated, reflecting Geertz’s (1977) “thick
description.” The intent is not to distill down to the true essence of the organization, or to
reduce complexity and contradiction, but to give an account of the organization that
connects with some aspect of the reader’s own experience, yet is recognizable to the
respondents.
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Although the official documents of the institution – historical, electronic,
financial, and marketing – were incorporated into the telling of the story, along with
interviews with most of the faculty and administrators of the organization, I consciously
analyzed that data more skeptically than I did the spoken data. This was done to de-center
the written account from its privileged position and to re-center the accounts of those who
live within the organization. To be sure, the perception of the researcher and writer also
inhabits a space of privilege because I get to tell the story, so a coherent account of this
organization does emerge from the writing of this study. As the author, I must recognize
that I have editorial power over which voices get heard and which are omitted. However,
I approach this privileged position from a sense of awareness of that power, and attempt
to acknowledge areas of contention and contradiction between my globalizing narrative
and the subjective ones of the respondents. As a “power aware” researcher, I see part of
my responsibility as an ethical storyteller to hold that power at arm’s length for as long as
possible, to de-center my judgments and re-center the stories of the respondents. It is also
important to consciously search for contradictions to my emerging themes, and to offer
those alternative narratives whenever I can. One important outcome of qualitative
researching should be the telling of alternative versions of the official story, rather than
trying to replace the official story with a “better” one.
These two assumptions – that written accounts are unreliable and organizations
are co-constructed -- create a unique challenge: to create a study that is consistent with an
approach to knowledge as a static device for perceiving a constantly changing reality, and
a view of the organization as co-constructed from the many lived experiences of it.
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Traditional understandings of scientific rigor fall short of these expectations. Rather than
attempting to elevate the reader to a summit from which one might have a perfect view of
the organization in its entirety, case study research attempts to give the reader the
vicarious experience of having been there. One wants the reader to come away from
having read the study with the feeling of having seen the organization through the eyes of
those who live in the organization on a daily basis, but also having a sense of its
complexity and contradictions.
As the goals change from giving the reader an objective view of the organization
to giving an “insider’s” view, the nature of the relationships that drive the study also
changes. In a study that aspires to objectivity, the driving relationship of the study is
between the researcher and the truth. In a study that aspires to vicarious experience, and
to offer a complicated and nuanced – and perhaps contradictory – account of the
organization, it is necessary to focus on the relationship between the researcher and the
researched. Methodology becomes less a series of procedures to establish the authority
and expertise of the researcher and more a discussion of the parameters within which to
negotiate those relationships.
For example, I made use of the practice of member checking with every
interview, and as themes emerged in the analysis section of the study, I member checked
again with selected leaders within the organization. One reason for member checking
would be a stance that the respondent or the researcher was somehow being dishonest or
inordinately biased. In the case of this study, this was done to establish a relationship of
trustworthiness with each respondent. Seeing these themes in a context other than the
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transcribed interview, perhaps hearing quotations of oneself used to make meaning of the
overall organization unsituated within one’s own sentences might raise objections or
corrections from the original speaker, or, conversely, prompt further reflection in the
same direction from that person. So, again, like triangulation, member checking of
themes serves not to cast skepticism onto the respondent by saying, “are you sure you
meant to say that?” or fact checking against the official record, but to transform the
monologue into a dialogue, or even a multivocal discussion. One says, instead, “does
what you’ve said sound like this other thing someone else said, and what does that mean
to you?” This different approach to member checking extends the dialogue, rather than
cutting it short. It re-centers the respondent from a “respondent,” one whose role is
simply to respond positively or negatively about the authenticity of the account, to an
active participant in creating the account.
Transferability and Reading
This relational approach to validity can also be seen in how I handle the empirical
standard of transferability. Whereas in validity the relationship to be managed is between
the writer and multivocal, often contradictory accounts, in the case of transferability the
relationship to be managed is the one between the writer and the reader. While I reject the
drive to essentialize the case to locate the prime elements that will exactly match those
found in other imaginary cases, I also reject the opposite approach that every case is so
radically different from others that there is nothing to be learned with respect to other
organizations. However, it is not the writer’s job to make explicit the case for
transferability. I leave that work to someone writing a comparative study. Rather, it is the
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writer’s work to create an account of the organization that creates what Iser (1989) and
other writers in the branch of literary criticism known as “reader-response criticism” call
the “virtual dimension” between the reader and the writer. In this “virtual dimension,” the
reader’s engagement with a text mirrors one’s engagement with the sensory phenomena
of the world by filling in the gaps left by the writer’s account with one’s own
imagination. This is not a case of the writer intentionally writing a vague or inexact
account of an essential reality that exists somewhere outside of the test. Rather, the
parallel between approaching a text and approaching the world acknowledges the process
through which we fill in the gaps of our senses with our own prior knowledge of the
world to create everyday meaning. Similarly, the indeterminacy of all texts allows us to
use our imagination to create a more sophisticated understanding of the object of the text.
Again, to paraphrase Iser (1989), the extent to which our engagement with a text involves
one’s investing the missing information of the text with our own experience of the world
governs the extent to which we experience that text as realistic. In Iser’s (1989)
explanation of the process of reading a text, as the reader fills in the indeterminate gaps in
the text with one’s own experiences, the reader is able to say to oneself, “that is exactly
the way it would be if I were actually there!”
Iser’s (1989) discussion of the reader’s investment of the text with personal
experience has its parallel in our experience of the world. As we encounter new
experiences, we unavoidably come across gaps in our understanding that we fill in with
our prior experiences. In the current discussion of organizations, our ability to make
meaning of organizations – to predict what is going to happen and to know how to act
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appropriately – is predicated upon a process of filling in indeterminate gaps with past
experience.
A qualitative study that has transferability brings these two threads together by
taking the reader through Iser’s (1989) reading process and the learning process at once.
The reader recognizes enough of one’s own experience in the account, and fills the
account’s indeterminacies with further experiences, such that the reader recognizes
certain aspects of the account as “just like” one’s own story. Thus, just as, in Iser’s
(1989) version of reader response, a reader can be moved to identify with the experience
of someone one has never met, or never existed, a reader of a transferable qualitative case
study can be moved to identify with a composite of many people who have personally
encountered the case.
If this feels more like fiction than social science, it illustrates how qualitative
work brings together the artistic (the work of the writer), the aesthetic (the realization
accomplished between the reader and the text), and the empirical (the engagement
accomplished between the respondent and the writer that leads to creation of the text). If
one writes a work that thoroughly engages the reader, this may make for excellent
literature, but to make the claim that it is a work of scientific inquiry involves an
additional standard. Writing a work that makes claims to originate in scientific data
collection and empirical analysis adds an empirical level to the virtual dimension
described by Iser (1989). The writer must create an account of the organization that has to
balance detail and “indeterminacy” in order to look familiar to the study’s respondents,
but also to engage its readers in virtual identification. It is not enough to create the
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experience of identification for the reader, so that the subject-object distinction between
the observer and the observed disappears, as one might find in a work of literature. An
empirical work aspires to give the reader a virtual experience that has an ostensible tie to
data from an actual organization, one that would not be gained just by visiting it oneself.
The relationship between the written account of the organization and the empirical data
that gave rise to the account is similar to the disappointment that one inevitably
experiences when one sees a mountain for oneself, as opposed to seeing it with the
mind’s eye. Upon viewing the mountain in person, one is forced by the immediacy of the
phenomenon to abandon the myriad potential experiences of the mountain that have been
previously stored in the imagination for a singular one that originates in empirical data.
Iser (1989) writes that reading is a process of simultaneously experiencing new
ideas and instantaneously remembering them in relation to one’s prior experiences and all
of the text that has gone before. The reader goes from an infinite number of possibilities
at any particular point in the text to a process of eliminating the potential directions that
the text could have taken, such that at the end of the text the potential has been
completely exhausted in actuality, and one is left with a singular account. An empirical
work has a more limited number of possibilities for its account of an organization, given
its claim to a close connection to data. However, it follows a directional arc that is similar
to that of the creative work of fiction. The qualitative researcher takes multiple accounts
of the organization and, working within the parameters of the empirical data, narrows
those many perspectives of the organization into a singular account.
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Returning to our account of the mountain, just as one’s experience of the
mountain, prior to actually seeing it, has unlimited potential versions, an empirical
account of the organization simultaneously narrows the possibilities of imagining it, and
integrates the multiple experiences of the phenomenon, such that the whole can be greater
than the sum of its parts, yet offers a coherent and plausible story of the whole. The
challenge to the authentic writer is to create a cohesive account of the organization while
maintaining the contradictions and richness that come from multiple respondents. The
challenge to the ethical writer is to create an account of the organization that engages the
reader in the “virtual dimension” and looks recognizable to one’s respondents, yet
integrates the multiple meanings that they bring to the case.
Up to this point I have described issues involved in writing a case study, and
discussed the practical steps that I took to generate the data that makes up this case study.
I have also discussed the assumptions about validity and empiricism that have driven this
study. In the next chapter, I will present an account of this unique organization and its
relation to the driving issues of entrepreneurism, innovation, and culture.
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Chapter 4: Running a University Like a Business

Building a Legacy
With successful careers in academia, government, and industry behind him, and a
CV that can best be described in ounces, rather than pages, Ernest Smith might not be the
kind of person one might expect to be involved in an unorthodox start-up university like
Reynolds Graduate Institute. Smith is an experienced researcher whose reputation is that
of a rising star in both the higher education and bio-tech worlds. Having already started
up a technology firm, he could have pursued a successful career in academia or industry
with equal portions of success. Having been involved with the start-up entrepreneurial
environment in industry, he increasingly views the opportunity to have a similar
experience in higher education intensely interesting.
For this entrepreneurial scientist on the cutting edge of his field, Smith’s attention
has more and more turned towards other pursuits, such as his legacy, an opportunity to
try something completely unprecedented, and his ability to have complete control over
the initial direction of an entire institution. However, his recent experiences in higher
education have left him deeply dissatisfied. Smith’s innovative ideas about postsecondary
education have received less of a welcome than his ideas about science. Speaking about
other established colleges and universities, he reflects in a soft, contemplative voice,
“Despite what they say, they are still very conservative.” He wonders aloud how anything
innovative can come out of higher education as it is currently organized. Further, he
shares his dissatisfaction with the disciplinary silos that characterize contemporary higher
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education to him. If only faculty could approach problems from a general scientific
perspective, like they do in industry, rather than concentrating on maintaining a particular
lens through which to use the science.
Amidst these conflicting thoughts about higher education, Smith began to read
descriptions of a unique start-up higher education institution being founded along the
lines of his own ideas about graduate scientific training. He quickly made contact with
the founding faculty through his professional networks. Smith’s record of success in both
academia and entrepreneurism, as well as his scholarly interest in interdisciplinary
approaches to scientific problems, turned out to be an excellent fit for the new institution.
Now, sitting in an office that would not be out of place in a typical suburban
office park with a computer, desk, and piles of papers covering every available surface,
he reflects on his plans for the new institution. He looks forward to creating a specific
kind of scholarly environment by attracting the kind of faculty who are interested in
many areas of faculty work, and not just their own individual research agendas. He wants
to educate students to become leaders in their field, to know the science and the business,
as opposed to his own trial and error experiences in commercializing science research. He
is most excited about the possibility to “break down the compartments” in which we
place knowledge that prevents us from making great discoveries.
Smith is less sanguine about the long-term prospects for his decision. Having only
two student cohorts to show for their work, and a thriving but incipient record in
contracts, grants, and publications, it is still too early for him to tell whether this
experiment in higher education is even sustainable. A mere twenty feet from the lab that
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he personally established and designed, and that bears his name as a member of the
institution’s founding faculty, he knows he has taken a calculated risk with his career. He
has gambled for the possibility of leaving a lasting legacy with this start-up institution.
A Place to Fit In
Ana Matute is probably surprised that she is still working in a higher education
environment. Since graduating from a highly regarded doctoral program in chemical
engineering, she has not felt like she “fits in” within a traditional higher education
environment. Her wide, interdisciplinary interests and impatience with the exigencies of
the conventional tenure path have created barriers to her finding a professional home
within a traditional department. Furthermore, her research interests have rarely been
encouraged, either in graduate school or in her prestigious postdoctoral fellowship,
because of her tendency to cross both disciplinary and political boundaries to pursue her
interests.
Despite her academic outlaw tendencies, Matute enjoys teaching, identifying as a
teacher first and a scientist second. In teaching, she finds the broad interdisciplinary
application that she feels is often withheld from her as a researcher within a traditional
departmental context. She is savvy enough to know that in order to achieve tenure in a
good institution, honing her teaching skills is important, but not as critical as establishing
a solid research record. She has found the lower priority accorded to teaching within the
research institution environment deeply disappointing. Looking back on the period prior
to her interview at RGI, Matute grumbles,
I had seen too often in academia that when you go and you do your
research, when you go to a typical research institution the teaching doesn’t
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really matter, and professors spent too little effort on their teaching. I want
my teaching to matter as much as my research. I want somebody to care
that I’m doing a good job on my teaching.

This creates some additional frustration with the traditional higher education
environment because she often feels that at some future point she might have to choose
between life as a research faculty member in an institution with little regard for good
teaching, or life as a teaching faculty member at a less prestigious institution with less
support for her to explore her interdisciplinary research interests.
Before joining RGI, she considered leaving academia altogether to pursue a new
career in the bio-tech industry, but her post-doc department chair was invited to a site
visit at RGI for the Reynolds Foundation and connected the new institution’s emphases
with Matute’s own interests. Matute visited the campus and found herself at home among
RGI’s combination of support for interdisciplinary, collaborative research and explicit
valuing of teaching. She was impressed by the new institution’s flexibility and the
willingness of its faculty to experiment with new approaches to teaching and research.
This contrasted with the rigidity and commitment at other universities to doing things the
way they had always been done.
Today, ensconced in an office distinctive both for its lack of decoration and
ubiquitous piles of paper and books, Matute exudes an expansive sense of finally having
found her place to fit in. She describes herself as an oddball who has found her
community of oddballs, although it’s doubtful whether her colleagues at RGI would
openly characterize themselves this way. She enjoys her colleagues’ support for
nontraditional approaches to teaching, especially the opportunity to innovate, recounting,
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“the coursework, the curriculum at other institutions seems very rigid, and faculty seem
to really want to follow what’s always been done. And that’s not the case here. We’re
open to trying, ‘well, let’s try and teach this in a different way.’”
What is most attractive to her is that her collaborative, interdisciplinary approach
to research is not only tolerated, but also encouraged. To her, the smallness of the
institution results in very intense and frequent interactions between faculty members,
making research collaborations more likely and natural. The entrepreneurial environment
and access to the bio-tech industry have been exciting to her, and although she has not
made enough progress in her personal research agenda to begin to develop a spin-off
company or even a patent, she appreciates the access to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists,
business faculty, and scientists who have been involved in start-up companies that might
someday facilitate that process.
Both of the preceding portraits are of actual current faculty members and
administrators affiliated with Reynolds Graduate Institute, whom I interviewed for this
study between February and June in 2004. Their individual stories are surprisingly
similar to those I heard from other founding faculty and administrators in the course of
this research. Most of the founding faculty and senior administrators of the institution
share strong research records and established tenured positions at their original
institutions. No one describes a working environment at their former institutions that was
particularly unpleasant. Rather, all of the respondents describe an overall sense of
dissatisfaction with the traditional higher education environment, as experienced at their
former institutions. As they see it, entering RGI is less of an escape from any particular
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institution than a flight from aspects of the conventional higher education experience.
Many have particular frustrations with the traditional departmental structure and its role
in directly or indirectly discouraging collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarly work or
teaching. However, no one was “pushed” out of a situation. Rather, they have been
“pulled” to a working environment that seems to promise seasoned faculty a chance to
leave a lasting imprint on higher education as a whole, and faculty new to their profession
an alternative to what they perceive as a stifling scholarly environment. In their accounts
of RGI, the institution is often referred to as the “best of all possible worlds” and the
speakers’ experience prior to finding RGI as “not fitting in anywhere.” This speaks
clearly to the sense among these faculty members that they have felt some pressure at
their former institutions to sacrifice some aspect of their professional and scholarly lives.
The ways that these faculty and administrators eventually become connected with
RGI are quite similar as well. In a few rare occasions someone reads an article in a
magazine, reacts to something in the description of the new institution, and subsequently
responds to a position opening. More often, faculty and administrators hear about RGI
from a third-party colleague – at times someone in the bio-tech industry or otherwise
obliquely connected to higher education – who has some direct connection to the
institute. In many cases, there is something distinctive about the respondent that the third
party sees as similar to the distinctiveness of the institution’s mission. In a few other
cases, individuals in the founding faculty directly pursue someone who has a reputation
that matches the desired founding faculty profile – innovative, distinguished, and
committed to interdisciplinary research and teaching. To these founders, the particular
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attraction of a start-up institution is the empowering idea of designing a new university
around themes that traditional research institutions often find incompatible – a focus on
both teaching and cutting edge innovative research, both collaborative, interdisciplinarity
work and support for individual entrepreneurism.
In this chapter, I propose a theoretical framework for the Reynolds Graduate
Institute, a start-up higher education organization constructed around themes of
entrepreneurism, innovation, and interdisciplinarity. In developing a theoretical
understanding of this institution, I have had to account for both the individual accounts of
the institution that I heard directly from respondents, and a theoretical understanding of
how organizations work. The uniqueness of the case of an organization that is both higher
education and start-up, as well as being dedicated to principles of entrepreneurism drawn
from business, has presented several problems that have had to be addressed in the
creation of a theoretical construct. I have had to construct a theoretical understanding of
RGI within the context of both higher education organizations in higher education
literature, and start-up and entrepreneurial organizations from the business literature.
In order to make sense of RGI as a start-up institution I have employed
Birnbaum’s (1988) theory of higher education organizations that represents colleges and
universities as sites of competing forces of change and stability. I have used Birnbaum’s
theory to show how overlapping understandings of RGI work together to create the
reality of the organization, especially when the identity of that organization is still being
established. I have also employed Bolman and Deal’s (1991) theory of organizations that
represents colleges and universities as sites composed of multiple competing frameworks
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through which participants make sense of the organization as a whole. I have used
Bolman and Deal’s theory to show how the new organization is being shaped on multiple
levels, and how viewing RGI through multiple lenses can add understanding to this
theory.
In order to make sense of RGI as an entrepreneurial organization, I have
employed Covin and Slevin’s (1991) theory of entrepreneurial posture to identify certain
kinds of organizational behavior as entrepreneurial. I have also employed Russell’s
(1999) approach to entrepreneurial organizations to create a framework of internal and
external organizational variables that make entrepreneurial posture within that firm more
or less likely. My approach to the entrepreneurial organization parallels my approach to
the higher education organization. My intent has been to represent RGI’s claims to
entrepreneurism, and its earnest attempts to create an entrepreneurial higher education
organization, through multiple lenses of entrepreneurism within organizations. I have
used both Covin and Slevin’s, and Russell’s theories to generate a framework for
understanding entrepreneurism that encompasses multiple aspects of the organization.
By combining Birnbaum’s and Bolman and Deal’s multiframe theories of higher
education organizations, and Covin and Slevin’s and Russell’s multidimensional theories
of entrepreneurial organizations, I hope to create a theory of an entrepreneurial higher
education organization that is also multidimensional.
I begin the chapter by problematizing the approaches of both Birnbaum and
Bolman and Deal within the unique context of Reynolds Graduate Institute, and
highlighting the limitations of both organizational theories when applied to this unique
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higher education institution. From there, I present an alternative theory to understand
RGI, combining both approaches to identify two primary organizational tasks that can be
seen in a start-up organization, but might also apply to a more seasoned institution. The
goal of resolving organizational identity, the first organizational task, is to strike a
precarious balance between what an organization claims to be and what it claims to be
becoming, thus balancing change and stability. The goal of resolving issues of power and
authority, the second organizational task, is to identify who has the power to implement
change, and in what context, and to articulate the “rules of engagement” within which
change might be initiated or prevented.
In the next part of the chapter I apply both of these organizational tasks to RGI’s
unique case by addressing RGI’s formative identity, and tie that identity as a start-up
entrepreneurial higher education institution to an analysis of its environment, structure,
strategy, and culture. I begin by demonstrating how interview participants describe RGI’s
task of resolving organizational identity as playing out within a business paradigm.
Through an analysis of participant descriptions of RGI, I describe how RGI’s faculty and
staff establish its identity as a start-up entrepreneurial university by constructing its
formative identity along the familiar lines of a start-up business organization in the early
entrepreneurial stages of a business organization life cycle.
In the remainder of the chapter I address the second organizational task, resolving
issues of power and authority, within the context of RGI’s environment, strategy, culture,
and structure. I redefine each of these organizational artifacts to highlight how the two
organizational tasks are related. In each, power and authority are resolved in relation to
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the identity task. Environment is the context that supports the establishment of identity.
Strategy is the translation of identity into function, integrating both organizational tasks
so that the institution’s actions have a good fit with its identity. Culture expresses the
institution’s identity through its use of power. Structure institutionalizes a particular
configuration of power to support the institution’s identity. In the next section, I address
the second organizational task.
Resolving Organizational Tasks
The uniqueness that attracts these institutional founders creates problems when
one attempts to describe RGI using a theoretical framework based on a traditional
institution. Birnbaum (1988) writes at length about how colleges and universities develop
internal feedback systems that balance leadership, written and unwritten rules, and
authority in order to resist significant changes and adhere to their strong internal cultures
and structures. According to Birnbaum, higher education organizations can be understood
by using a number of different social constructs that can each highlight a particular
perspective of the institution. Birnbaum’s picture of higher education institutions as
systems of feedback loops, rules governing interactions, and varying tightness of
coupling between sources of authority posits and depends upon static systems. However,
when the institution is a start-up that has been intentionally designed to respond flexibly
to changes in an industry that is itself rapidly changing and developing, an analysis based
upon the existence of an established culture begins to break down. Birnbaum’s higher
education organization framework is helpful, but insufficient in this context. At RGI a
fixed organizational culture replete with feedback loops and coupling between sources of
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organizational authority may eventually be the case, but in the organization’s formative
stages, another way of understanding its culture is needed.
Similarly, Bolman and Deal’s (1991) account of leadership and paradigmatic
frames in organizations is insufficient within the context of a new organization, in which
the frames are still being established. The authors describe leadership as taking place
within sites of conflict and cooperation among people who may bear competing
conceptions of the organization. The authors present a series of frames that leaders can
use to enhance their understanding of organizations in order to reconcile the disparate
approaches of the organization’s inhabitants through “framing and reframing” issues.
This approach to understanding this start-up organization comes closer to a framework
with which one can understand the culture of RGI. One can be fairly certain that RGI’s
inhabitants bring their own frames from their past experiences with higher education and
other kinds of organizations to their understanding of RGI. Each participant brings
specific preferred approaches to concerns that Bolman and Deal write into each of their
frames: organizational values, organizational identity, rules of engagement, power and
authority, and contextual appropriateness. Bolman and Deal’s framework nevertheless
depends on the tacit belief of the organization’s participants in the existence and
legitimacy of each frame as a plausible explanation of “reality” within the context of the
organization. The framework breaks down in the context of an organization that
intentionally attracts participants who are committed to the project of identifying,
critiquing, overturning and reconstructing conventional frames.
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Both of these theoretical frameworks, although considered essential in many
studies of traditional higher education organization, fall short of helping us to gain a
theoretical understanding of an unorthodox start-up institution such as Reynolds Graduate
Institute. RGI’s start-up status presents immediate problems in attempting to fit it into a
framework based on a more established organization, and its core mission as an
entrepreneurial organization distinguishes it from other higher education institutions. This
distinction is true whether one approaches the study of higher education organizations
from the perspective of archetypal institutions or frames of reference.
A theoretical framework for understanding RGI that both bridges these
perspectives and overcomes their shortcomings must perform three functions. First, a
theoretical framework for this organization must address RGI’s founding central values
of entrepreneurism, innovation, and interdisciplinarity. A theoretical framework for RGI
must include some theoretical understanding of entrepreneurism and how it works within
the context of the organization. Second, it must take into account RGI’s start-up status
and its formative institutional culture. Most theoretical frameworks are based on stable,
fully formed organizations and tend to attempt to explain issues of change; either the
initiation of change by organizational leadership, or the organization’s resistance to
change. A working framework for this organization must begin with the internal
participants’ assumption that change is central to the organization’s past, present, and
immediate future. Finally, a working theoretical framework for this organization must
address issues of higher education privatization. As a higher education organization that
has embraced the corporate value of entrepreneurism as a founding theme, a study of RGI
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may begin to address some of the questions that higher education scholars have asked
about the appropriateness and relevance of corporate business and industry concepts and
values within the higher education context.
Although Birnbaum (1988) and Bolman and Deal (1991) do not account for
Reynolds Graduate Institute, their basic framework for analyzing an organization is
useful for understanding this new institution. Integrating these two theoretical
frameworks, one can identify a discrete set of common categories, or organizational
tasks, which higher education institutions must address, regardless of the type of
institution. Each organization has a distinctive configuration of environment, strategy,
culture, and structure that both defines these tasks and structures the ways that the
organization will meet them. Whether one describes this configuration in terms of frames
or archetypal institutions may fit into the schema of either Birnbaum or Bolman and
Deal, but an understanding of organizational functions in light of these tasks will also
encompass a theoretical understanding of Reynolds Graduate Institute.
The first task is resolving the complexity of organizational identity. Organizations
are creations of the people who inhabit, shape, and interact with them. Each person brings
one’s unique understanding of the organization, as well as intent to shape the
organization in a particular direction. Resolving organizational identity involves
maintaining a precarious balance between the various competing perceptions of the
organization; both what it purports to be, and what it claims to be becoming. Bolman and
Deal describe the organization as embodying the coexistence of multiple versions of itself
that can be better understood by peering at it through a variety of frames. Their
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description of frames for understanding these competing perceptions of organizations
fails to capture the complexity of the task of identity development that the organization is
constantly performing. Resolving organizational identity is a critical, continuous task that
allows a complex, constantly changing organization to resolve competing concepts of
itself without flying apart into its individual components, or wasting resources on identity
wars. The difficulty of understanding a start-up organization like Reynolds Graduate
Institute within Bolman and Deal’s frame schema speaks less to the difference between a
continuous organization and a new one, than to what is more likely a state of constant
becoming within which all organizations exist.
Resolving organizational identity also involves creating a unique balance for the
organization between change and stability. Organizational feedback loops, as described
by Birnbaum, play a critical role here in managing the rate of change so that the
organization can respond to its environment enough to survive, but resist change enough
to establish a coherent identity that is recognizable to internal and external stakeholders
despite this state of almost constant change. Within the context of Birnbaum’s
understanding of organizations, feedback loops and systems play an important role to
create a unique combination of leadership, rules, and authority to establish and maintain
the organization’s identity.
The second organizational task involves resolving issues of power and authority
within the organization. As in the case of organizational change and its relationship to
organizational identity, power and authority determine who has the ability to influence
the organization to initiate and implement change, as well as how the flow of information
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is coordinated within the organization. At a more basic level, resolving issues of power
and authority creates the internal rules of engagement between individuals and between
segments of the organization. This aspect of the task determines not only who has overall
power within the organization (as depicted in the organizational chart, for example), but
also who has power and authority within which contexts.
Within Bolman and Deal’s description of organizations, depending on the
particular frame that two individuals might share for understanding the organization, one
person or another might have authority to act within a given circumstance. For example,
within the political frame any member of the organization might feel empowered to take
action within certain parameters in order to gain more power to influence the institution.
On the other hand, within the bureaucratic frame, authority might need to be derived by
various means through one’s formal position or specialized knowledge within the
organization. In another context, such as the symbolic frame, an institutional leader’s
claim to authority might itself send a message of competence to organizational players.
Similarly, within Birnbaum’s description of colleges and universities, the
existence of different constellations of power and authority might determine whether an
institution and the individuals that inhabit it act more like what he describes as a
collegium or a bureaucracy. Resolving these issues is more closely tied to institutional
identity within Birnbaum’s schema. For example, individuals within a collegium might
feel more empowered to publicly question a decision made by individuals who are highly
placed on the organizational chart. On the other hand, within Birnbaum’s bureaucratic
organization, the rules of engagement might be more formalized, especially between
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individuals occupying different levels within the organization. As organizations develop
within the early part of their existence, the resolution of issues of power and authority
through the establishment of rules of engagement is especially important, and takes a
large amount of energy, relative to what takes place in more established organizations.
Later, when the organization enters another stage in its life cycle, resolving issues of
power and authority comes to the forefront again as individuals within the organization
wrestle with the relationship of change to organizational identity.
A formal theory of the organization that helps us to better understand Reynolds
Graduate Institute should account for the unique ways that the institution enacts both the
task of establishing organizational identity and that of resolving issues of power and
authority. The Reynolds Graduate Institute uses its unique commitment to incorporating
entrepreneurism and innovation into the design and ethos of the institution to accomplish
both of these organizational tasks. Entrepreneurism is embedded within the institution’s
incipient organizational identity, creating a central theme for the organization that brings
together competing themes such as its parallel commitment to interdisciplinarity, market
and career focus, and student centeredness, while creating a niche for itself within the
larger institutional consortium. The organization’s commitment to an institutional identity
rooted in entrepreneurism also creates a powerful central theme for resolving issues of
power and authority by clarifying institutional purpose, and integrating both of these
organizational tasks.
Located at the start-up stage of the organizational life cycle, Reynolds Graduate
Institute is still in the process of establishing its organizational identity. In their review of
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the literature of organizational life cycles, Quinn and Cameron (1983) identify the initial
stage in start-up organizations as a period of intense entrepreneurial activity, primarily
focused on establishing a niche for the organization through developing competencies,
creativity, and product innovation. Developing a higher education institution's identity
around a central theme like entrepreneurism can draw a link between our understanding
of higher education and business organizations because it creates an expectation that
although the institution will act within a higher education organizational context, it is
likely to act like a start-up business organization in terms of a commitment to a business
principle like entrepreneurism. With entrepreneurism posited as the guiding motif of the
organization, its identity is clearly laid out at the beginning, along with — for better or
worse — unambiguous answers to questions about the institution’s mission and values. In
the case of RGI, it is, in short, an entrepreneurial higher education organization that is
engaged in preparing students for professional careers in the biotech industry.
Having established its identity on this basis, Reynolds Graduate Institute can
begin to address the more complicated issues of its identity as an organization. For
example, as an “entrepreneurial organization” the balance between change and stability
can be directly addressed. Since the two main aspects of its identity — entrepreneurism
and the biotech industry — are associated with intentional, rapid, and constant change,
this organization can be expected to intentionally establish an organizational culture and
structure that supports operations within a constantly changing environment. This should
be true both for the organization’s internal environment, that calls for continuous
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reinvention to respond to a constantly changing external environment, and its approach to
the external environment, that is assumed to be in constant change.
Likewise, the leadership of Reynolds Graduate Institute has clarified the
resolution of issues of power and authority by organizing the institution around a single,
shared, clear understanding of itself. These issues of power and authority have been more
broadly resolved because of the establishment of organizational identity. Entrepreneurism
has become a powerful guiding metaphor for the development of the organization by
occupying the place of a vision for the institution that is grounded within the business
organizational paradigm. According to the identity of the entrepreneurial higher
education institution, as has been established here, Reynolds Graduate Institute follows
the development of a commercial organization in its environment, strategy, culture, and
structure. Within the context of this metaphor, the organization’s identity as an
entrepreneurial start-up means that power and authority become configured along the
lines of a corporate business organization. As in the organizational life cycle stage, the
structure of an organization in the entrepreneurial developmental stage is simple and
informal. Decision-making emphasizes rapid growth, innovation and creativity, and the
establishment of organizational competencies and niche formation. The organization is
structured around simple functions and becomes more complex as the organization grows
(Miller and Friesen, 1984; Quinn and Cameron, 1983).
As in both Birnbaum’s and Bolman and Deal’s accounts of organizational
development, the elements of a more conventional organizational analysis — external
environment, strategy, culture, and structure — provide easily identifiable lenses through
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which to see how the resolution of these two organizational tasks finds its expression.
The remainder of the chapter views RGI through each of these lenses to illustrate how
power and identity are configured in the second task. In my analysis, the external
environment is a lens through which one might view the context within which the
organization is articulated. Within the unique context of a start-up organization, the
external environment plays a potential dual role by serving as a shared construct that the
founders might push against in establishing the organization’s initial identity. The
founding of the organization might be an act of reaction against the external environment,
as represented by that construct. Strategy is another lens through which identity is
translated into purpose, integrating the two tasks of establishing identity and configuring
power and authority, so that the organization’s overt functions have a good fit with its
identity. Later, I characterize culture as lens through which to view the dynamic process
within which the organization, as its participants experience it, is simultaneously pulled
together and pulled apart by stakeholders, each attempting to use power to influence and
shape the institution’s identity. In the conclusion of the chapter, structure is the final lens
that I use to view RGI, in which the organization’s unique configuration of power and
authority is institutionalized, in line with the institution’s espoused values and its overt
functions.
Reynolds Graduate Institute is unique among higher education institutions in its
use of entrepreneurism as an organizing theme both to establish its identity and to guide
issues of power and authority in its development. Conversely, it uses the shared idea of a
“traditional research university” as an organizing concept to push against. If
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entrepreneurism is the way that this organization resolves these two organizational tasks,
it is important to explore the idea of entrepreneurism, as it is understood in this study. In
the immediately following section, I will introduce Covin and Slevin’s concept of
entrepreneurial posture.
Entrepreneurism in Organizations
Covin and Slevin (1991) and, more recently, Russell (1999), have identified
organizational entrepreneurism within the framework of the concept of entrepreneurial
posture. For Covin and Slevin, entrepreneurial posture is framed within three types of
organizational behaviors: risk taking, innovation, and competition. In addition to the
specific kinds of actions that organizations can take, Covin and Slevin describe how
organizational entrepreneurism occurs within a specific organizational context, which can
be internal external, and strategic. Russell (1999) supports Covin and Slevin’s concept of
entrepreneurial posture, but extends it through a framework designed around specific
organizational actions that promote both innovation and entrepreneurism within the
organization. This framework aligns along an axis of organizational strategy, culture, and
structure. To begin, he cites his own collaborative research (Russell and Russell, 1992) to
make the correlation explicit between organizational values and norms that support
innovation and organizational strategies, structure, and environments that support
entrepreneurism. Rather than advancing Covin and Slevin’s project, Russell’s
contribution to the identification of entrepreneurism and innovation nexus is to make the
link much more explicit through his former research that shows the correlation between
the two. More importantly, Russell takes the project in a slightly different direction by
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turning from a discussion of the context and characteristics of an entrepreneurial
organization toward a discussion of the specific actions that will likely promote
entrepreneurism within that given organization.
Within the context of this study, the combination of the two approaches helps to
define how the internal and external environments of an organization can combine to
form its identity around a theme of entrepreneurship. This theme frames the discourse
about the new institution’s formative identity within a set of parameters. Whereas the
identity of RGI may be territory that is equal to other institutions in combativeness, the
core of that identity, that this is an entrepreneurial higher education institution, rises
above these disputes, hence a culture of entrepreneurism exists. Accordingly, an
integrated framework of organizational entrepreneurism accounts for the role of both the
internal and external environment by juxtaposing Covin and Slevin’s concept of an
organization’s internal entrepreneurial posture and Russell’s description of an
organization’s “hostile” and “dynamic” external environment. When these two
perspectives are side by side, one can see that, like Birnbaum and Bolman and Deal, both
Covin and Slevin’s and Russell’s approaches to organizational entrepreneurism can be
read through the lenses of environment, strategy, culture, and structure. Through these
lenses, entrepreneurism can be expressed in those elements of the organization where
Covin and Slevin’s descriptive approach meets Russell’s prescriptive approach to
organization building. Accordingly, one can construct an integrated approach to strategy
in both authors’ support for organizational characteristics such as a focus on growth and
competitive tactics, as well as organizational behaviors that support the creation of
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entrepreneurial posture. In the area of environment, both Covin and Slevin and Russell
point out that “hostile” and “unforgiving” business environments support
entrepreneurism in organizations. Similarly, one can find commonality in the area of
culture, in their support for organizational cultures that value creativity and innovation,
and in their support for organizational behaviors that would signify these values to
internal and external stakeholders, such as an explicit tolerance of failure and facilitation
of resources for new ventures. Both authors describe how structure supports
entrepreneurism by creating organic, decentralized, informal contexts that facilitate quick
decision making at all levels of the organization and an open flow of communication
across the bureaucracy.
Up to this point in the chapter I have addressed some challenges to analyzing both
entrepreneurism and organizational development in a start-up environment when the
organizational frameworks are based on institutions that are neither start-up nor
organized around entrepreneurial themes. I have presented an integrated theory of
organizational development that attempts to resolve the gap between two recognizable
theories of organizational development. This framework is centered on the
accomplishment of two primary organizational tasks: the resolution of the organization’s
identity and how power and the flow of authority and information are configured within
the organization. I have also presented a theory of entrepreneurism in developing
organizations that is grounded in both Covin and Slevin’s and Russell’s theories of
entrepreneurial behavior in organizations, framed within conventional analytical
categories: environment, strategy, culture, and structure.
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In the rest of this chapter, I will expand on these definitions within the context of
the Reynolds Graduate Institute’s use of entrepreneurism as a central concept used to
guide its resolution of organizational tasks. Consistent with my intended integrated
approach to organizational entrepreneurism, I will analyze the Reynolds Graduate
Institute’s internal process of identity development within the context of Covin and
Slevin’s and Reynolds’ concept of entrepreneurial posture. Moving from organizational
identity to the configuration of power and authority within the organization, I will
analyze RGI’s environment, strategy, culture, and structure within this context. First, I
will describe the organization’s external environment within the context of Russell’s idea
of entrepreneurial environments as hostile and dynamic. This will be followed by a look
at the Reynolds Graduate Institute’s approaches to strategy, culture, and structure, within
an entrepreneurial context. In the concluding chapter, I will address concerns about this
organization’s sustainability in its current incarnation, and then describe the institution
within the context of privatization, with special attention to the claims being made by
privatization’s adherents and opponents.
Entrepreneurism and Organizational Identity
Covin and Slevin write that entrepreneurial posture in organizations is
characterized by three dimensions: risk taking propensity; tendency to act in a
competitively aggressive, proactive manner; and reliance upon extensive and frequent
product innovations. Within my conceptual framework, an entrepreneurial organization
seeks to establish its identity in such a way as to reflect a strong commitment to each of
these three dimensions: risk taking, competition, and innovation. My interviews with
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faculty, staff, administrators, and others associated with Reynolds Graduate Institute
illustrate the organization’s attempts so far to establish its identity through initiation of an
entrepreneurial posture, both in the original intent of the founders and in the day-to-day
experiences of the faculty, staff, and administrators. This would seem to support an
institutional commitment to creating an entrepreneurial identity at RGI in the first
organizational task.
Reynolds Graduate Institute seems to have made a number of design decisions in
its start-up phase that have incorporated risk taking into its institutional makeup. Working
within higher education, an industry that is traditionally conservative in its organizational
structure, the original start-up team designed an institution without tenure or shared
governance, or even academic departments. In an academic environment that, at best,
looks suspiciously at movements in the direction of higher education privatization, the
designers of Reynolds Graduate Institute have explicitly chosen to start up an institution
that is organized around close working partnerships in both teaching and research with a
specific industry.
The individual faculty members who have chosen to participate in this start-up
institution also describe themselves as risk-takers, many of them having left behind
thriving careers in conventional higher education settings (in some cases with tenure
status and established research labs) for a new institution lacking many characteristics
that faculty in conventional institutions take for granted. As one faculty member reflects,
“I think all of us are somewhat risk takers. And our students definitely are, you know.
The fact that they’re going into something that’s totally un-treaded waters.” The
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individuals connected with this organization represent themselves as explorers on a
journey, where the risks are high, but the potential rewards are high as well. Another
faculty member admits, “My expectations were I fully expected this to be a very high risk
place where if you didn’t perform you would be obsolete. I also expected it to be high
reward because of the high risk, which I think was generally true, more or less.” To this
respondent, in an organization where risk taking defines the act of even accepting the job,
risk taking seems to have become tied to the identity of the organization. A founding staff
member identifies risk taking as an essential part of the institutional psyche for everyone
involved in the organization, declaring,
…everyone who has come to work here, whether it’s staff, faculty, post-
doc, throughout that, you know, non-student side of the house, took a risk.
We knew we had money for the first three to five years, but, you know, we
didn’t know what the future would hold. Of course, faculty came here
without tenure. And therefore, the people attracted to come to this place
tend to be risk takers, and so it is also with the students.

As the faculty I interviewed reminded me again and again, Reynolds Graduate
Institute has no doctoral program or doctoral research assistants, nor a track record or
reputation for attracting students or research grant monies, nor a well established
endowment in case this institution-wide experiment fails. Furthermore, the single degree
that the institution offers is itself a start-up degree, one that respondents reminded me is
relatively unknown even within the bio-tech industry that it serves. One faculty member
remarks on the pervading sense of having taken a risk to work at RGI:
That’s also, you know, the disadvantage, of course, is that you don’t know
if the institution will survive, in terms of where’s the money coming from,
where the donations are coming from. We don’t have that alumni base,
you know. We can’t get students, enough students that are willing to pay
full tuition. So we have to give tuition subsidies, and that cuts into the
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budget. So there are a lot of budgetary concerns that I think as a faculty
member at a state institution we would be sort of insulated from, to a large
extent, those concerns.

This faculty member illustrates two aspects of risk in RGI’s internal environment.
Initially he expresses the risk that he might lose his job if the institution cannot support
itself financially. He also describes how the sense of risk pervades his day-to-day
experience of the organization by forcing him to be engaged around the institution’s
finances, whereas he perceives that many other faculty at other kinds of institutions have
the luxury of choosing to ignore the institution’s financial well being.
This faculty member perceives the choice to give up the security of an established
institution, and his individual security as a tenured faculty member at a traditional
research university, as a significant individual risk. However, for newer faculty whose
individual reputations are less established, beginning one’s career at RGI is seen as a
different – albeit no less significant – risk. One faculty member laments the experience of
trying to attract a high quality post-doctoral researcher to RGI to work in her lab thus:
“you’re Little Miss No One, Miss Nobody at a nowhere institution. I mean, nobody
knows about [RGI]….” This sense of having to build the reputation of the institution
“from the ground up” is summed up by another faculty member, who considers,
I knew there were some risks associated with being in a startup
entrepreneurial environment…You talk about the branding of this new
degree, getting it known throughout the world as a novel degree, and we
still have a lot of work to do in that area. We’re not a household name.
The degree is not a household name, and [RGI] is not a household name.
There are pockets where people know us very well, and love what we do,
and have hired many of our students. Outside of those pockets it’s still
fairly sparse in terms of recognition.

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This speaker characterizes the sense of simultaneous angst and idealism that are
felt by the founding faculty of the institution. He expresses at once his concern about the
lack of progress that has been made in the institution’s brand recognition, relative to the
faculty’s expectations up to this point, and his confidence in the quality of the
institution’s products, in this case recent graduates.
Along with the sense of risk, the second dimension of entrepreneurial posture,
competitiveness, characterizes the organization’s relationship toward other graduate and
professional institutions, as well as RGI’s identity as a competitive organization.
Competition is a prevalent theme in interviews. It can be seen in respondents’ use of the
language of the competitive market in their descriptions of the organization. It can also be
seen in their accounts of the role of the organization with respect to other higher
education institutions, and in the position of RGI’s students within a competitive job
market. Every interview eventually makes its way around to whether the organization can
compete with its rivals – for students, donors, and research dollars. A related theme is the
difficulty of identifying its competitor institutions.
Many of the responses from interviewees are couched within the language of the
competitive market, whether that rivalry comes from the ranks of traditional research
institutions or traditional professional schools. An immediate difference between faculty
and administrators at RGI and those at other, more traditional, institutions can be seen in
their use of language. Created to be integrated with the bio-tech industry, those who
inhabit the institution reflect their own personal immersion within the world of industry
in their choices of words. Often, faculty and administrators use market language to
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describe the institution, their own work, and even their students. Evaluating the success
of the institution so far, one administrator describes RGI’s students, affirming, “I think
we've been able to recruit very good students from the beginning and we've been placing
them well and the organizations that we've been placing them in, they seem to be pleased
with the product.” He further describes the institution’s outreach to industrial partners,
declaring, “we haven't really penetrated the large pharmaceutical companies with our
students. There is a real brand image there, branding our degree, its value. That remains
to be done.” In these passages, it is interesting to note that the speaker refers to the
institution’s students as “students” prior to and during the admissions process, and as
“product” following placement in their initial jobs in RGI’s partner corporations. In the
imagery of this administrator’s account, students seem to follow the path of an industrial
process, not unlike raw materials entering a factory, to emerge as a finished product on
the other side. Similarly, students are “recruited,” not “attracted,” not unlike new
employees in industry. In the second quotation, in addition to concerns about the
organization’s “product,” the administrator expresses concern for “penetration” of
companies, and the “branding” and “value” of the institution’s degree, all primary
concerns of a commercial venture for its product. Moving away from the specific degree-
granting ability of the institution, the speaker again refers to RGI’s students as an
industrial product, referring to them as a tool for “penetrating” a new market, in this case
pharmaceutical companies who might hire the institution’s students. The “branding” and
“value” that get added to the institution’s image come attached to the students as they
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enter these firms, the way a product might enter one’s home with a brand name attached
to it.
For most respondents, the way that the speaker perceives the institution’s ability
— or inability — to compete directly with traditional higher education institutions is a
primary concern. At times this competition is explicit. In one case, an administrator
defines institutional success as its students’ ability to compete with MBA graduates for
jobs, declaring,
These are students unlike MBA’s. These are students who come to us right
out of an undergraduate experience, or maybe with a couple of years.
Typical MBA candidates are in the workforce 3-5 years before they come
to that graduate program…the fact that they compete in the marketplace
for jobs and are chosen shows me that we have a curriculum that makes
some sense.

Although the speaker’s account acknowledges RGI’s differences from those of a
typical business school in her comparison of RGI’s students, the statement makes the
point that RGI’s students are able to compete with MBA programs’ students. In another
case, a faculty member refers to the threat posed to the institution’s competitiveness by
the absence of a doctoral program to attract high quality research assistants:
The one thing that still is not figured out is how you get the warm bodies
into your labs to do the research, and so if [RGI] expects faculty members
to be as productive as a faculty member at a R-10 university, then, you
know, we’re competing against groups that have…You know, other start-
up Assistant Professors have groups of 5 doctoral graduate students. I
can’t compete with that.

Again, in this passage, the speaker defines institutional success around
successfully competing against a rival institution, in this case a traditional research
institution with a doctoral program and doctoral research assistants. This faculty member
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couches her critique of the institution — and her precarious place within it — within an
evaluation of the organization’s competitiveness.
In other cases, the competition that pervades the institution is with an idealized
conventional higher education institution. Many respondents speak of their work at RGI
in terms of overturning traditional paradigms of higher education. These entrepreneurs
seem to see their competitive task as not just to beat their direct competitors, but also to
transform higher education as we know it. In this sense, they are working to overturn
traditional ideas of higher education or professional graduate training by showing that an
alternative model can be successful in direct competition with conventional institutions.
For example, an administrator speaks of having to overcome other faculty’s mindsets
about their own students’ ideal career objectives:
No one argues, for example, that the M.B.A. has value. No one argues that
going to law school has value, or that the Ph.D. has value. But in science
we’re still struggling with this perception that…there hasn’t been a
professional Master’s in the sciences. And actually we’re trying to say that
there needs to be one, we’re it, and we’re the place to be. So the success
will be breaking through that with the academic faculty.

To this respondent, institutional success is again translated into competitive terms,
but in this case the institutional rival is constituted, not as a traditional higher education
institution, but in traditional higher education mindsets. To this administrator, RGI is
competing with the idea that the only options for undergraduates in the sciences are either
doctoral programs in the sciences or medical school. For this respondent, the real
competition is not traditional higher education institutions but traditional attitudes about
higher education.
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Another faculty member speaks with pride of the jealousy he senses from other
faculty when he tells them about his work at RGI:
And when I talk to some faculty, even somebody really snooty from Yale
or whatever, and you really talk to them for a while, it's almost like they
tend to envy you, like, "wow, that sounds pretty damn neat, I wish…”
(laughs), you know? It’s kind of interesting. They say, “wow, you get to
do all those things?”…I’ve never come across somebody when I’ve
actually been able to talk to them for ten or fifteen minutes when there
hasn’t been, you know, a little of that.

Like the previous speaker, based on his accounts, this respondent’s approach to
other faculty is very competitive. However, he does seem to believe that he is competing
directly against a specific rival institution like Yale, but with the traditional way of doing
higher education that Yale represents. The pleasure he shows in his colleagues’ supposed
envy for his situation is an important part of the institutional identity. For both of these
respondents, the goal is not to compete and win against any particular higher education
institution, but to supersede a mindset about higher education against which the existence
of this start-up institution represents a challenge.
The third aspect of entrepreneurial posture is innovation. Faculty and staff
describe the internal environment of RGI as a combination of structured and individual
support for innovation. Through various means, they perceive the organization as having
been designed to explicitly encourage innovative approaches to teaching and research on
a day-to-day basis. For example, the lack of departments, while accentuating the sense of
risk involved with the organization through its positioning as a maverick institution, is
also seen as promoting interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research for faculty.
A faculty member observes:
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…this is a group that has different academic cultures. They approach
problem-solving different ways. And we're all thrown here together. Now
we're interacting with each other. I think that trying to figure out where the
other culture is coming from, you can have really great synergy.

Even when it has not been occurring at the levels that they expect, the RGI faculty
almost unanimously equate interdisciplinarity and collaboration with increased
innovation, and regard this aspect of the institution as a primary reason for working there.
To this faculty respondent, the act of explaining a point to someone from a different
disciplinary background is a creative catalyst that inevitably leads to others. Another
faculty member comments on the relationship between the lack of departments and
interdisciplinary collaboration, remarking:
Clearly there is an institutional structure that helps [interdisciplinary
collaboration], that there are no departments. That’s sort of built into the
[RGI] model. There’s no professor of computational biology or professor
of bioengineering; just professors. And maybe, unlike other schools, if you
do manage to collaborate with somebody outside your field, that’s really
appreciated at this institution.

For this respondent, the absence of departments is linked to the absence of
disciplinary titles among faculty. Perhaps, as the respondent implies, collaboration is
heightened because faculty identify primarily with the institution, rather than with the
department. This faculty member continues his remarks by describing a more explicit
form of encouraging collaboration: faculty retreats that are held to promote sharing of
research ideas and to stimulate interdisciplinary research projects.
This philosophy of design translates to the geography, where one can find faculty
from the various disciplines located in close proximity to faculty from other disciplinary
backgrounds. A faculty member comments on the effects of this “department-less” design
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on the day-to day experience, reflecting, “on the research side, the faculty who came here
from the beginning expected interdisciplinary activity to be what was unique about this
place. We have people from different backgrounds in offices right next to each other.”
With a large number of faculty from different disciplines located next to each other, the
design of common space — classrooms, laboratories, meeting rooms — has been
conceptualized to encourage maximum contact between people from different academic
approaches. Although this contact cannot be mandated, respondents describe this layout
as facilitating frequent informal and formal contact in which ideas can arise. An
administrator describes how a combination of planned and unplanned interaction between
faculty can influence the internal creative environment:
So we meet frequently. The faculty are always getting together, either
formally or informally, to talk about potential research collaboration. And
we strongly encourage, both institutionally, and, of course, privately,
people working together. And that’s rewarding for all kinds of reasons.

Proximity does not necessarily equate with innovation, unless one has an
innovative task to accomplish. The experience of having gone through the start-up
process together with faculty from varying disciplinary backgrounds plays a major role in
creating both an institutional identity and a day-to-day experience of collaborative,
creative work. To respondents, the process of building a curriculum, designing facilities,
developing processes for faculty evaluation, and creating an institutional identity together
all conspire to create an internal environment in which day-to-day innovation is a central
feature. The idea of creating a new institution, and of creating something important
together that they believe will have impact on higher education, is a common theme
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among respondents. One faculty member’s enthusiasm for the mission of the institution is
characteristic of respondents:
And what I found really interesting about [RGI] as I dug deeper was the
interdisciplinary nature of it, and how willing they are to do things
completely different, agreed or not. The idea of not only starting new
programs, but also starting a new school, the idea changing how education
is done… it's really interesting.

This respondent conveys the sense of being involved in something important to
higher education. “Doing something completely different,” “starting programs,” “starting
a new school,” and “changing how higher education is done,” are all linked in the same
experience for this faculty member. The social aspect of this experience amplifies these
respondents’ sense of the importance of the founding process. For example, curriculum
and course development are carried out by faculty members from different disciplines,
forcing interdisciplinary approaches to the curriculum and individual courses. For these
faculty members, innovation occurs in teaching and curriculum development because
everyone is pushed away from their customary one-discipline approach towards a
synergistic one. One faculty member describes the pleasure of approaching teaching from
an interdisciplinary approach as a special value to working at RGI:
…and then again in the teaching it’s nice because you can really integrate
different disciplines. You know, you can see how can you mesh these
together, and how can it make sense so that the students can understand
how to put it all together. So I definitely can do a lot more in terms of my
teaching than I could at other institutions.

This faculty member depicts her RGI teaching experience as a simultaneous
learning experience that is in many ways equivalent to the one experienced by her
students. She gains this learning experience through the process of creating coursework
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with another person from a different discipline. Another faculty member describes his
interdisciplinary team teaching experience:
We have all these people teaching the other, teaching things together. In
that sense, that's a very stimulating experience. It's very time-consuming
to get that curriculum going, and we continue to refine the curriculum
because of that, because people continue to learn from each other, from
different perspectives, from their different disciplines that they’re brought
up in. I think that actually helps innovation, to begin to get… they begin to
get it, the synthesis of these different approaches and how they can be
useful.

This faculty member equates innovation in teaching with the interdisciplinary
approaches that faculty gain from one another because, despite the challenges of
communicating across approaches and cultures, the experience of creating something
together models how the scientists’ differing perspectives can work together in the
research context. Explaining how innovation fails to develop in traditional research
institutions, a faculty member explains, “And you don't see that in other classes. You're
locked in your disciplines. You're locked into your department chair. And everyone
knows how to teach that discipline because they've been teaching it the same way for a
long time.” To this respondent, innovation emerges from the faculty being forced to look
at one’s discipline from another discipline’s perspective.
Along with teaching, respondents describe the explicit encouragement of shared
experiences in interdisciplinary research through a range of formal and informal means.
One speaker draws connections between pursuing collaboration, interdisciplinary
research, and generating innovation in the institution:
As far as the research goes, we’ve been encouraged to do a lot of
interdisciplinary work, and in doing the interdisciplinary work, you can
often be more innovative, because you can try other things. Simply
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because I may not have the expertise to do something, but I’m interested
in it, then I can go get somebody else to help me with it. So you can do
more innovative things because you’re able to draw from other people.
And so that’s really encouraged too.

As in co-teaching and team curriculum development, this respondent perceives
interdisciplinary research as giving rise to innovation through the act of reaching across
disciplines to someone else’s approach. This faculty member feels freed from the
boundaries of her own discipline and the limitations of her personal academic preparation
to explore the boundaries of other disciplines that overlap with her own. She also sees her
academic colleagues from other disciplines as potential co-investigators and a source of
assistance, rather than competitors. Another faculty member illustrates the link between
interdisciplinary research and innovation in research:
So I think not only has the teaching improved but the research has also
followed along with it. The engineers have learned a lot of biology
creating these little devices that might be very useful biological tools, and
conversely the biologists are learning how to talk to engineers. Like an
engineer, they'll learn how to think in terms of specifications. People
began to learn to talk each other's languages. And that really helps
innovation.

This faculty member’s description of research as a learning experience for the
faculty member in interdisciplinary thinking and communication mirrors what others
have said about teaching in this respect.
The general sense of integration that is gained with a focus on interdisciplinary
research is seen as extending beyond the core faculty functions of teaching and research.
Although the institution currently lacks a formal governance process, faculty at all levels
of the institution report an intense level of involvement with all aspects of institutional
decision making, which intensifies their feelings of involvement. A faculty member
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comments, “Everyone has a say in faculty meetings. You’re able to speak up when you
want. And then other things like we do have all-[RGI] meetings, where the entire staff are
invited, all the faculty, all the students…” A second faculty member comments on the
involvement of lower ranking faculty in the creation of the organization:
One difference being a junior faculty member at RGI is that everyone has
been involved in helping get this venture off of the ground, and so there is
a jack-of-all-trades mentality, and the faculty actually enjoy that (laughs),
and that’s something very different than you’d find at a traditional school,
where faculty feel that service is a burden. Here, the service is part of the
growing of a venture, and most of us have really enjoyed that aspect of it.

In this passage, the speaker creates a parallel between intense faculty involvement
in institution building and faculty enjoyment of the service aspect of their responsibilities.
Another respondent describes the intensity of service/governance involvement as
somewhat of a detriment to being at a start-up institution:
…the time to [create a new institution from the ground up] had to come
from somewhere (laughs), and, the only time I had to give was from my
research. My research took a big hit. Between setting up the building,
infrastructure, and planning out the curriculum, my research program was
what paid the price, and I ended up losing a grant, for a while. “There’s
only 24 hours in a day” kind of thing.

Although this founding faculty member’s involvement was elevated beyond most
other respondents, having been one of the first faculty to join the institution, his struggle
to balance the increased service expectations of a start-up institution with other important
career tasks is similar to other respondents’ comments. Commonly, respondents welcome
the “intrusion” of intense service involvement as part of the expectations of being part of
a start-up institution. Looking back at the institution’s progress since founding, an
administrator adds,
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…it was exciting, and frustrating…We wore many hats and saw many
opportunities. You could have a personal impact on the development of
the place. It was frustrating because there was no infrastructure; you had
to do all kinds of stuff yourself. If the computer didn't work, you didn't
have anyone you could go to. And we made incredible progress the first
couple of years that I don't think we appreciated because the first day you
had to figure out what you did have.

This interviewee’s comments are atypical in that he speaks from a position of
perspective on the development of the institution, as a founding faculty member who has
taken on an administrative leadership role since working there. He looks back almost
wistfully on the days, just a few months prior to this interview, in which every day
brought a new unknown challenge to solve. Conversely, the comments are typical of
other faculty members’ comments in the pairing of the exhilaration of starting up with its
day-to-day aggravations. The less than ideal experience of having to concentrate on
“infrastructure” is balanced against the speaker’s intense feelings of involvement in
something important.
Commonly, the experience of frustration with the organization’s unpredictability
runs in unison with the thrill of achieving something unprecedented and meeting
challenges on a regular basis that the speaker never expected to attempt. For example, the
previous speaker continues,
…and then of course we did hear we're not just building education from
the ground up, we’re building everything from the ground up —
infrastructure, the whole thing. And so you get here and you end up, you
know, doing things that you never thought you'd do, doing almost
secretarial work, almost clerical work. I ended up negotiating our first
indirect cost rate with the federal government, talked production with the
Director of Federal Research, which I never dreamed that I would come
here and end up doing that.

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Many respondents share this initial sense of having had to set aside one’s
expectations of what kinds of work one might consider oneself above doing, as well as
what kinds of work one feels qualified to do. In addition to the satisfaction of solving
tangible problems on a regular basis, the combination of sharing an intense experience of
this kind and the close personal relationships that are created through the organization’s
structure and geography create a strong esprit de corps among the faculty, enhancing the
sense of linkage between the individual’s personal work and the progress of the
institution. One faculty member adds,
…we had to come in here and remodel the building, everything from
water purification systems that we’d need — which I’d never dealt with
before — to the sterilization, and laboratory dishwashing facilities, plus all
of the licenses that you need to be able to conduct research that have to do
with acquiring chemicals and radioactive materials, and on and on…So I
was one of the few bench scientists, and I had to do all the laboratory set-
up work (laughs). I was the first one in the door, and, there essentially
wasn’t anyone else to do it, and it had to be done.

Like many other speakers, this respondent’s use of “we” at the beginning of his
account merges seamlessly into his individual recounting of having personally designed
and equipped this lab. In fact, each morning several of the founding faculty literally walk
into labs bearing their own names or that of the person in the office next door, in honor of
the immense amount of individual work it has taken to get them started. Nevertheless,
this speaker uses the collective sense to describe this accomplishment. In other interviews
the speaker uses the collective “we” to claim institutional accomplishments, from the
creation of the curriculum to the successful placement of graduates, as personal
accomplishments. A faculty member reflects on her expectations and her sense of
accomplishment thus far,
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And since I came, I think we have accomplished quite a bit. In the
beginning we didn’t have offices, we didn’t have classrooms, we didn’t
have laboratories, nothing. So we kind of built it from zero out. So it is
exciting, you know. We didn’t have curriculum, we didn’t have students,
no internship programs, nothing.

As in the previous speaker’s recounting the tale of single-handedly establishing a
laboratory, this speaker conveys the pioneer spirit of having come to the institution before
offices, classrooms, or laboratories. However, the repeated use of “we” emphasizes the
only resources that seem to have been available to these pioneer founders — the
ingenuity of their colleagues and their own creativity. Subsequent speakers link the theme
of shared challenge with the repeated theme of making things up as one goes along.
These themes reflect the sense of integration between the organization’s progress and
one’s personal efforts on a day-to-day basis. Comparing the varying levels of
infrastructure and how that affects one’s day-to-day work, one administrator recounts her
adjustment to RGI:
Coming from a major institution like a [major research university], I had a
whole department to conduct research that would support our efforts in
development. Coming to [another more established college within the
parent institution consortium] I then had to get used to a smaller shop with
not as many resources. And then coming to [RGI], with very minimal
infrastructure (laughs)…So you have to be very creative. And everything
was new. We had to write it for the first time. The mission statement had
just been written. The story was, “how do you articulate it?” We’re still
working on articulating what [RGI] is all about.

The speaker transitions here from a story about her personal experiences with
infrastructure transition to RGI, using “I” to describe her work, to the impersonal “you,”
finally to the collective “we” to describe her work at RGI. The transition in her language
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seems to mirror her experience of shared effort. Elsewhere, a founding trustee describes
RGI’s early days:
…we did find and recruit a faculty with entrepreneurial instincts, signed
on to an adventure that wasn’t even fully defined yet, began work on a
curriculum that…where there was no rear-view mirror (laughs). You
couldn’t look back and say, “let’s do it the way Cal Tech did it, let’s do it
the way MIT did it.” Nobody had ever done it before. But that’s the fun of
it.

Like the previous speaker, he combines the collective “we” with the impersonal
“you” and finally back to the “you” again. Again, the explicit message of having created
faculty qualifications and curriculum as they went along is paired with the implicit
message of this having been a shared experience.
The theme of “making it up” also reflects a commitment on the part of
respondents to the principle of pragmatism and immediacy in the day-to-day creation of
the organization. Like Wohlstetter’s charter school founders who are “building a plane
while flying it,” (Griffin and Wohlstetter, 2001), innovation is seen less as an added
value, and more of an imperative for continued survival of the organization. Many of my
questions were answered with, “I can’t tell you how it is because we haven’t done it yet.”
Like the trustee who compares working on RGI to driving without a rear-view mirror,
creation and what can best be described as “tinkering” are perceived to be woven into the
daily routine. One respondent announces, “You know, just like with everything, you try
all sorts of innovative things. If it doesn’t work one way, try something else.” Another
shares her approach to the unexpected: “… when you are prepared to be surprised you
don’t get so surprised, right? This approach to building an organization is reflected in the
comment,
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…you often fall into an old habit, but the principle we used — if there
were any academic conventions —…we would try to look at them in such
a way that we would decide whether that academic convention was useful.
If it was, we could adopt it. If it wasn’t useful, we won’t adopt it; try
something else.

Here, the speaker presents a working model for the new organization in which
existing models are purposefully identified and either incorporated or rooted out based
upon their immediate utility. Others struggle to predict the future or even continued
existence of the organization, choosing instead to appeal to more immediate indicators of
success, such as informal feedback from partner corporations and student evaluations.
Often, speakers refer to the institution with tentative language such as an “interesting
experiment.” In one case, an administrator initially disclaims her ability to evaluate the
institution’s success, and then evaluates the success of the institution based upon the
students’ immediate success in placing into paid positions immediately following
graduation, reasoning,
We’re graduating our third class now. But we really won’t know…it’s not
the first job or the second job that they get after graduation, but it’s going
to be five or ten years out before we really know if we’ve produced
leaders. Now the fact that my students…the fact that they compete in the
marketplace for jobs and are chosen shows me that we have a curriculum
that makes some sense. And, of course, I get feedback from industry that
tells me that.

In each case, the respondent links one’s personal efforts to the immediate survival
of the institution. The importance of one’s personal efforts as one piece of a shared effort
is, in this respect, magnified, tying the speaker more closely to the group. If the group is
innovative, and the situation requires constant innovation to survive, then the individual’s
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identity as innovative and entrepreneurial is tied to the institution’s identity as innovative
and entrepreneurial.
Up to this point I have introduced the two primary organizational tasks with
which this study deals, resolving organizational identity and resolving issues of power
and authority, which are taken from the work of Birnbaum (1988) and Bolman and Deal
(1991). I have introduced a concept of entrepreneurial posture in an organization, from
the work of Covin and Slevin (1991) and Russell (1999). Using this established concept
of entrepreneurism within an organization, I have applied entrepreneurial posture as a
way to understand RGI’s process of resolving its organizational identity, showing various
ways in which RGI has attempted to establish itself as an entrepreneurial organization.
This study is intended to illustrate an organization in the start-up stages, in order
to gain some insight into how a new organization resolves primary organizational tasks at
a singular moment in its development. Quinn and Cameron (1991) describe organizations
as moving through a series of distinct stages, from founding to renewal or dissolution, in
which unique organizational tasks are accomplished. Although RGI in 2004 is a
distinctive higher education institution with its own set of drawbacks and benefits, the
picture that is presented in this study is of an institution in the early days of its formation.
Although I intend to present this institution’s formative moments in some detail in
subsequent pages, this is no way an attempt to present the institution as static. Connecting
one organizational task of establishing identity to the other organizational task of
configuring power and authority within the organization, the remainder of this chapter
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will deal with the expression of the resolution of these organizational tasks through the
lenses of the organization’s environment, strategy, culture, and structure.
“Choosing Hostility”: Shaping the External Environment
As has been proposed, at Reynolds Graduate Institute, the perception among
respondents is that the institution uses entrepreneurism as a guiding theme to establish its
identity. Consequently, entrepreneurism is seen as pervading the entire institution as the
core of this institution’s identity affects other aspects of this organization. In the
remainder of this chapter, my study of RGI will move from describing how respondents
experience the establishment of institutional identity to describing how respondents
experience the resolution of issues of power and authority at RGI. I will use core
organizational building blocks, such as environment, strategy, culture, and structure, as
lenses through which we may see how the organization configures power and authority to
express the theme entrepreneurism.
The external environment is one important lens through which we can see how
the shaping of the organization’s identity is experienced through the configuration of
power and authority. Within the context of my organizational tasks framework, as an
organization establishes its identity, the external environment provides both a context that
shapes and supports its identity, and an “anti-construct” against which the organization
pushes. Consequently, RGI respondents experience the external environment as both
supporting the establishment of “entrepreneurial posture” and establishing the idea of an
existing higher education model for the new institution to push against.
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Within their definition of “entrepreneurial posture,” Covin and Slevin (1991) and
Russell (1999) describe an environment that supports entrepreneurism as “hostile” and
“unforgiving.” Entrepreneurism thrives in environments that are highly competitive, and
that present a high degree of uncertainty for the future of the organization. Elsewhere,
both authors describe technology-based industries as especially supportive of
entrepreneurial posture. This description seems in line with both the environment for
higher education start-ups and that of the bio-tech industry in which the new institution is
situated. Higher education as a whole has been described at length as entering a period of
upheaval and uncertainty, particularly with regard to the issue of privatization (Benjamin,
Carroll, Jacobi, Krop, and Shires, 1993; Bargh, Scott, and Smith, 1996; Collis, 1999;
Levine, 2000; Marchese, 1998).
The unique political context surrounding RGI’s founding creates what the
literature would call a hostile and unforgiving environment for its participants. As a
higher education institution with close ties to the private sector and values that might be
considered more closely aligned with industry values than with traditional higher
education values, RGI is considered by many within the organization to be a high profile,
controversial experiment that does not have the approval of many faculty in its parent
organization. To many respondents, discussion of RGI’s environment must begin with
the historic and political context of the institution that gave rise to hostility and resistance
to its founding. The specific controversies that initially resulted in resistance to the
institution’s founding were threefold. The combination of lacking tenure or a shared
governance model, public anxiety about the bio-tech industry, and the initial location of
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the campus on land that had previously been used as a nature preserve coalesced into a
significant local opposition to the founding of RGI, much of which came from faculty
from RGI’s sister institutions within the consortium. Several respondents tell the story of
faculty from the other consortium colleges who picketed RGI’s dedication ceremony, at
one point physically blocking attendees from entering the event.
“There were lots of things that tended to stir up controversy around the founding
of this institution,” says a respondent. Reflecting on the founding of the institution,
another respondent recalls,
I think the last thing we expected was to bump into resistance on building
on that property. Others did not share our enthusiasm. That was a real
disappointment. I thought that by the time we were given the approval to
start a new institution that our sister institutions would be all for us.

Continuing with her account, the respondent describes several controversies
surrounding the founding of the institution as a distraction from being able to deal with
specific educational issues:
…I was really surprised not everyone shared our enthusiasm, and it took a
real drain on [the founding president]’s time, and [a senior administrator]
so much got distracted by that for us to go there. We had wonderful plans
for a new campus and we had already drawn up plans to show to
prospective donors and then there was all this chaos and resistance.

Another respondent describes a “crushingly conservative” environment for the
kind of innovation that RGI represents, and that RGI’s sister institutions in the
consortium were, “Not very embracing of the ideas, and in fact seemed to be very
threatened by some of the things we were saying.” An administrator recalls how the three
controversies coalesced into local opposition to the institution’s existence:
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And it just really struck a nerve with a lot of faculty and a lot of students,
the connection with bio-tech. I mean, people were convinced that they
were going to get into cloning and get into genetic engineering of all
kinds...I found this document that somebody had put together and
circulated when [Reynolds] was trying, just being founded, and trying to
get approval to build a building, and it was really a kind of scaremonger
brochure about genetic engineering coming to [the city where RGI was
founded], and really all these evil things…most of it was based on rumor
mill information, or inaccurate information. And certainly the fact that
[RGI] decided that they weren’t going to give faculty tenure was a clear
threat to the guild and there are faculty today who remain deeply, deeply
troubled by that.

There is a clear sense in this account of the speaker’s support for the institution’s
founding, despite what she sees as hysteria surrounding it. The speaker implies that the
beliefs of RGI’s opponents were based upon erroneous information. Another insight that
one can find in this account of RGI’s founding days is the frustration of not being able to
have rational exchanges – or even to clearly identify – the opposition to the institution's
founding. The respondent recounts her experience of receiving in this anonymous
publication what may be her only clear account of the arguments of the institution’s
opponents. Similarly, she describes opposition from other faculty in the consortium in
terms of a “threat to the guild.” Her choice of words to describe faculty resistance implies
a faceless organization that seems to be reacting unthinkingly to a danger to its
membership, rather than to the merits of the new institution’s values and vision.
One respondent shares an especially dramatic experience of physically moving
faculty members whom he had considered his academic colleagues in order to allow the
institution’s dedication ceremony to commence:
The day of the dedication of the new institution when I got there, there
was a big line of protesters surrounding the tent where the ceremony was
to be held. So since the ceremony was going to be held in this tent none of
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the guests who had been invited to attend could get into the tent, except
for the minister who was going to do the invocation, she entered through
some other side entrance, so she was just sitting in there all by herself in
the tent surrounded by all these people. The people running the event were
panicking, didn’t know what to do next. When I saw this situation I told
them, “I’m going to move these people out of the way and we’re going to
have this ceremony.” Now, some of these people were people I knew. And
I walked right up to them and asked them to get out of the way so we
could get on with the ceremony, but they said, “sorry Dr. Moore, I can’t
do that.” And I told them, “I’m going to ask you once again, and if you
don’t move I’m going to make you move.” But they said, “I’m sorry, Dr.
Moore. We’re not moving.” So I took a page from my college days -- I
played some football in my younger days -- and I backed up, and took a
running start, and broke right through that line of people! (laughs). Well,
once I broke through the line, then everyone else could enter the tent and
that’s how we were able to get on with the dedication of the institution.

This anecdote is remarkable not only for the potential for physical violence
connected with the formal opening of a higher education institution, but for the fact that
many people on both sides of this incident were well known to one another. Despite their
seemingly amicable professional relationships, many of these people felt sufficiently
compelled by their personal feelings about the founding of RGI to be on either side of an
incident that eventually involved a measure of physical force and intimidation on both
sides.
The combination of RGI’s status as a higher education institution within a highly
competitive industry without a long-term source of financial support or even a familiar
educational product creates the higher education equivalent of what Covin and Slevin
(1991) would describe as an “unforgiving” business environment for participants. Added
to this are the controversies surrounding RGI’s institutional founding, giving rise to the
conviction among many respondents that many within the institution’s immediate
collegial environment would not be sorry to see this particular experiment fail. The
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founding faculty and administrators find themselves operating within a quite literal and
figurative hostile business environment, in the rare situation (for higher education) of
having to face the possibility of institutional failure. Undaunted, as I have addressed
elsewhere, faculty and administrators within the institution describe this experience as a
high risk-high reward opportunity, although many are sober in their calculation of the
institution's likelihood of long-term success.
For a start-up organization, the founders have a number of choices with regard to
the organization’s environment, especially with regard to the organization’s specific
niche and the competitiveness of its market. This institution has organized itself around a
particularly competitive high technology industry, bio-tech, which is characterized by its
emergent status, and, consequently, a high number of start-up companies relative to more
established ones. Describing the economic context of the institution’s founding days, one
respondent states, “the economy for the past two years has been very challenging in the
bio-sciences. Many companies have gone under. Many companies have been de-listed
from the NASDAQ. Many of our friends of [RGI] have no budget for an intern or a hire,
so these were challenging days, but the expectations were never lowered.”
The uniqueness of this industry has created some special challenges for the
institution. An emergent theme in faculty interviews is the necessity to stay current with
this industry in order to be responsive both to students and industry partners. As one
faculty member comments, “you have to know the mood of the industry. So your
knowledge about the industry has to be current.” Elsewhere, an administrator addresses
the pressure of working in this environment:
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It's an incredible challenge to keep the curriculum up-to-date. It's also very
challenging to do your own research in this era; it's changing so rapidly.
It's absolutely crucial that we keep up to date with everything that is going
on. It's incumbent on us that we know all the time what that industry looks
like.

To these respondents, the bio-tech industry is characterized by rapid and constant
change, which puts pressure on faculty to stay abreast of the industry in both their
teaching and research. One faculty member remarks on the enormous responsibility that
“keeping up to date” places on faculty. He responds, “well basically, this whole program
for MBS is catered toward students who are going to work in industry, and as the
industry changes, we have to be innovative. And [RGI] understands that. If not, it’s our
responsibility to make them understand it.” To this faculty member, the founding faculty
has a particular duty to their students and the future of the institution to build
responsiveness to changes in this industry into the framework of the institution. Another
founding faculty member states that responsibility more explicitly:
One of the arguments for having a contract system for faculty rather than a
tenure system… is that this industry and the science on which it’s based is
changing rapidly. Now, a classics professor…not much changes. That’s
true of English. It’s true of history. Less true of the social sciences, but not
at all true of…this science. We need to make sure that we stay current
with what’s going on in industry, what’s going on in the underlying
science. Now, fortunately, our people, our faculty, can move back and
forth [between higher education and industry], unlike the classics
professor, who, once he becomes a classics professor, there’s not much a
hell of a lot else he can do in life. That’s not true for our people. So they
don’t need the security protection of tenure. And we can provide academic
freedom in other ways. So I think the fact that this is a fast changing
industry, a fast changing science, has affected the way we structure the
program.

This statement gives an example of how the rapidly changing business
environment of the bio-tech industry is perceived to affect not only day-to-day decision
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making of faculty and administrators in RGI, but likely influencing major structural
elements of the institution. For this respondent, the contract employment system for
faculty has been designed, in part, to encourage faculty to be more innovative and
responsive to the bio-tech industry by intermittently taking positions in industry settings.
We have seen how participants’ perceptions of RGI’s external circumstances have
influenced the establishment of an entrepreneurial identity for the institution by creating
what Covin and Slevin would call a hostile or competitive business environment.
Respondents’ experiences of the environment establish a context in which entrepreneurial
behavior is both encouraged and seen as necessary for institutional survival, further
reinforcing RGI’s identity as an entrepreneurial institution. In generating its raison d’etre
and locating its individual “niche,” this new organization has established its identity to a
large extent in relation to participants’ perceptions of this external environment. RGI’s
identity both shapes and is shaped by the perception of the environment shared by the
individuals in the organization. Consequently, along with the creation of a shared
construct that represents the organization when internal participants refer to “RGI,” part
of the “establishing identity” task involves the creation of a shared construct that holds
the antitheses of the organization’s distinctive characteristics. For RGI, its “antithesis
organization” can be seen when internal participants refer to traditional higher education
institutions, variously described as faculty and administrators’ former institutions,
conventional research universities, “our competitors,” or just “everyone else.”
Briefly focusing on the “antithesis organization” can give us some insight into the
identity of RGI, and the vision of its participants. Based on respondents’ descriptions of
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other, conventional universities, one can create a composite institution from these
assembled characteristics. As described by respondents, the antithesis organization’s
faculty work in defined silos, and rarely interact with scholars outside of their
departments in teaching or research, which tends to inhibit innovation. Describing her
faculty job search, one respondent recounts,
…it became pretty evident that a lot of institutions, everybody says, “oh
yeah, we are interdisciplinary,” but when it comes down to it, the searches
are from a certain department and usually for a certain position. Like for
chemistry you’ll have a position filled out for an organic chemist, or a
biological chemist, or something…it is clear that within the departmental
structure of an institution they have certain holes that they needed to fill…
“these are the little boxes that historically have existed, and so we need to
fill these slots”...

For this former faculty candidate, the message is clear from her prospective
employers that faculty members who do not care to work within the “little boxes” of the
conventional department structure are not welcome. Also juxtaposed for the reader here
is the claim of interdisciplinarity on the part of the prospective institution and the
perceived reality of an organizational structure that actually discourages
interdisciplinarity. Comparing his experience teaching at other institutions with his early
teaching experience at RGI, another respondent observes,
People began to learn to talk each other's languages. And that really helps
innovation. And you don't see that in other classes. You're locked in your
disciplines. You're locked into your department chair. And everyone
knows how to teach that discipline because they've been teaching it the
same way for a long time.

Like the “little boxes” of the first speaker, this speaker’s imagery of being “locked
into” something as if one is in a cage or a prison is juxtaposed against the more freeing
experience of learning a new language, that of one’s cross-disciplinary colleagues.
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Another respondent extends the imagery of RGI as a place where one can be free to
pursue one’s interests compared to the intellectual limits of a conventional university
career:
So every few years I caught myself changing my research area…This is
not very good for a conventional research career. They expect that you
become highly specialized with your colleagues in one thing and stick to
that thing, and not a dilettante. But I could not fit into that category
(laughs)…I started collaborating with computer scientists and
mathematicians, working on common interests, and then I truly
appreciated the impact of interdisciplinary research…The atmosphere was
not conducive to large-scale collaboration…You do your own thing and
establish a temple around yourself, and collaborations are, “oh, by the
way” kinds of affairs, and the creative work was not sufficiently
satisfactory.

Here, the speaker extends his description of limitation from the individual to the
collective sphere by recounting how the limiting environment of a traditional university
makes it difficult to create interdisciplinary collaboration. The imagery of individual
faculty establishing untouchable “temples” around themselves extends the picture of an
institutional type that discourages interdisciplinarity, while claiming to support it.
Another characteristic of the antithesis institution is that, to RGI participants, it
touts its own entrepreneurial and innovative intentions, but does not support its faculty
with resources or policies to act entrepreneurially or innovatively. For example, an
administrator describing faculty in RGI’s consortium sister institutions characterizes
them as individually innovative but collectively conservative, declaring,
I think you can find, in some disciplines, individual faculty who tend to be
very entrepreneurial, depending upon the nature of their own research, the
nature of their field. But as institutions, there’s just a mindset difference,
really, and clearly a lot of the people at the [consortium] colleges found
[the entrepreneurism theme] threatening, and inappropriate for a higher
education setting.
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A faculty member echoes these sentiments, declaring, “as in many academic
institutions, you find individuals who are very forward looking and quite adventuresome.
But the institution as a whole, everybody taken collectively, are the opposite of what they
say they are.” These characterizations about RGI’s sister institutions in the consortium
seem to supersede residual bitterness about faculty opposition to the institution’s
founding. Respondents apply criticisms of their local sister institutions equally to
conventional higher education institutions in general. The previous faculty member
defends the institution’s contract renewal system in comparison to the traditional tenure
process:
What we do is we actually have all the faculty vote on the renewal. That’s
actually very different and somewhat radical. That means the assistant
professor will vote on whether the full professor gets his contract renewed.
I think that’s very healthy. But the way it’s normally done is everyone
from that rank and above will vote on the promotion. What that does,
unfortunately, in many instances it makes the assistant professors much
more subdued and subjective to the authority of their seniors who are
flourishing their academic freedom, things that they wave the flag about in
the [other consortium colleges]. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s exactly those
people who aren’t in power who are in need of academic freedom.

In contrast to his prior comment, this respondent characterizes faculty as being
caught in a structure that forces them to act in a manner contradictory to their self image
as champions of academic freedom. To this faculty member, rather than making a
conscious effort to betray their values, faculty in other institutions are caught within an
environment that makes them complicit in discouraging academic freedom. Nevertheless,
for this respondent, although traditional universities tout academic freedom, their tenure
policies mitigate the actual practice of academic freedom by untenured faculty members.
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Rather than intentionally acting against their self image, faculty in traditional universities
are trapped in a system that undermines their deepest values. Another faculty respondent
shares this perspective, pointing out structural barriers to entrepreneurism and
interdisciplinarity:
If you’re still going to be determined by how many publications you have,
how many grants where you’re the sole [principal investigator], how are
you going to do interdisciplinary work? How are you going to have a close
industry component if consulting is considered negative, if patents are
okay, but maybe not considered great, you starting your own company is
seen to take away from your own duties…You can’t talk out of both sides
of your mouth.

For this faculty member, the traditional faculty responsibilities, both in terms of
workload and the RTP evaluation process, are the primary barrier to faculty
entrepreneurism and interdisciplinarity. To this respondent, the faculty reward system
creates disincentives to interdisciplinarity through opportunity costs applied to
interdisciplinarity and entrepreneurism. This faculty member also calls into question the
department system as a barrier to interdisciplinarity and entrepreneurism. He asks, “are
people really willing to give up their fiefdoms and willing to really have
interdisciplinarity? If you tack it on as just a new program, but you still have
responsibilities in the old department, how is this really ever going to happen?” Again, to
respondents at RGI, interdisciplinary work comes with a steep cost in the antithesis
university. Faculty have to give up the protection of their “fiefdoms” by neglecting their
responsibilities to their home departments.
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In contrast to these respondents, one founding faculty member points out how
some traditional institutions actually do act entrepreneurially, despite it not being a
particularly strong aspect of their organizational identity:
I think that certain institutions, in a very understated way, are very
entrepreneurial, but they just don't tell anyone about it. I would say that
[competing research university] is a very good example of that.
[Competing research university] has an incredible amount of spin-off
activities that they don't, you know, bill themselves as an entrepreneurial
place. They just sort of do it on the side. It happens (laughs). So a lot of
that is perception, I think.

Another, in describing RGI as, “…very different from traditional universities but
not so different from departments such as [competing biotech degree program at a large
research institution],” distinguishes between entrepreneurial departments and an
entrepreneurial institution. To all five speakers, in the area of innovation and
entrepreneurism, traditional institutions do not act in harmony with their identity, whether
they see themselves as entrepreneurial or not.
Most importantly, to these RGI participants, the antithesis institution does not
support innovative work or interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching or research. Most
descriptions of traditional higher education in this respect point at two areas of resistance
to innovation and entrepreneurism: an inordinate amount of bureaucratic obstacles to
change or innovation; and the lack of a mission or institutional culture supporting change
or innovation in many higher education institutions. To many, traditional higher
education institutions fail to support entrepreneurism and innovation because of the
prevalence of bureaucratic obstacles and adherence to traditions that limit individuals’
receptivity to new ideas. To one administrator, higher education institutions work within
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sets of parameters that are defined by the kind of income that supports them. The
respondent illustrates this point:
If you're in a traditional academic setting…you have extremely well
defined boundaries, you have extremely well defined revenue streams.
You're going to be tuition driven, you're going to be endowment
driven…research driven. You basically have well-defined ventures you
will work with and then you try to enhance those.

In the process of explaining why traditional institutions do not act more
entrepreneurially, he describes how the revenue scheme tends to define the institution,
and limits the kinds of innovation and entrepreneurism that the institution is likely to
pursue or reward. Aside from the limits imposed by the institution’s primary funding
source, an institutional culture can be perceived to put other kinds of obstacles in the way
of innovation. Looking back on her experience in a traditional liberal arts environment,
an administrator describes the effect of this environment on the creative aspect of one’s
work:
Not to say that you don’t get to use your creativity. You always have to
exercise creativity just to figure out how to do things. People don’t always
recognize that. [my previous institution] was constrained, hierarchical.
What level of position you had was very important there. Good ideas had
to come from senior management.

To this speaker, prospective change agents spend their energy strategizing and
gaming in order to win approval of marginal changes, rather than generating new ideas.
Within a traditional higher education environment, then, innovators use their creativity to
overcome barriers to change, or to identify someone to sponsor a new idea.
Nevertheless, among respondents who describe their experiences creating
innovation and entrepreneurism within conventional higher education institutions, some
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respondents are at least able, to some extent, to successfully affect their ideas. However,
even successful innovators tell of significant barriers to their efforts in traditional
institutions. To these respondents, conventional higher education institutions require an
inordinate amount of approval from others to allow an individual or department to
innovate in the area of curriculum or teaching. Speaking of her former institutions, an
administrator emphasizes,
…the degree of bureaucracy, formality. [Traditional liberal arts college]
was steeped in tradition…getting from point A to point B was difficult. If
you wanted to do something you couldn’t just go from point A to point B.
You had to take this route around it to get there [candidate takes out a
pencil and a yellow legal pad, and diagrams two points connected by a
meandering line].

This administrator is not the only person to describe the circuitous route that one
has had to follow in order to effect institutional change at conventional higher education
institutions. Another administrator describes the process that must be followed in order to
make even small changes: “…you have a task force, work group, three committees, four
sub-committees, a faculty advisory group, and they would have to meet over a period of
years to make incremental changes. And that’s not much of an intent to change things. I
mean, that’s out!” Later, this administrator recounts the process that he experienced to
change an executive’s job description:
At many institutions…it’s almost a sort of annual event of whether or not
the Dean of the Graduate College should also be the same as the Vice
President for Research…Should they be the same, should they be
different, should they be together, should they be separate?… half the
institutions went one way and half the institutions went the other, and they
flip-flopped every so often because there’s a new philosophy. But to do
that every so often is not just a decision. It’s task force, work group,
committee, faculty input… And it’s another two-year process, and it’ll last
for another five years and then we do it all over again.
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This respondent portrays the frustration of working within the parameters of a
traditional higher education institution: not only the difficulty of instituting change that
one deems necessary, but the stultifying effect of having to work through the entire
change process even for mundane changes. A faculty member shares his experience of
trying to effect change at a traditional higher education institution in the United
Kingdom:
They had this big…fifty million pound grant — that’s seventy-five million
dollars — from the British Government to bring people in from [an
American research institution], start new programs, start new projects, to
basically kind of bring [the university] from the Eighteenth to the
Twentieth Century…and modernize the curriculum. And every discussion
was about how, “well, this would be a great idea, but, you know, there’s
some five-hundred-year-old constraint,” or, “we don’t do things this way,”
or “nobody has an incentive because they’re all bought into different
programs.”

To the speaker, his experience in this established institution provides an example
of a traditional higher education institution that intentionally sets out to effect
organizational change, despite the existence of a culture formed around resistance to
change. The faculty member is speaking of instituting curricular change, not
organizational change, but is similarly stymied by a culture of resistance to change. As in
the experience of the previous respondent, whether change is aimed at organizational
rules or learning outcomes, original or cyclical, these change agents have found
themselves frustrated by internal forces that resist change.
To many respondents, the problem with traditional higher education institutions is
primarily a matter of mission: to them, without entrepreneurism and interdisciplinarity at
the center of the institution’s mission, the conservative culture of the institution will
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prevent it from happening. One faculty member compares conventional higher education
to other conservative institutions, stating that entrepreneurism is,
…never a term that I would associate with higher education. Higher
education is among the longest living institutions that we have. It’s
basically the church and the university. This is good because it’s stable,
but it’s not an institution that has been associated with entrepreneurism:
taking risks, innovating, making money.

In order to promote entrepreneurism and innovation in higher education, to this
faculty member, the main obstacle to be overcome is higher education’s long history of
conservatism in this area. In contrast to this image of higher education, an administrator
describes the culture of RGI. In the process giving a clear picture of her perception of
how conventional higher education juxtaposes with RGI, she elaborates, “If the student
wants a very prescribed, very linear, very predictable outcome to their graduate
education, they quickly know that this is not the place for them, and that they’re probably
better off in a [traditional] Ph.D. program.” In other words, the speaker thinks that
traditional graduation programs are conservative and unlikely to provide innovation in
their educational programs. She simultaneously maps out the space that RGI might
occupy alongside the space for traditional higher education.
Within these participants’ understanding of RGI, the existence of a conceptual
antithesis organization helps the organization to shape its own identity by creating
something to push against and justifying its own existence. To faculty and administrators
at RGI, then, as a foil to this imaginary antithesis organization, RGI is represented therein
as the one truly entrepreneurial higher education institution. Respondents describe the
institution’s support of faculty entrepreneurism through allocation of resources and the
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creation of policies to support entrepreneurism. RGI’s faculty are not seen to work in
silos, but are depicted in their descriptions as working figuratively and literally side by
side in an interdisciplinary community of scholars. Interaction between scholars from
different disciplines is portrayed as common and encouraged. To interviewees, the
institution has committed itself to entrepreneurism, but it also backs up that commitment
with actions. They perceive collaborative interdisciplinary work as encouraged in both
teaching and research. Although much more time must pass to truly determine whether
any of these propositions turns out to be an accurate description of RGI, the existence of
the antithesis organization lays out a terrain of opposition to the norm that at any rate
feels like an entrepreneurial institution to its participants.
A word of clarification is important here. The process through which this
organization’s identity is created can tell us more about how an organization develops a
concise identity and thinks about itself. Showing how the institution makes decisions
about such things as resource allocation can tell us more than attempting to prove or
disprove the participants’ claims about RGI. Within the context of organizational identity
creation, many of these participants’ statements about RGI’s entrepreneurism are made in
relation to a context of their own creation, the antithesis organization. We cannot really
know whether RGI is entrepreneurial or not, outside of its own context, or in relation to
the participants’ construct of the antithesis organization. For these founders, in the
absence of a quantitative baseline for entrepreneurial higher education institutions, the
internal role of the antithesis construct is to justify their significant efforts to create
entrepreneurism and interdisciplinarity in this start-up institution. According to Covin
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and Slevin, and Russell, an institution’s external environment can encourage the creation
of an entrepreneurial culture at RGI. To participants, the historical context of RGI’s
founding and surrounding controversies establishes a hostile and unforgiving
environment. Likewise, to participants, RGI’s context within the bio-tech industry
establishes a competitive environment.
Institutional culture is built and sustained over years, and little time has passed
since the founding of RGI. However, the stories that participants tell about RGI’s
entrepreneurism, especially in relation to the external environment, can tell us quite a bit
about how organizational participants’ values and beliefs translate into more immediate
organizational artifacts like strategy, culture, and structure. In the next section, I will
discuss one of these artifacts, RGI’s organizational strategy.
Organizational Strategy: Linking Mission and Function
Having concentrated on the external environment for entrepreneurism and
innovation at RGI, I will now turn to the internal environment. In the establishment of an
organization’s identity, strategy translates identity into function, as the organization
attempts to integrate the two primary organizational tasks so that its overt functions have
a good fit with its stated purpose and identity. The outcome of strategy is an integrated
process of establishing identity and configuring power and authority through the
allocation of resources in support of the institution’s identity. Tying the configuration of
RGI’s institutional resources to its nascent identity as an entrepreneurial higher education
institution begins with a central narrative within which a target group of founding faculty
and administrators enters a formative community under a unifying theme. Within this
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narrative, as described by respondents, the theme of RGI as an entrepreneurial and
interdisciplinary start-up institution guides the initial recruitment of a founding class of
faculty and administrators who share this vision. In the next step of this narrative,
respondents describe how the founders’ decisions are perpetuated through the recruitment
of successive faculty and administrators who continue to pursue the vision, and who are
in turn socialized into the incipient culture of the organization. In the final part of the
narrative, respondents describe how the themes are further established when individual
actions are connected to resources through the creation of institutional processes and
procedures. In this section I will address how, to participants, each of these elements of
RGI’s strategy acts out the integration of its two primary organizational tasks.
In the case of RGI, this central narrative can be seen in three elements of RGI’s
strategy, as described by this study’s respondents. The initial step can be seen in their
descriptions of the selection process that creates an initial faculty cohort of the institution
and their subsequent socialization in support of entrepreneurism. In the next step,
successive faculty and administrators are socialized into the institutional culture to the
extent that internal processes and the allocation of institutional resources are organized
around the values of support for innovation and support for entrepreneurism. In the final
step of the narrative, as acted out at RGI, individual actions are connected to resources
through the organization’s focus on customer service through responsiveness to students
and the teaching mission.
Respondents perceive the institution taking its first step in establishing a unifying
theme in the initial recruitment of the founding faculty and administrators. Many faculty
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and administrators describe having been attracted to RGI because of its conscious
organization around traits of entrepreneurism and commitment to interdisciplinary work
that have made it difficult for them to fit in elsewhere. One faculty member, who
describes her fit within a traditional higher education setting as a “square peg in a round
hole,” explains that what attracted her to RGI is that “what I really saw as a problem in
other places was really an advantage here, because here they are an interdisciplinary
institution.” Another faculty member describes her surprise that anyone other than she
and a few founding faculty would be able to buy into the institution’s unique vision:
I think I was surprised by the quality of our students, especially the first
class. I, and maybe others, were all a bit uncertain who would come and
apply. And we were very pleased by the quality of our applicants. And I
was very pleased, I have to say. Because once you think you’re doing
something important, and…you have good students coming along, you
feel more enthused.

In both of these descriptions, as well as in the previous discussion of the antithesis
institution, faculty members describe their own interests as outside of the mainstream of
traditional higher education institutions. These faculty members contrast their unreceptive
experiences at conventional institutions with their favorable ones at RGI. This institution
has constructed an identity as a maverick institution in opposition to conventional higher
education. In their descriptions of RGI’s early hiring decisions, respondents paint a self
portrait of a group of people with eccentric interests who have finally found a place to fit
in. Within the narrative of their search for a faculty environment that will support their
interests, respondents present a picture of RGI in possession of a guiding vision of itself
as a unique fit that seems individually tailored for them.
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This theme of RGI as the perfect fit for those who do not fit anywhere else is
further elaborated when faculty repeatedly refer to RGI as “the best of both worlds.” One
faculty member remarks:
My propensities were very much to bridge these different sectors and my
scientific interest is very broad and multidisciplinary as well…I’ve done
basic work, and I’ve done work in applied areas and companies [that] I’ve
run. So it seemed like a really interesting place to fit my personality and
interests very well.

Another founding faculty member’s testimony agrees with this assessment,
reflecting that the institution,
…fit me to a tee because my background is both industry and
academia…And so I looked at that, and said, “based on what I do for my
research, and what my interests were in the first place, this institution was
perfect,” and considerably better than where I was at the moment.

In each of these cases, the faculty member describes having brought one or more
interests or backgrounds to his career that he considered incompatible with a traditional
higher education setting. To both of these respondents, working at RGI is a way to pursue
both of these interests without having to sacrifice one or the other to fit into a traditional
faculty environment.
In other cases, founding faculty and administrators are mentored or otherwise
directed to the institution through their reputations for interest in interdisciplinary work.
In the follow-up to the previous speaker’s story, he recounts being recommended to the
institution by a junior colleague, concomitantly confirming his original interest in RGI:
…one of my post-docs saw [the position advertisement], and came in and
said, “you really ought to apply for this position. This is exactly what you
are.” That’s when I sort of felt, “well, maybe I should.” And so I did. It’s
the only position I applied for. I wasn’t really looking at the time. [RGI]
agreed, by the way, obviously. (laughs)
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In another case, a faculty member is recommended by a department chair familiar
with her desire to combine her interest in both the bio-tech industry and high quality
graduate level teaching. Another faculty member is referred to an RGI faculty member
for an open position there after failing to get a job offer at a traditional department at one
of RGI’s consortium partner schools. In each case, faculty who gain a reputation for
innovative or entrepreneurial work, or an interdisciplinary approach, are encouraged to
apply, most often by people who are not directly connected to the institute, but have
heard of its unique mission.
In addition to the themes of the perfect fit and interdisciplinarity, the theme of an
entrepreneurial higher education institution drives respondents’ perceptions of the
makeup of the founding cohort of RGI faculty. To participants, the institution has
concentrated on attracting and selecting founding faculty members and administrators of
the institution who are former entrepreneurs and have had some direct experience in the
bio-tech industry. Although they do not perceive the institution as having been as
successful in this regard as they had envisioned, this shared expectation that faculty ought
to have an entrepreneurial perspective on science and higher education has a powerful
effect on participants’ impressions of faculty identity within the institution. Even faculty
members who have never started up companies from their research aspire to someday
commercialize their research. They pay close attention to their colleagues who have had
this experience, and draw from their experience when they can. Often within the context
of interviews, faculty respondents describe teaming with faculty who had entrepreneurial
experience in order to gain insight into the process or industry contacts.
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Immediately following their recruitment into this entrepreneurial community,
faculty identity is linked to institutional identity through socialization. Subsequent
interactions and initiatives are shaped around the theme of entrepreneurism, especially
entrepreneurism involving the bio-tech industry. Faculty and administrators describe
having received messages upon entering the institution that their success is tied to their
relationships with the bio-tech industry and their insider understanding of that industry.
For example, the theme of close partnership and interdependency with the bio-tech
industry translates into the sense among faculty that their individual and collective
success at the institution is dependent upon establishing relationships within that industry.
In response to a question about the institution’s benchmarks of success, respondents
almost unanimously equate institutional success with closer relationships with the bio-
tech industry that will result in jobs for RGI’s graduates, research and spin-off
opportunities for its faculty, and internships for its students. One faculty member’s
comment is typical, in which she measures RGI’s success against the benchmark of,
“whether or not the word is getting out, whether or not people…in the industry are hiring
our graduates, whether or not they’re willing to take our interns…whether or not they’re
willing to support a Team Master’s Project.” “…Our well being is tied to that sector,”
says another faculty member. “It’s one of the most cyclical businesses on the planet.
When it’s on the up swing, it’s easy to make the students happy. In [RGI’s] second year,
bio-science is a harder industry. There are not a lot of alternatives for our students.” In
both cases, embedded within an institution lacking significant endowment, state funding,
or track record of research funding, faculty respondents must rely on the immediate
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success of their few graduates in a single industry as their benchmark of initial success.
Lacking an alumni network, faculty perceive that their graduating students are dependent
on their developing relationships with the bio-tech industry for their first jobs, while
faculty are hopeful that these graduates will form the nucleus of an alumni network for
the institution. Their perception of the bio-tech industry as dominated by start-up and
spin-off businesses impels faculty to work even more closely with contacts in bio-tech in
order to keep up with rapid changes in the industry.
Faculty members at RGI share the perception of having been chosen for their
support for entrepreneurism and interdisciplinarity. Their collective understanding of the
institution’s identity has a sustained effect on research choices. At the heart of RGI’s
mission to fuse entrepreneurism with scientific discovery and instruction, the collective
drive to commercialize science translates into an emphasis in research on the pragmatic
and application over the theoretical. Faculty’s shared understanding of RGI’s institutional
identity links to their specific actions by shaping and creating boundaries for their
research pursuits. A faculty respondent describes this emphasis, asserting:
I think we really focused a lot more on the applied sciences, I would say,
than other universities. So we always put ourselves in a situation and try to
answer what my research will impact life in a real way, you know. Sowe
have bio-engineering faculty, someone like myself, [other founding
faculty], we’re all focusing on drug discoveries, or some kind
of…developing new diagnostic tools and things like that. So you have a
very strong focus on application, much stronger than in industry.

This perspective does more than just shape the way that they perceive the science.
It directs and guides their gaze toward more applicable, marketable pursuits. An example
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of this theme of commercialization can be seen when a respondent describes how the bio-
tech industry impacts his work:
You keep in mind that the bio-sciences industry is, in one sense, one of the
key motivating factors for us. It’s important to understand that what that
really means is not “whatever the bio-sciences industry does is good”
(laughs), but rather that we believe that for the life sciences to impact
society in a positive way, the only way that that can happen, in this
country anyway, is that you get the science [to] turn out, generate products
and services for society. And the way that is done is through
commercialization. There really isn’t any other way. Now there’s a lot of
corollaries to that: government funding, government programs, but,
ultimately, products and services come from the commercial sector, so the
life sciences industry is in some way the ultimate vehicle for impacting
society through the sciences.

To this faculty member, if the aim of the institution is to create research that can
have an immediate practical impact on society, then faculty should pursue research
agendas that can yield findings that are likely to be quickly commercialized so that
society can quickly realize the benefits of that research.
In the choices that they describe making in constructing their own research
agendas, faculty show how institutional identity is translated into their day-to-day
actions. Although one faculty member at the institution does work on more theoretical
aspects of the science, most describe RGI’s focus as much more practical and directed
toward application than other institutions. By extension, their descriptions of their own
identities seem wrapped in their descriptions of the identity of the institution. Like their
self descriptions, they describe RGI as a maverick institution that pursues entrepreneurial,
interdisciplinary, commerciable research and education, in opposition to that pursued at
conventional higher education institutions. All three of these descriptions of RGI’s
mission with regard to research — entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary, commercializable
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— can be applied to faculty’s own research agendas within RGI, as the institutional
identity plays a powerful role in creating parameters for faculty work.
The function that socialization plays in strategy can also be seen in the way that
becoming a part of the institutional identity is linked to the antithesis construct. The
theme of establishing a legacy in the context of the antithesis construct amplifies that
function. Faculty and administrators see their work as founders to be intrinsically linked
with the future of higher education and the struggle against conventional higher
education. The critical role of the founding staff cohort in establishing the initial culture
is taken neither lightly nor unconsciously. Faculty and administrator respondents often
articulate awareness of their personal responsibility, as the founding cohort of the
institution, for the present and future of the organization. This burden prods individuals to
take more risks, collaborate more closely with industry, and act more competitively in
order to establish the institution’s niche within the higher education market, relative to
conventional higher education.
Recalling his initial conversation with another founding faculty member before
joining the institution, a faculty member remembers that RGI represents being “provided
with, in some ways, a blank slate to do this general thing, and [the other faculty member]
said that I’d have the opportunity to create something from whole cloth that had already
been funded; a really, really great opportunity.” Another founding faculty member
remembers the early days of RGI as, “exciting, because it was new, and it was a chance
to really do something very interesting, novel, and useful that had never been done
before. That’s marvelous. That’s a huge, exciting opportunity.” The thrilling note of
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infinite opportunity in these respondents’ recollections harmonizes with an undertone of
heavy responsibility to posterity, which is sounded more explicitly in another faculty
member’s response that, “you’re responsible for everything from the ground up.”
Likewise, a faculty member refers to:
the feeling that biotechnology and the biomedical world, applied life
sciences, this is going to be…a huge part of our future. It's a huge
responsibility. I think that we can easily botch it, but this has such huge
ramifications on the next fifty to one hundred years or beyond, that this is
at the cusp of something really new and exciting.

This faculty participant senses that his work at RGI is likely to have a far-reaching
effect, not only on the future of this institution, but also on higher education in general.
This sense of the burden of responsibility for the future is often expressed as high
expectations for oneself or others, or a sense of anxiety about oneself to uphold the image
of the institution. A faculty member articulates this individual responsibility, declaring,
“…this whole program…is catered toward students who are going to work in industry,
and as the industry changes, we have to be innovative. And [RGI] understands that. If
not, it’s our responsibility to make them understand it.” In some ways the RGI project
seems to supersede the founding of the institution. For this respondent, the themes of
connection to the bio-tech industry and innovation are internalized, residing within the
individual rather than in the physical institution. Faculty and administrators see
themselves, rather than the institution, as the bearers of these themes of entrepreneurism
and interdisciplinarity. A typical exchange exemplifies many faculty members’
perspectives on their own responsibility for establishing an entrepreneurial culture at
RGI:
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Respondent: People here are not as entrepreneurial/collaborative as I
would like.
Researcher: Do you mean that this institution is not entrepreneurial and
collaborative, that the reputation and identity is misplaced?
Respondent: No, this institution is by far the most entrepreneurial and
collaborative place I have ever seen, but nevertheless we could/should be
doing a lot better in this area

As an example of this exchange, a faculty member warns,
…as the school is getting bigger, that aspect has the danger of…getting
more modular. Although we don’t have departments, there are tendencies
that are forming, isolated groups, but that is something that we need to be
very careful about, and I would expect that these things would have to be
weighed seriously by the administration.

Later in the interview, the following exchange occurs:
Researcher: So interdisciplinarity and collaboration happen just as much at
other institutions, but it’s just more noticeable here?
Respondent: I don’t think it happens more often than this. You’d never see
an example, in my limited experience, where a management faculty teams
together with a scientist and wrote a research grant, which I’ve done with
one of the management faculty, and it was very simple.

This dialogue typifies most faculty criticism of the institution on entrepreneurial
or interdisciplinary grounds. The respondent expresses dissatisfaction with the pace of the
institution in this respect. Upon reiteration of the point, the respondent clarifies that RGI
is far superior in comparison to a conventional institution. The comment seems to be
offered less as censure of the institution and more as a comparison of the organization’s
progress with where the respondent, as the bearer of the institutional vision, expected the
institution to be at this point.
Eventually, faculty describes transitioning into the role of gatekeepers as they
attempt to perpetuate the developing culture of the institution through their own
participation in the hiring, recruitment, and socialization of new faculty. Internal players
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begin to take on a policing role to find the right kind of faculty and staff to fit into the
unique mission of the institution. One faculty member’s account of his experience in
RGI’s recruitment and hiring process exemplifies this role. The respondent relates:
we had a faculty here…who was…helping teach students how to take a
start-up from an idea and actually get it funded and do everything that
went with that. And he was looking for a job and he was considering
working here, and he was actually a little bit of a quirky personality, and
although he did great work, I think we were all kind of leery how in such a
small environment would we all be able to work with him…He was
talking to me about [research university], and I’m from [research
university]. That’s where I got my Ph.D., and he didn’t realize I was from
[research university]. And he was talking to me, and I was meeting him
and just feeling him out, and I think he’s a really bright guy and very
successful what he did, but I could see him being a little difficult to work
with, which kind of worried us, because we’re so small. And he’s like,
“well, do you know that [research university] is third in entrepreneurship
in the country?” Ranked by…I don’t know who it’s ranked by. Third in
entrepreneurship! And I kind of laughed and…I looked at him, and I was
like, “…I was at [research university]. I was a graduate student. My
advisor’s dream was always to have his own company, or start something.
He would love to have a dual role as an academic and start a company.

In this account, the speaker is sharing two things about RGI. First, he is pointing
out that, compared to the level of support at RGI, the ability for a faculty member to start
up a company from one’s own research remains elusive, even at a traditional research
university that is renowned for its support for entrepreneurism. Second, he demonstrates
the establishment of the new institution’s standards concerning faculty. To the speaker,
new faculty should have a personality that holds up to the close, intense relationships that
are built in a small, developing institution. More importantly, participants’ expectations
for a supportive entrepreneurial environment should be placed far above even the best
that traditional higher education institutions have to offer.
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In my discussion of strategy at RGI up to this point, I have focused on how RGI
faculty and administrators participate in the establishment of institutional identity through
their selection and socialization into a shared institutional identity. Strategy also involves
linking the establishment of institutional identity and the actions of institutional
participants through the granting and withholding of institutional resources. The renewal
of employment contracts provides a specific example of how a process can structurally
connect the day-to-day actions of participants with the mission and identity of the
institution. To respondents, the contract renewal system of faculty employment at RGI
gives all faculty members an immediate influence on how the shared idea of the
institution is expressed through their input through the outcome of hires and contract
extensions. One respondent, in comparing the values that drive the tenure process at his
former institution with those at RGI, sketches this portrait of the two:
I think the real differences are what is expected of you in terms of getting
tenure. And I think [former research institution] is cutting edge in terms
of, yeah, they want to get that IP, they want to get the money, they want to
get incubators, and they want to be close to industry, but the amount of
consulting or the amount of people actually dealing with industry, the
percent is much lower than it is here. It’s not even close…At the end of
the day when you do tenure…it’s going to be how many grants you pull in
by yourself. That’s the strong message. How many grants did you pull in
by yourself and how many articles did you write where you’re the primary
author? Those are the 99.9% of what you need for tenure. And starting a
company…things like that, the impression I get talking to people there,
and when I was here, is still not, “okay, you started your own company?
Okay we’re going to give you tenure.”
Researcher: It doesn’t happen?
No, nowhere near that. You’d be woofing up the wrong tree, man!
(Laughs). It’s not going to happen! Now, here, if I do a good job at
teaching and I actually can start, have a start-up company, and that start-up
company looks…extremely promising, people here will be extremely
pleased. I mean, it’s not (laughs), it’s not even a debate. This is something
that’s considered really worthwhile.
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Here, this faculty member states rather unequivocally that actual engagement with
the bio-tech industry such as industry consulting and entrepreneurial behavior, or starting
up a new business, will result in direct rewards at RGI, in this case in contract extension.
The convergence of institutional identity and institutional strategy are captured in
the synergy between the organization’s status as both a spin-off of the larger consortium
and a source of start-ups and spin-offs. Chief among this strategy is the availability of
resources to support innovation and entrepreneurism. Respondents describe receiving
generally unrestricted funding for activities that are directed toward supporting
entrepreneurism and innovation in research and teaching. In a departure from other
research institutions, RGI provides assistance to faculty to spin off new corporations from
intellectual properties that have been developed at RGI, so far resulting in two start-up
companies. One respondent tells of the skepticism he felt when he initially explored
RGI’s support for entrepreneurial research, wondering to himself:
So am I going to be doing any real research here or not? And then you dig
deeper and then you find out…these guys actually not only want you to do
research, but they're keen on you working closely with industry. They'd
love it if you start your own spin-off company, make your own patents.
They let you have the rights to what those patents are…in terms of
determining what happens to those patents. You own that right.

This faculty member continues his account by describing his doctoral faculty
advisor’s reaction to the support for entrepreneurism at RGI. He says, “my advisor is just
totally like, ‘wow,’ because he still always has this dream of starting a company and it
doesn’t ever happen.”
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The structural and cultural support, that has been built into RGI, seems to have a
significant effect on the founding faculty and administrators’ perspectives on the
institution. However, core to the approach to strategy in this study has been the
connection between the identity of the institution and the institution’s use — and
distribution — of resources. In the final step of the central narrative of integrating
identity creation and resource allocation, the institution establishes policies and
procedures to more concretely link its entrepreneurial identity with the distribution of
resources. The way that faculty describe their start-up packages to create their labs
provides one illustration of how resources are directed to support the institution’s identity
as an entrepreneurial research institution. Faculty describes RGI’s approach to
establishing their labs as generous when compared to conventional higher education
research institutions. A faculty speaker describes RGI and it’s approach to supporting
innovation with resources, as “a place where [the institution gives him the message]
‘here’s all the tools you need to start something new…You need to spend that much
money. We’re going to invest in our research program. Let’s get everything.’” Although
this faculty member has had to personally oversee the construction and furnishing of his
lab prior to being able to conduct his research, there is a tradeoff in receiving what he
sees as almost unlimited support to create the best, most advanced lab possible.
In the creation of the original labs that subsequent faculty will eventually use as
shared institutional resources, there is a clear sense among founding faculty that the
limitations on the lavishness of their appointments might be found only on the
imaginations and time of the faculty themselves. These respondents describe RGI’s
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commitment to their research as going beyond just the establishment of initial facilities.
In a start-up organization in which resources are understandably scarce, the institution
has allocated support staff to assist faculty with research applications. Faculty
respondents are especially attentive to the assistance that the institution provides to free
up their time to spend in laboratory and classroom activities.
Tying institutional resources to the institutional identity is not limited to the
research side of the institution. When asked about the institution’s support for innovation
in their teaching and curriculum development, both faculty and administrators respond by
describing a generous pool of funding to bring external experts to speak to students on
topics that do not have a local expert represented among RGI’s faculty. One faculty
member describes the pool as:
…a budget for each of the main science parts of our curriculum —
bioengineering, bioinformatics or computational biology, biological
assistance — they each have an annual budget and we can actually use
those funds to bring in external speakers. If the curriculum involves labs,
and the students are going to do a lab project, they have some funds to
order the specific types of things that the students might need on a specific
lab, so from that point of view the resources are available, and they have
very good computer infrastructure for doing computational biology…

Another faculty respondent supports this perspective, stating:
They provide…resources to bring in. They don’t assume that when I’m
teaching a class I should know everything. If it’s relevant. I’m not a
lawyer, so one of the really important things in teaching technology
strategy is dealing with patents and intellectual property so…we have
resources to bring in an expert and pay him a lot of money to come and
spend six hours with the students, and things like that. So resources to
make sure that that set of things happen, in terms of the curriculum.

A word of clarification is required here. In each of these accounts, the respondent
refers to readily available resources to bring in expertise to address specific topics that the
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instructor finds are needed for students. However, the use of resources described by these
respondents do not seem to be the creative, exceptional approach to the support of
entrepreneurism, interdisciplinarity, and innovation that one might expect, given the
careful attention that has been given to the organization’s structural support, and the
selection and socialization of the founding faculty. One might expect that this
environment that supports creativity and innovation in organizational development would
give birth to more unique forms to materially support entrepreneurism and
interdisciplinarity in the institution. For example, another way of looking at respondents’
descriptions of RGI’s support for building its new facilities is that building state of the art
research facilities tends to be universally at the top of any science and technology deans’
wish lists, so this aspect of the institution might not be considered especially unique or
innovative. One could easily argue that attention to high quality research facilities is a
“hygiene” issue that is not especially innovative or singular among top research
institutions. However, what is important here is that faculty and administrators perceive
RGI’s actions in this regard as unstinting, and that their understanding is that these
institutional resources are tied to the institutional identity.
My discussion of strategy so far has described a central narrative in which RGI
links identity with the use and distribution of resources. This is done through the
recruitment, selection, and socialization of faculty, and later through the allocation of
resources that support activities in support of the institution’s identity. In both cases the
institution’s strategy promotes actions that are seen as entrepreneurial — perceived by
participants as supportive of competition, risk taking, and innovation. RGI further
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integrates its identity as an entrepreneurial organization with the internal distribution of
resources through what respondents see as the pursuit of a customer service approach to
its stakeholders. Most respondents see students as the only source of immediate income
in a competitive market, the institutions primary “customers.” Faculty and administrators
at RGI directly correlate the success of the new institution with the success of its students
in their internships and eventual jobs in the bio-tech industry. Consequently, respondents
characterize the institution as continually focused on augmenting the value that students
receive from their affiliation with RGI. To them, all of this focus on increasing value to
students translates into responsiveness, both to students and to voices from the bio-tech
industry regarding student issues that affect the perception of the quality of its graduates.
The outcome to respondents is the perception that consistent attention is being paid to
improving student experiences and satisfaction. Within the context of professional
education, students are described as the “customer,” but they are also described as the
“product” of the “venture.” Consequently, within this narrative, “opportunities and
threats” to the quality of that student experience are quickly addressed. A founding
administrator explains this rationale:
…if you’re going to be in a school where the primary degree program is a
professional degree, the teaching’s got to be important. Now, that’s true of
MBA schools, it’s true of law schools. It should be true here. And, frankly,
we just failed to renew, decided not to renew, the contract of somebody.
He does a pretty good job of research, but he’s a god-awful teacher. And I
think that’s the right thing. He was pretty surprised. So were some of the
other faculty, they were surprised, but I think that’s the right thing to do.

Here, when forced to choose between the two, the speaker places the priority of
the new institution with its teaching mission, even above its research mission. He also
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makes an important connection in this passage made by several other respondents in the
study between RGI and other institutions offering professional education like business
and law schools, which gain status from the practical accomplishments of their alumni, as
much as from the research productivity of their faculty. A faculty member echoes this
perspective on the professional school status of RGI:
I think we tend to be really, really receptive to feedback from the bio-
sciences industry on how useful our students have found the curriculum.
One of the discussions we’ve had recently is: who are our customers?
…Our customers are probably applicants to the program…Obviously it’s a
sort of stakeholder system and there are multiple constituencies, and so
forth. But I think at the end of the day if the professional program that
we’re setting up doesn’t work, everything else is pretty much going to
erode, so it pretty much starts there, with me.

Although the speaker identifies potential students as the institution’s primary
customers, rather than current students or the bio-tech industry, the student teaching
mission is seen as existing at the core of the institution. The respondent acknowledges
that RGI has multiple customers, but, as in a professional school, emphasizes that all
other relationships are likely to “erode” if the teaching mission does not meet
expectations. Another administrator, speaking of the importance of the institution’s
relationship with its two boards, places the trustees’ and advisors’ potential influence on
the students’ prospects in the bio-tech industry at the core of the institution’s relationship
with its boards:
…our role vis-à-vis that Advisory Council is very different from what I
think it is in most other places. One of the things I’ve seen when you have
these corporate or industrial advisory councils is really just, they bring
them in, they do this show-and-tell: “here’s how great we are, give us
money.” Well, that’s fine. Don’t get me wrong. I understand my top three
priorities are money, money, and money. But that’s not our
relationship…that’s not our only relationship with those companies. They
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are our customers. And that’s different. They’re the ones who employ our
graduates. And so their input in terms of curriculum, in terms of visibility,
in terms of identification of the value of the degree, and on and on and on,
is really critical.

To this administrator, although trustees and advisors are invaluable for their
fundraising potential, the most important role that they play is as potential employers for
RGI’s students, and for their assistance in improving the students’ educational experience
at RGI.
One faculty member, in describing the differences between RGI and other places
she has worked, emphasizes that:
We’re really open to the student suggestions on how to change courses, or
things, subjects that should be included in their curriculum, things that
maybe could be left out. That’s probably the biggest difference. The
coursework, the curriculum at other institutions seems very rigid, and
faculty seem to really want to follow what’s always been done. And that’s
not the case here. We’re open to trying, “well, let’s try and teach this in a
different way.”

Perhaps as an outcome of the smallness of the institution, team teaching, or RGI’s
start-up status, faculty are perceived by the speaker as especially willing to entertain
student feedback to make formative changes to their courses and to the overall degree
program. To this respondent, faculty are all teaching courses that have only been recently
created, so this tends to make faculty more flexible about tinkering with the elements of
the academic program. Feedback is not generated primarily through informal
conversations with students. Another faculty member catalogs the mechanisms employed
by the institution to solicit feedback from students:
As far as the teaching is concerned, we have a lot of different assessment
tools. We have anonymous questionnaires filled out by the students, we
have a lot of oral feedback within the modules, we have module wrap-up
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sessions where students will give you feedback, students will meet
with…our dean, and give him feedback. As far as the teaching is
concerned, our students are very vocal. And you’ll know as far as whether
something works. As far as the teaching end is concerned, I’m pretty
confident that you'll know if you’re doing a good job or not, because
students will let you know.

Within this speaker’s description, there seems to have been a concerted effort,
through the use of multiple feedback mechanisms, to signal to students that their formal
opinion is welcomed. To these respondents, responsiveness to students is as highly
valued by institutional leadership as responsiveness to the bio-tech industry. In other
accounts, the curriculum and the overall student experience receive the same high level of
feedback as students exit the institution. An administrator describes multiple feedback
mechanisms that the institution uses with students to solicit student input on the overall
experience and its value in their careers:
Another thing that I can mention in that regard is that we interview our
students/alum. We have a graduate interview process wherein our faculty
will interview their former advisees on six-month, one-year, and three-
year intervals. So we get feedback on aspects of the curriculum that are
beneficial: what we should do with the program. We interview them and
ask them these questions, so there’s a feedback mechanism there to make
sure that we’re staying current with the applied life sciences. So feedback
not just from the Advisory Council, but from students.

The achievement of RGI’s graduates in the bio-tech industry, and the feedback
mechanism between students and institution, advisory board and institution, seems to be
where responsiveness to RGI’s primary customers and responsiveness to the industry
come together. Most speakers refer to the formal feedback mechanisms when asked about
responsiveness to the industry, but most also point out that the students would be sure to
provide the feedback informally if the formal mechanisms were not in place. Whether it
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is in response to the intimate scale of the institution, the many opportunities to give
formal feedback, or a characteristic of the student culture of RGI, respondents perceive
students to be especially forthcoming with opinions about the institution. Many
respondents describe students’ eagerness to deliver feedback to faculty and administrators
as unique to RGI. A previous respondent adds to her description of students at RGI:
If you get good students, they give you a run for your money. (laughs).
They're very smart, and so they're dealing with things sort of in this
overall context, so…if you’re teaching them in class, and they’re going to
raise questions, such as, “well that’s all great, but how does that work in
this context?” “Have you thought of the IP challenges,” and “have you
thought of”...and, “what’s the actual market penetration you have with
this?” So you get a totally different perspective.

As RGI has attracted a founding faculty cohort committed to interdisciplinary
work and entrepreneurism, it has attracted a founding class of students who also share
these values. The students form another feedback loop, along with the advisory board, to
hold faculty accountable to their stated intentions. This faculty respondent describes the
difficulty of teaching to students who will shortly take their class experiences to the bio-
tech industry through their internships and Team Master’s Projects. To faculty
respondents, these students aggressively engage with the course subject matter, serving as
living feedback loops for the institution by attempting to apply lessons directly from the
laboratory or lecture hall to the corporation. The combination of a student who is likely to
challenge or question course material that is not up to date and relevant to the bio-tech
industry, and faculty intent to be responsive to this industry creates a strong incentive for
faculty to put work into staying current with the industry. Here, a faculty member
describes her preparation process for teaching:
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As far as the teaching goes, I really try to bring examples from industry
into my courses, which is really different from the way similar courses are
taught at any other institution (laughs), so what’s happening in the
industry really affects my teaching, and what I’m presenting; not the way I
present it, but it does affect, because I have to constantly update my
course, and bring in new things, talk about, you know, if a company fails
in industry, in the tissue engineering industry, why it fails, you know, what
happened, what are the pitfalls in that industry, and what’s going on.

To this respondent, when there is a misfit between the industrial environment and
the classroom, faculty are likely to find that out immediately from their students. Faculty
respondents describe this process as a relationship of mutual learning between the
institution and students. One faculty member describes this relationship:
…having these students here all the time, they’re interested, particularly
the second-year students now are always interested, in what’s going on in
the industry. They’re looking for jobs, internships, so we interact with the
industry an awful lot, and sometimes the students are the sort of
intermediaries who talk to people they’re interested in working with, talk
to people about getting them internships.

To the speaker, arranging an internship or a professional contact for a student is
likely to result in an opportunity or professional contact for the institution or the faculty
member, as well as the intended learning experience for the student. On the heels of these
arranged internships and other developmental experiences in the bio-tech industry,
students are likely to return with more direct familiarity with the industry, further
influencing both their class experiences and their ability — and intent — to play more of
a feedback role for the institution. Another faculty member comments on this feedback
mechanism for the institution:
And of course we have internships for our students in industry every
summer, and then the students come back and give presentations on what
they did, and explain what the company does. So we learn a lot from that.
And then we have in the second year the Team Master’s Projects, which
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are industrially sponsored projects leading to a master’s thesis, a team-
based master’s thesis. So we always have to go out and solicit projects
from industry, and that’s another mechanism in which we learn about what
kinds of things, kinds of problems that industry would like to have solved.
Our students give presentations on their Team Master’s Projects
throughout the year, and then at the end of the year we learn about what
they did, and what was their problem that was solved for that company.
And then contacts are nurtured, and we try to go back to these same
companies for projects every year, and to place interns. So that’s a main
mechanism.

For this faculty member, one of the more important means by which the bio-tech
industry influences his day-to-day work in the classroom and in his research is through
his role supervising Team Master’s Projects. The respondent accentuates the great value
that the institution places on the communication that takes place between individuals
supervising a Team Master’s Project within the corporate environment and the faculty
member working with the team of students who are completing the project. To this
individual respondent, the Team Master’s Project is a primary means of gaining insider
information about the bio-tech industry and responding to its needs.
My discussion of strategy has focused on how organizational identity has been
integrated with the internal use and distribution of resources through three important
initial projects at RGI: 1) the process through which new faculty and administrators have
been recruited and socialized into the culture of the organization; 2) the extent to which
institutional resources and internal procedures have been established to support
innovation and entrepreneurism; and 3) institutional focus on the customer through
attention to students and teaching. In the next section I will describe RGI’s culture.
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Table 1: Entrepreneurial Start-up and Traditional Higher Education Institutions
Function Entrepreneurial
Start-up Institution
Traditional Higher
Education
Institution
Environment Context in which
identity is formed
“Hostile and
competitive”
business
environment
supports
entrepreneurial
behavior
Faculty work in
isolation,
institution’s declared
support for
entrepreneurism and
interdisciplinary
work not matched by
resources or policies
Strategy Integrates identity
creation with
allocation of
resources
Provides the “best of
both worlds” to
faculty struggling to
fit in at traditional
institution; faculty
can combine
interests in teaching,
entrepreneurism, and
interdisciplinary
work
Faculty feel like
“square peg in a
round hole;”
individual success
tied to department’s
and conventional
definitions
Culture Expresses identity
through exercise of
power
Entrepreneurial
business plan
integrates values of
academia and the
“real world;”
support for
flexibility and
creativity
Internal participants
isolated from
business and
management aspects
of the institution; no
understanding of
how individual
efforts are tied to
larger institutional
project
Structure Institutionalizes
identity
Small, informal,
simple, organic,
“face-to-face;”
support for rapid
decision making and
responsiveness to
change
Well-defined
boundaries;
established
institutional interests
discourage
experimentation;
large and
bureaucratic

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RGI’s Culture: Support for Entrepreneurism, and the “Real World”
In this section I move from my original starting point in environment, which
creates a context in which identity can be developed, through strategy, which creates a
site in which identity formation can be integrated with the distribution of power through
resources, to culture. Culture inscribes identity onto the expression of power using the
organization’s values as a template. What is intentional and planned in strategy is
unspoken and apparent in culture. Birnbaum (1988) describes culture as expressing the
values or social ideals and beliefs that the organization’s members come to share. Within
the context of this study, these values or social ideals and beliefs can be understood as the
organization’s identity. Culture is the expression of that identity through the exercise of
power.
Within RGI, institutional identity is expressed through its business plan. Every
organization has a business plan that expresses its mission and the functions it will
perform in order to successfully achieve it. The business plan configures institutional
power around the expression of institutional identity. Covin and Slevin (1991), in their
description of the business plan of an entrepreneurial organization, identify a set of
specific business actions that tend to signify an entrepreneurial organization (Table 2). To
Covin and Slevin, organizations with an entrepreneurial business plan support predicting
industry trends, a focus on high product quality, increased levels of advertising and
promotion, and the high priced segment of the market. Although higher education
institutions differ markedly from their counterparts in business in their goals, products,
and customers, one nevertheless might construct a higher education parallel to Covin and
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Slevin’s picture of an entrepreneurial business plan, providing some insight into RGI’s
entrepreneurial culture.
Table 2: Entrepreneurial Culture in Industry and Higher Education
Entrepreneurial Culture in Industry
(Industry Business Plan)
Entrepreneurial Culture in Higher
Education
(RGI Business Plan)
Predicts industry trends Attention to the bio-tech industry,
especially potential employers
Focus on high product quality Focus on high quality teaching and
research, and responsiveness to students
Increased levels of advertising and
promotion
Focus on enrollment management and
admissions
Focus on the high-priced segment of the
market
Marketing to “risk takers” among both
students and faculty; emphasis on
innovation and high quality over
controlling costs

What would it look like to translate these organizational characteristics from an
entrepreneurial business plan to a higher education context? Covin and Slevin
characterize an entrepreneurial organization as supporting the prediction of industry
trends. Rather than predicting trends within a particular industry, an entrepreneurial
college or university might support predicting trends within the “industry” of higher
education. Covin and Slevin also characterize an entrepreneurial business plan as
focusing on high product quality. An entrepreneurial business plan in higher education
might focus on high quality in the “product” of teaching and research. Given that student
graduates, a primary “product” of higher education, might also be seen as its customer,
predicting trends and supporting high quality product in this industry might also translate
into paying attention to the industry or industries that are likely to hire the institution’s
graduates. Unlike most business organizations, colleges and universities have more than
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one type of “customer,” and more than one type of “product.” In addition to students,
potential students, and employers, higher education institutions have multiple
constituencies. An entrepreneurial business plan that focuses on high product quality
might translate in a higher education institution into increased levels of responsiveness to
all of the organization’s constituencies, as addressed in the previous section.
Covin and Slevin point out that an organization with an entrepreneurial business
plan is characterized by increased advertising and promotion. If one assumes that a
college or university’s customer is its students or potential students, then increased levels
of advertising and promotion might likely translate into a focus on enrollment
management and admissions. Finally, Covin and Slevin characterize an organization with
an entrepreneurial business plan as one focused on the high priced segment of the market.
Not unlike customers in the high priced segment of any market, the students and faculty
who are involved in an entrepreneurial institution are likely to be risk takers and more
interested in high quality and innovation than low cost.
The parallels between Covin and Slevin’s description of an entrepreneurial
business and my translation of those characteristics into the context of an entrepreneurial
college or university can be identified in two cultural themes demonstrated by RGI
participants in interviews. These themes are RGI’s “real world” culture and its support
for flexibility and creativity. To these participants, RGI values the integration between
academic perspectives and business approaches to the management of the institution, the
integration of the values of “academia” and “the real world.” In respondents’ portrayals
of conventional higher education, academic concerns that are internal to the institution,
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such as teaching and research, are generally held distinct from “real world” concerns,
such as the institution’s own financial viability, the status of the employment market for
graduates, or the success or failure of individual businesses in a given industry. One
element that makes the institution distinctive, to these respondents, is that these two
perspectives are joined at RGI. This joining of both perspectives incorporates three
characteristics that Covin and Slevin identify in entrepreneurial organizations: focusing
on industry trends, increased advertising and promotion, and a focus on high product
quality. Within RGI, these characteristics translate into a focus on industry trends in both
the “industry” of higher education and the bio-tech industry, increased advertising and
promotion through the involvement of all staff in the task of enrollment management, and
the involvement of all staff, especially faculty, in RGI’s internal business practices.
In addition to the integration of “real world” and academic perspectives,
respondents describe RGI’s culture as valuing flexibility and creativity, and establishing
the conditions that will allow both to thrive. This value incorporates an institutional
support for innovation, support for high quality in the institution’s outcomes, and
responsiveness to the institution’s many constituencies, especially those who are
interested in high quality and innovation, all of which are also characteristics of
entrepreneurial businesses identified by Covin and Slevin. This section will address both
of these themes. I will expand on the idea of a “real world” strategy through a description
of RGI’s focus on the integration of its business and academic functions. Then I will
describe how smallness and the precariousness of RGI’s financial viability combine to
promote integration between the academic and business aspects of managing RGI. This
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will be followed by an account of how RGI promotes the idea of valuing openness and
creativity as inherently positive and essential to the institution’s continued survival.
Like a small start-up business venture, an entrepreneurial higher education
organization might be characterized by a close connection between the day to day
internal operation of the institution and each actor and the role of each process in the
immediate success of the institution. This organization might be described as inhabiting
the first two stages of the organizational life cycle. In Quinn and Cameron’s (1983)
description of the organizational life cycle, the first stage is characterized by innovation,
creativity, and niche formation; and, a high level of commitment and cohesion in the
second stage. Early in the organizational life cycle, the connection between the financial
world and the academic world translates into tight integration between the higher
education, and financial aspects of the institution in order to involve all members of the
organization in both the academic and business aspects of the institution.
Integration of these worlds starts with choosing faculty who are grounded in both
the business and academic worlds, and establishing social norms within the organization
that support an integrated approach to the management of the institution. As in Covin and
Slevin’s description of entrepreneurial businesses, faculty in an entrepreneurial higher
education institution like RGI might be expected to pay attention to trends in both
markets that have the power to affect such an institution: the competitive market for
students in higher education and the competitive market for jobs in the bio-tech industry.
For this faculty, teaching and research in the bio-tech field might be closely connected to
the “real world” impact of the bio-tech industry on the institution’s success or failure.
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Focusing on high quality product in this context might result in a focus on augmenting
and protecting the value that students would receive from affiliation with the institution.
As discussed in the section on strategy, this focus might translate into responsiveness to
RGI’s student customers and to other institutional partners that can affect student success
in their future careers in the bio-tech industry.
RGI’s “real world” culture is focused on establishing an entrepreneurial
organization through the overall integration of the academic and business aspects of
managing a higher education institution. This real world approach extends from faculty’s
range of discovery in their research agendas to the way that they approach their own
institution, and ultimately extends to the institution’s use of resources. Faculty and
administrators who have had some entrepreneurial or corporate business experience view
the organization like a higher education version of a start-up business, referring to the
institution in terms of its business environment and business plan. A faculty member with
entrepreneurial experience describes RGI’s current status as:
…very analogous to the time when in a startup corporate venture you’d
begin to start looking for your second round of funding. So it’s kind of
like we’re now looking for our second round of funding. While we do
have an endowment, we’ve begun to fall off of our initial budget figures
that we had aimed for, and we’re hoping to turn that around now, and I
think this is very typical of what happens in a startup, entrepreneurial
corporate startup.

A founding administrator and faculty member who also has both corporate and
entrepreneurial experience speaks of having been most attracted to RGI’s status as a start-
up organization. This respondent describes RGI as:
…a really interesting place to fit my personality and interests very well.
But I particularly like the challenge of trying to create something. I think
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my major motivation was in fact that — I think I became convinced that
— it was the kind of thing that was actually needed, that was really going
to be useful, and was therefore a very worthwhile thing to do, based on my
experiences in academia and in industry.

This speaker appreciates being able to apply a start-up entrepreneur approach to a
higher education environment, to generate something new that will have immediate,
direct benefit to the world. Not unlike a researcher who commercializes her findings to
benefit others, he relishes the opportunity to use both his experiences in higher education
and in the bio-tech industry to generate something “useful.”
One important aspect of RGI’s business plan that can be seen in interviews is the
relevance and immediacy of external events with regard to the financial viability of the
institution. For example, most faculty and administrators have a good understanding of
the business side of RGI. They are familiar with the institution’s enrollment, and the
success of the institution’s admissions and outreach efforts at attaining RGI’s enrollment
targets. They also know whether the institution has been successful at attracting donors,
and how successful students and alumni have been in their careers in the bio-tech
industry. Their perception is that even faculty very involved in governance at other
conventional institutions might typically be ignorant of much of this kind of information.
One faculty member, commenting on the differences between the working environment
at RGI and at more traditional institutions, describes it as:
A lot more unpredictable. That’s also, you know, the disadvantage, of
course, is that you don’t know if the institution will survive, in terms of
where’s the money coming from, where the donations are coming from.
We don’t have that alumni base, you know. We can’t get students, enough
students that are willing to pay full tuition. So we have to give tuition
subsidies, and that cuts into the budget. So there are a lot of budgetary
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concerns that I think as a faculty member at a state institution we would be
sort of insulated from, to a large extent, those concerns.

Another faculty respondent goes into more detail on the level of student support versus
full tuition payers in his evaluation of RGI’s success as an institution:
We have had a little bit of a problem achieving our enrollment goals, and
so on. It’s a little bit of a cause for concern, because the projections for
about five years were to bring in about sixty students every year, and
we’ve not been able to really increase our annual…it’s stayed around
thirty, thirty students per year. But that may have to do a little bit with the
state of the economy, and students’ willingness to pay that. I mean, we’re
actually subsidizing the students to a large extent. Eventually, our model,
our financial model calls for bringing in sixty students who are paying
most of their tuition, and this is a kind of professional degree on par with
an MBA, and so on, so it can be very expensive…But in terms of job
placement, we’ve been reasonably successful, so far. And as the economy
improves, hopefully, we’ll have a good track record of finding our
students good jobs.

Both of these respondents project into these quotes a sense of RGI’s financial
precariousness, such as its dependence on student tuition income for its well being,
especially in the use of language like “unpredictable,” discussion of whether the
institution will survive, and discussion of the institution’s inability to achieve its
enrollment goals. The respondents also make clear their perception of the direct
connection between the status of the bio-tech industry itself and the success of the
institution in attracting students. The connection between the success of the bio-tech
industry and that of the institution can be seen in the response of a third faculty member,
who refers to the downturn in admissions in relation to the struggles of the economy in
general, and the bio-tech industry in particular:
As far as student applications there has been a downturn in applications. I
think that we are part of a national phenomenon that is reflected in second-
tier business schools. We had hoped to grow the size of the student body
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every year. The first year we had twenty-eight and the second year we had
thirty students. We are going to go back to thirty students again this year
because of the popularity of this kind of degree. Business has been in a
slump. The biotech sector has been in a slump.

The level of sophistication of most RGI faculty about specific areas of the
institution’s business side can be seen in these respondents’ knowledge of the
institution’s ratio of students who pay full tuition students to students who receive
financial aid subsidies. Their knowledge of RGI’s business affairs can also be seen in
their apparent familiarity with the relationship between the economy and student
applications. One can see in each of these responses the high level of attention that these
faculty members pay to the business aspects of the institution.
Beyond merely individual faculty and staff approaching their institution as
entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial approach to organization building pervades the culture
of RGI. RGI’s environment is unique in that everyone seems personally engaged in the
business aspects of the institution. This aspect of the institution may be rooted in the
small number of people involved in this recently founded institution, or in the frank
discussions about RGI’s business decisions in RGI’s regular public meetings. However,
the start-up status of the organization and the seeming precariousness of the institution's
future are what most likely contribute to the connection of its members to aspects of the
institution that are not solely academic.
The smallness associated with start-up status contributes to an entrepreneurial
environment because it supports a preoccupation among all members of the institution
with institutional viability and one’s individual contribution toward the institution’s
viability. In a small, start-up institution, the impact of each individual actor’s actions is
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magnified, such that small differences between individuals’ productivity are perceived to
potentially threaten the livelihood of all. This is not unexpected, as one respondent,
looking back at her expectations in joining RGI, reflects. She has envisioned being a part
of an institution in which:
My success would be tied to the success of the institute. No barriers — I
could rise to the level of my competence. I started in March. The proposal
was due to the [Reynolds] Foundation by May. The decision from
[Reynolds] would come in June. I asked [another founding administrator]
what would happen if the foundation turned us down. He said if we didn’t
get the gift, “you and I would be out on the street.”

Her recount of this conversation between two people in the early days of the
institution gives a vivid picture of both the precariousness of the institution’s continued
viability and the very personal role that each of the speakers in the conversation plays in
that viability. Just as, to respondents, the small scale magnifies their feelings of individual
responsibility for the institution. It also creates the perception of interdependencies, or
magnifies those interdependencies, that might not be evident at larger, more established
institutions. For example, faculty who specialize in social sciences and business describe
feeling as if they are expected to represent all business faculty members within the
institution and to know about aspects of business literature distant from their own field
specialties. One faculty member in the social sciences illustrates how receiving a grant to
pursue social sciences research subsidizes bio-tech sciences laboratories:
…the big drawback here is that — it’s not a huge thing — this is a science
institute, so the overhead that you have to put into grants is huge. And for
most private type of organizations that give us all of our funds, they want
50% overhead. So if you get a $100,000 grant, 50,000 extra has to be put
in to do whatever, to go to the general fund here. It’s mostly used to
support lab infrastructure primarily. I just need a computer in my office,
and I’d be, you know, whatever, so that’s the difference here.
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This respondent brings up the potential threat to his securing grant funding
because of the necessity of subsidizing expensive science laboratories that he is unlikely
ever to use. Although the faculty member takes this apparent inequity in stride (“this is a
science institute”), the anecdote demonstrates a significant difference between RGI and
larger research institutions. At a larger research institution, social sciences or business
faculty might partially subsidize expensive physical or biological sciences research
facilities through overhead policies, but at most institutions it would be unlikely for those
faculty to regularly see their colleagues using those facilities and collaborating with their
social sciences and business colleagues in teaching and joint research and business
ventures. If expensive equipment goes unused, or costly research ventures do not yield
results that can be brought to market quickly, would this faculty member begin to think
differently about his individual contribution? On the other hand, many of the benefits of
largeness are lost, further magnifying the sense of individual responsibility for the future
of the institution. An administrator remarks on the differences between RGI and his
former institution, a large state research university:
…it’s nice to have that scale where, you know, if one of those disciplines
goes into the doldrums of finance, well, another one will come up. If it’s
not physics it will be math, and if it’s not math it will be life sciences.
Well, we don’t have that luxury. We don’t get to spread that risk — or
cost, expense, or whatever it is — out.

The sense of precariousness and individual responsibility are intense here, as this
respondent illustrates the unforgiving characteristics of RGI’s financial status. With its
singular degree offering and unique mission, RGI lacks the perception of stability that
participants might describe in a larger institution with multiple degree programs that
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might subsidize one another depending on the waxing and waning of the popularity or
profitability of different fields of study. For faculty working in this environment,
smallness means that one can turn only to the efforts of oneself or one’s immediate
neighbors for financial security. Another faculty respondent comments on the immediacy
and openness of this working environment:
You know, it’s a small place, so there’s not much to hide. And we do have
our strengths and weaknesses in different areas. And it’s not much of a
secret, and [the current president is] pretty open, and [the former
president] was before him. You know, there are things we need to work
on, and as long as steps are being taken to work on them in those areas,
what else can you say or do?

Here, the advantages of knowing one’s colleagues, and daily interaction with
one’s interdisciplinary neighbors, are weighed against the necessity of knowing that one
relies on these individuals for one’s future employment and well being. As one
respondent reflects on the evaluation process, “This is a small place, and not a department
of three hundred people, so everyone has an idea about everybody else.”
To respondents, this sense of shared individual responsibility for the future of the
institution translates into the public sphere through the institution’s regular all-
organization meetings and retreats. Unlike conventional universities, described by
respondents as dealing separately with the business and academic aspects of running a
higher education institution — usually by different divisions of the institution —-
respondents describe RGI’s all organization meetings as encompassing an integrated
view of institutional management. A faculty member describes the inclusion of the
business of the institution at these meetings:
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We get regular updates on both the…admissions office in student services,
and from career services. At our faculty meetings, typically, you’ll get a
report from our admissions person on how students have applied so far,
how many have been admitted, what are the enrollment figures. And the
career services person will give us a list of how many students have
already found internships, how many are interviewing, the graduates, how
many have jobs, where these jobs are, and so on…And then from the
admissions office, we also do get regular updates on application figures,
and so on, and comparisons with earlier years, and where we were at this
particular time last year, and the year before, and so on. We always get the
Excel spreadsheets via e-mail to the faculty, from the admissions and
career on placement and the admissions.

To this respondent, the structure of these meetings promotes information sharing
and engagement of all administrators and faculty in the business aspects of the institution.
The development officer also describes making these regular reports on fundraising at the
all RGI meeting. In another depiction of the all RGI meetings, a faculty member focuses
on the inclusive and unscripted nature of these meetings:
Okay, well, number one, as much as you can say about [RGI], [RGI] is a
small place, and you would be amazed how fast information propagates
(laughs), just by the virtue of people talking with one another. You
generally know what’s going on here, unless you’re a little hermit and you
bury yourself in your little hole. And one thing I think is important, and I
hope we maintain it, is that there is quite a bit of all these town meetings,
these all [RGI] meetings. Periodically, we just get everybody into a large
auditorium and we just sort of announce and discuss sort of major
happenings and major issues. And I think that [RGI] has really made a big
effort to include all its stakeholders in decisions, processes, at all levels.

In both of these descriptions of the all RGI meetings, the combination of start-up
status and smallness gives each participant in the organization a clear picture of the
institution’s primary income and outputs on a regular basis.
Regular meetings between institutional leadership and RGI’s two advisory boards,
which are both taken from the bio-tech industry, extend this integrated approach to
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organizational planning. Often, the advisory board members engage in conversations with
RGI leadership about both business and academic decisions. Just as administrators who
are involved in the business aspects of managing the institution make regular reports that
are perceived to be unvarnished on the status of RGI in their areas, they also make similar
reports to the advisory boards. These open, largely unscripted discussions provide
opportunities for the board to give more detailed feedback to the institution about its
direction. Perhaps as a function of the institution’s start-up status or smallness, or as a
function of the unique “insider’s” perspective on their industry that they can bring to the
conversation, the Board of Trustees and the Advisory Council are seen to have a large
degree of day-to-day influence on the management of RGI, especially relative to what
respondents think might be the day-to-day influence of a board on a conventional
institution. When asked how the bio-tech industry affected their day-to-day work in this
institution, almost every respondent turns first to a discussion of the dramatic influence of
their two boards on RGI. Here, an administrator directly involved in placement of
students in jobs and internships describes a typical interaction with the two boards:
I’m encouraged to interface with the Advisory Council, the Board of
Trustees. And I’m encouraged to be very forthright with them about the
challenges that I face, as well as the successes. Very oftentimes, if the
career planning and placement person is brought before the board, it’s to
give a very nice tight report: “thank you very much” and then, you know,
you can leave. But that’s sort of the give and take

This respondent speaks here, not only about the unique experience of a career
placement staff member making regular reports to the university’s Board of Trustees, but
also about having a conversation with them that gives the board more than just a
superficial, misleadingly positive, picture of her work at RGI. She emphasizes how this
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kind of conversation with a board is atypical, compared to her other experiences in this
role at other conventional institutions.
The career placement officer’s comment highlights the generally spontaneous
nature of RGI’s meetings with its boards, which further strengthens the integration
between the business and academic aspects of managing a higher education institution in
its conversations with institutional leadership. The lack of strict boundaries around the
kinds of advice that the board can give at these meetings can be seen in a description that
a senior administrator gives of the kinds of dialogues that he aspires to share with RGI’s
boards at board meetings:
We have a lot of very, very strong interactions with those companies. And
they give advice as well, and they give advice that you need. “You’re
producing the wrong stuff.” Are we training or educating to do the right
things? They say, “yeah, keep it up, don’t lose focus.” That kind of advice,
I think, is crucial. I mean, we’re sitting here at ground level. Our [laughs
and gestures out of his first floor office window] bird’s-eye view looks
onto the grass. They come from a higher level, and they can look at us,
and they’re not here every day, so they can give us that perspective that’s
so important. We get advice. So you have to obviously filter it and think
through where it’s coming from, but it’s very valuable. That advisory
group, the industry Advisory Council, is very critical to our mission.

One can gain a glimpse here of the unscripted nature of institution’s interactions
with the board here. The speaker’s respect for the unique approach to strategy
development that the boards can bring to meetings can be seen in this response. Finally,
the speaker directly links the role of the advisory board to RGI’s mission of
responsiveness to the bio-tech industry. Here, the institution’s interactions with official
representatives from that industry are presented as a critical part of implementing that
mission. Another remark gives a specific example of how this relationship is applied in a
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more “real world” environment. A faculty member describes a specific interaction in
which an Advisory Board member applies his personal experiences with bio-tech
industry start-up corporations to management of a start-up university:
We just had an Advisory Board meeting, and one of the advisors works for
a small start-up company that just made their first product and it looks like
they’re going to be okay. And so he went to us and he said, “so what do
you spend in marketing?” And the amount that we spend in marketing was
almost an order of magnitude less than he thought we should spend,
“because,” he said, “you’re a start-up!” And yet, the way we’re looking at
things, we don’t see it. You know, the amount he thinks we should spend
seems like an astronomical amount, because we’re from an academic, you
know, many of us come from an academic bent…

In this account, the speaker emphasizes how the shortcomings of many of the RGI
founders who have spent most of the careers in academia create synergy with the board
members who bring to their role as advisors a business approach to the management of a
university. Although the board members may be inexperienced in running a conventional
university, they bring their experiences with running a start-up organization to a
conversation about running a start-up university. The board member in the account does
not make clean distinctions between running a start-up business and running a university,
which helps the speaker to identify a potential blind spot in his own approach to the
marketing of the degree program. Elsewhere, in his account of an Advisory Council
meeting, a faculty respondent describes an incident in which the board members disagree
with an action taken by the RGI leadership. The respondent begins by telling the
interviewer how one way that the bio-tech industry affects the institution is through:
…the Advisory Council, which includes a lot of prominent people from
industry, from the life sciences industry…they give us a lot of advice on
things we should continue to do, things we should not do, and so on, and
that advice is heeded by [RGI]…We were recently thinking of offering
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another Master’s [degree in] computational biology, and at the recent
meeting with the Advisory Council and the Trustees, they suggested that
the fact that we had fallen a little bit short in our enrollment numbers…we
shouldn’t try to establish new programs that might compete with the MBS
degree…and we should sort of stay the course, and ride out this period that
may be somewhat low enrollment, but not change our long term goals and
not lower our standards…So we get a lot of advice from our industrial
Advisory Council.

In his account, the respondent shows how the board members have been able to
help organizational leaders to inform an academic decision with a business approach to
institutional management. In this case, the board members have tied an important
academic decision to the fluctuation of the market for graduate degree seekers relative to
the overall bio-tech economy.
So far in this section my description of RGI’s “real world” culture has been
marked by a sense of the institution’s financial precariousness and smallness, and of the
importance of one’s individual efforts for the institution’s continued viability. I have
shown how, to participants, these characteristics combine to integrate the institution’s
academic tasks with its business management tasks, contributing to a business plan that
they describe as entrepreneurial. Another part of RGI’s culture that is seen to contribute
to an entrepreneurial business plan is the institution’s valuing of openness and creativity.
In Covin and Slevin’s discussion of business plans that support entrepreneurism, valuing
openness and creativity is an organizational characteristic that is shared by
entrepreneurial organizations. In interviews, faculty and administrators at RGI identify
the importance of both of these values in the organizational culture, and describe how the
institution structures them as outcomes when constructing the institutional mission and
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choosing faculty who fit that mission. RGI’s valuing of openness and creativity is the
focus of the next part of this chapter.
Openness and creativity are described by respondents as critical to the
institution’s continued survival. Respondents emphasize that innovation and change are
both inherently positive and essential to the RGI’s future survival. Further, they insist that
the traits of collaborativeness, interdisciplinarity, and teamwork are valued for their
ability to promote faculty creativity and synergy. Searching outside of the institution for
sources of innovation is a common theme in interviews, as well as supporting creativity
through flexibility and openness to change.
A common theme in interviews is that innovation and change are inherently
positive and necessary for the future viability of the institution. For example, one
respondent, in his description of curriculum development, takes an approach that is
decidedly centered on the likelihood — and even the desirability — of change:
Well, first of all, many of us who came from industry, we have an idea of
where industry is heading. And that is how we try and organize the
curriculum…and we also try and change our curriculum in a way that our
students do fit in with the needs of the bio-sciences industry. And the same
point, our goal is not to make someone ready for that particular job in a
certain discipline today, but to make him more generalist. Because over a
working lifespan of thirty years, the needs will change.

For graduates entering a new and volatile industry in which value is defined by
innovation, the idea that change is inevitable seems to be common. In this environment,
the ability to predict, manage, and nurture innovation and change is seen here as an
important learning outcome. Another respondent demonstrates the same theme in an
anecdote about wooing an executive to join the Advisory Board:
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We are, first of all, an educational enterprise, and we’d damn well figure
out (laughs) what that industry wants, and how it’s going to change. Just
as business schools have to stay…focused on knowing what the issues are.
The other, you want to be careful you’re not chasing the latest fad. Our job
is education. It’s not training. Let me give you an example. [Large
Western state comprehensive university] has a pretty good program in
regulatory affairs, a master’s program. I remember sitting in a CEO’s
office not too long ago. I was trying to recruit him to our board. And I
remember him saying to me…“why should I hire your folks when I can
hire somebody from the regulatory affairs program at [large Western state
comprehensive university], who is much better trained to be productive
day one on the job?” And my answer to that was you should hire that
person. But you should also hire our person. We educate these people, we
hope, for the long haul. That is, we want them to understand the science,
because the science is going to change. Therefore they’d better be
equipped to continue their own education. So we’re not training. I really
don’t like the word, “training.” That’s not all we do. We educate (laughs).

The distinction that this respondent makes between training and education is
concomitant with the prior respondent’s distinction between preparing for a job and
preparing to be a generalist. The common theme between both statements is the
assumption that change will happen, and the educator has a responsibility to prepare
one’s students for that inevitability. The idea that change and innovation are critical to
continued viability is not limited to RGI in some accounts. To many respondents, there is
the sense that this institution’s founding and future success is connected to the
transformation and continued viability of the larger consortium of colleges. In his account
of the institution’s founding story, one respondent explicitly connects the existence of a
new college in the Defarge Consortium with the consortium’s founding principles:
The idea of a new institution involved with bio-tech was floated. The idea
was that in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century the great science was
chemistry and metals. In the mid-Twentieth Century it was radioactivity.
In the first part of the Twenty-First Century it will be bio-tech. It came
down to the concept of the [DeFarge] Consortium as being designed
around the starting of new institutions, and [DeFarge College] — and I —
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have been big believers in the starting of new institutions… The main
fears fell into three categories. First, the idea that starting something new
takes away from the rest. Now, new institutions historically had not taken
anything away. In fact, they had added to the others. Second, will it be any
good? Will it add to the glory of [DeFarge]? Or will it intellectually not be
the equal of the others? Finally, there was a concern about undergraduates.
Would it take students away from the others? Now, the historical record
showed that new institutions did take away undergraduates from the
others… The same percentage of people who got the bachelor’s degree in
the 1920’s and 1930’s are getting their master’s degree now. So there has
been an escalation of higher education attendance. And competition — it’s
good to have competition…There are benefits to both competition and
cooperation. Competition is part of the program, and historically it has
been extremely successful.

In this respondent’s recollection of the conversation that gave birth to Reynolds
Graduate Institute, the idea that a new institution might add both an innovative approach
to higher education and a beneficial form of competition to the other consortium member
institutions is a core part of the original values of the consortium founders.
Throughout the organization of RGI, collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and
teamwork have all been consciously valued and written into the institutional mission for
their ability to promote creativity and synergy. The financial arrangement that allows
faculty to own their own patents that are created as a result of their collaborative work
with industry is one example. Interdisciplinary team teaching as a founding principle of
the educational mission is another structural way that the value of collaborative work has
been written into the institutional mission. An administrator recalls the process of
beginning the work of creating a curriculum “from scratch”:
One of the things was to design, from the ground up, a new curriculum.
Nobody brought the courses they had taught before and just plunked it into
our curriculum. We were sufficiently innovative in that curriculum that
everybody had the…everybody kind of was pushed off center, if you will,
and that caused us all to be pretty innovative in our teaching.
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A founding faculty member describes this process of team teaching and creating
curriculum with colleagues from multiple disciplines:
We have all these people teaching the other, teaching things together. In
that sense, that's a very stimulating experience. It's very time-consuming
to get that curriculum going, and we continue to refine the curriculum
because of that, because people continue to learn from each other, from
different perspectives, from their different disciplines that they’re brought
up in. I think that actually helps innovation… They begin to get it, the
synthesis of these different approaches and how they can be useful.

Common to both of these accounts of curriculum building and teaching as a
collaborative act is the conscious valuing of teamwork as an inherent good that adds to
the educational experience of both faculty and their students. Consequently, in addition to
formal collaboration and teamwork among interdisciplinary colleagues, informal
interaction is often cited as highly valued for its tendency to lead to more formal
collaboration later. An administrator compliments another administrator for his
effectiveness in supporting informal interaction between faculty members:
I think one of the greatest additions that [this administrator] has brought
here is that he’s a very good catalyst for research. He’s…good at seeing
what Faculty Member A is doing and what Faculty Member B is doing
and saying, “you know, you two ought to get together, because you could
do some things together.” So we really like collaborative research here.
It’s part of our emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and [the administrator] is a
good broker for that kind of stock.

Just as faculty are valued for their ability to enhance the collaborative
environment as colleagues, this administrator is valued for his ability to facilitate
collaboration, which ultimately leads to innovative research later. A faculty respondent
shows how this informal interaction crosses over into research collaboration:
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There’s a lot more opportunity here for research, to interact with people in
fields you might not if you were in a bigger institution. If I was in a bigger
institution I’d be in the department of biochemistry or the department of
microbiology and I would see only other biochemists or microbiologists
all day, five days a week all year round. Here, I’m sort of on my own, so
you’ve got to grow up a little bit. I’m one of only one or two molecular
biologists in the place, but I’m interacting with bioinformatics specialists
and bioengineers all the time instead. So it’s a lot more interdisciplinary,
there’s a lot more …cross fertilization of ideas across these fields. You get
used to talking to these people and seeing what it is they do and how it is
what you do can mesh with them. And it’s just a truism of most fields in
science now that the best stuff is really at the interfaces between fields, not
in any one particular field. You find that out quickly.

Throughout this comment, the speaker makes little distinction between informal
and formal interaction and collaboration. Instead, the speaker transitions smoothly from
one topic to another within the same thought. In his transposition of the idea of more
research opportunities existing at this institution with the idea that there are more
opportunities for informal interdisciplinary interaction, this faculty member strongly
infers that one proceeds from the other.
Despite the premium placed on structured internal innovation and creativity,
searching externally for sources of innovation is also described as a highly valued action.
Although, as has been discussed, participants perceive the institution as expending a large
amount of effort to ensure that innovation is generated internally, they are quick to point
out that their attention is focused on the innovation that is happening in the bio-tech
industry. The theme of “keeping up” with the industry or “staying current” appears often
in respondents’ accounts of their day-to-day work as teachers and researchers, whether
the speaker is referring to keeping up with the large amount of innovation taking place in
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this new industry, or keeping up with the demands of the industry so that RGI’s graduates
can in turn keep up with the industry’s demand for innovative leaders.
Faculty members’ and administrators’ external search for innovation can be
categorized into intense scrutiny of industry news and individuals for trends, attempting
to predict and meet the demands of the bio-tech industry, and learning from direct contact
with individuals from the bio-tech industry. Throughout their work, faculty describe
keeping up with the bio-tech industry as an important part of their innovative practice.
For example, faculty highly value keeping their examples and assignments based on
actual “real world” events and companies. A respondent describes a typical class
assignment in which he is having students perform:
…market research sort of stuff, like different classes, we have them
working on [RGI] lab projects…And that’s real innovative in that the
faculty are happy because they’re getting free technology and market
assessments, and they’re really into it because it saves them tons of time.
The students are really into it because it’s not just some pie in the sky type
of thing, but they’re working on something that’s serious. I think you see
that also in [another faculty member’s] class on business systems, private
entrepreneurship, working on real projects.

Referring back to the “real world” theme, this respondent creates innovation in his
teaching by creating assignments that provide service to faculty members in their current
research projects. Similarly, his colleague gives his students experience with “real
projects.” The interviewee portrays this kind of assignment as more engaging of students
because it is “serious;” it has a positive or negative tangible impact on an actual
individual or firm that is likely known to the student. Another respondent describes how
she tries to join her observations of the bio-tech industry with her classroom experiences
in the creation of her lesson plans:
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You’re sort of striving to bring in a lot of real world relevance: the
seminar speakers that you invite; making a lot of these teaching things as a
pure isolated fact; trying to make mini studies out of them; just putting
things a little bit more in a context. So you’re thinking of, well, I mean,
there’s a lot of cool things you can teach, but what’s really relevant?
What’s really important? What are the things that students are really going
to walk out the door with, and go, “yeah, this really has helped me in
developing my career.”

One begins to see, especially in this speaker’s account, a process of faculty
members struggling to make sense of the industry and attempting to predict trends, as
they attempt to help their students to do the same in their classes.
This process is especially challenging for faculty with conventional academic
training. Reconciling traditional academic cultures with bio-tech and corporate cultures
can be daunting for some faculty. One respondent addresses this issue at length:
…if you want closer ties with industry, if people are going to try and do
some of these things themselves, they’re going to have a better
understanding of the industry…Well, the bottom line is they don’t have
work experience. They’ve gone through school, and they haven’t done all
this. I mean, it’s not their fault. They’ve been driven for publications and
research, and they haven’t been driven to know what the hell industry is.
It’s not their, it’s never been their focus, and it’s never been anything that
was there before…this generation is basically people like myself, and I’m
probably one of the last group who are basically working in a field who
are now converting over to bio-tech. So almost all these people starting
these new bio-tech programs, really most of them aren’t really 100% in
the bio-tech field. Most of them are just, you know, are converts moving
in, which is another issue, which makes it harder for them to really know
what the industry is, or anything because quite frankly they weren’t in it,
they weren’t associated with anything. But now, people are going to be
trained, good or bad, students are going to be trained specifically for these
industries.

To this faculty member, conventional academic training is a liability to gaining a
strong internal understanding of the bio-tech industry. The need to overcome this
impediment becomes a strong incentive to keenly observe developments in this field,
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especially innovation. The sense that faculty are at a disadvantage in their knowledge of
the bio-tech industry is a spur to intensify their scanning outside of the institution for
sources of innovation.
In addition to the need to retroactively achieve insider understanding of the bio-
tech industry, there is an immediate need to anticipate and respond to demands from that
industry. Respondents often describe a feedback loop that goes from responding to
industry feedback, to applying industry feedback to the education of students, to placing
students in the bio-tech industry where they apply that knowledge in their careers, to
responding to feedback from former students on the usefulness of their educational
experiences from the perspective of industry insiders. Throughout, interviewees
consciously elevate the industry perspective on the usefulness of various kinds of
learning experiences in preparing students for success in bio-tech careers. In a passage
about the institution’s Team Master’s Projects, a respondent asserts:
We want this to be a network of our students, our graduates that can feed
back into the curriculum and into the way that we relate to industry. And
the Team Master’s Project is an effective way of keeping them involved.
If some of the companies where the students are working sponsor a TMP
then we see our students are directly working on something that alumni
have fed back to the institute. So this process closes the loop.

“Closing the loop,” then, refers to more than just a series of altruistic gestures, but
to an informational feedback loop in which innovation is created, supported, applied in
“real world” situations, and driven back into the institution. In the operation of this loop,
the most valuable elements of feedback come directly from bio-tech industry “insiders,”
whether they are advisors coming directly from firms in the industry or former students
speaking from their positions within the industry.
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Faculty and administrators are most likely to search for external sources of
innovation through direct contact with representatives from the bio-tech industry. An
administrator remarks on the process of direct contact through the institution’s speaker
series:
we have a very high number of guest speakers…I’d say we have on
average three to five of these every week. That’s a tremendous presence of
industry on campus interacting, and not only do they give presentations;
they have lunch with the students, meet with the president, and then,
depending on their disciplines, they interact with faculty that night to
collaborate…It’s a success story.

Merely having industry representatives in a position to interact informally with
faculty seems to create opportunities for more formal collaborative projects later. Many
respondents refer to joint projects or collaborative programs with industry having been
originally generated from this kind of interaction. A faculty member describes these
common informal interactions:
You know, they say, “well, this is the way we see things in industry.” And
that can help…guide us in how we’re going about our work, whether it be
teaching, or research, or whatever. So their input helps a lot…We may see
these people on a regular basis and talk to them about what’s going on,
and ask them informally, “what would you like to see,” “how can we
collaborate on research,” or, “what would you like to see students
learning?” “What would be useful for you?”

This passage provides a glimpse at what a typical interaction might look like
between an RGI faculty member and an industry representative. Starter questions such as,
“what would you like to see students learning?” might eventually turn into a more
substantial conversation about learning outcomes and the needs of industry. In a similar
vein, a faculty member comments on the evolution of an important industry contact’s
involvement with RGI:
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…a lot of it is informal, just talking to [the provost] or [the
president]…Some of it is more formal. We’ve just been going through a
strategic planning exercise. One of the things we’ve done, [supportive bio-
tech company’s] vice president…she’s great. She came and actually spoke
to the big sort of board meeting where we talked about the strategic
planning things, and has offered to be on our Advisory Board, our
Advisory Committee. She just wanted to be involved in it. It’s great for us,
because she’s a big, huge honcho in the industry. So that’s the most
important thing. Basically, she really had a good time at that informal
thing. She’s more than happy to come and… share. She came and queried
us, like [the vice president’s] just really, really activated by the program.
They’ve been a really big sponsor of both internships and TMP’s over the
years. [The RGI president] invited her out for that thing, and she gave a
great fifty-minute talk about the interface between [RGI] and industry.

This anecdote gives an example of how formal interactions turn into informal
ones, and vice-versa. The industry contact seems to have been brought into an
institutional planning meeting for a rather formal talk, and the informal conversation
connected to that formal talk has brought about yet more formal interactions.
The preceding passage reveals something else about RGI. In the respondent’s
anecdote, a high ranking industry representative, who is still establishing a relationship
with the institution, has been invited to an institutional strategic planning exercise, where,
presumably, she has the opportunity to participate in a candid internal conversation about
RGI. It is likely that she will be exposed to many unfavorable perspectives on the
institution, and her participation in decision making and problem solving will be at least
as valuable as any other participant in the room. So in addition to a story about informal
interaction with representatives from the bio-tech industry, this is an anecdote about
RGI’s willingness to openly engage contacts from the industry in honest dialogue.
Consequently, “openness” appears in many respondents’ descriptions of RGI as an
important cultural theme. Openness may be defined as the willingness of members of
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RGI to engage both internal and external entities in dialogue about internal management
issues. Willingness to share information and engage with external constituencies is just
one aspect of the theme of openness. Respondents also describe openness in terms of:
information sharing within the organization; tolerance for failure; and consideration of
new ideas generated by individuals in the institution.
One aspect of openness that is common in respondents’ descriptions of RGI is
information sharing across all levels of the organization. Respondents characterize RGI’s
culture as informal and collegial. They describe communication between individuals at
every level of the organization as expected and taken for granted. Communicative
openness is an organizational trait that respondents make a point of mentioning in
descriptions of the institution, and consider worth defending. One respondent declares,
“One thing that I think is very important is just to maintain channels of communication
and really keep people engaged.” Another administrator, who supports more
formalization of tasks as part of the organization’s evolutionary process, nevertheless
values maintaining a core of openness in the organizational culture, if not the structure:
…the faculty structure has been flat except for decision making, but I don't
see us breaking off into separate units. That's been one of our strengths.
So, even though, in terms of administrative policy, we've evolved to
traditional structures at the faculty level, we have maintained that flat
structure. That's very important.

Recently hired faculty and staff describe opportunities to participate in
management decisions alongside highly ranked administrators and founding faculty, and
they perceive their unique contributions to be respected. An administrator reflects on her
experiences at RGI:
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It’s been a lot of fun to be a part of real decision making discussions. I've
been in positions where I was looked to for advice regarding foundations,
fundraising, and donors. Here at [RGI], we’re in on the broader
discussions and it’s very satisfying that, you know, your input is respected
and they’ll listen to what you bring to the table

In this passage, an administrator distinguishes her experiences at RGI from others
at conventional institutions where she expects her perspective and opinion would not be
as highly regarded. This quotation is typical, especially of newly hired faculty and
administrators in the study, and administrators lower in the hierarchy, in showing the
sense of pleasant surprise experienced by participants at being valued for their opinions.
To participants, this open flow of communication encourages honest examination
of decisions as they are made, and receptivity to alternative perspectives. A faculty
respondent comments on this free flow of information within the organization:
You know, one thing that I saw was really neat was [the president], for
example — now he’s teaching the finance class — …he did basically the
[RGI] budget as a case study in the finance class. So all of the students are
intimately familiar with the [RGI] budget. This is a very real life example,
but it also enables students to see what’s going on and take some
ownership. They know what’s going on. I mean, they know all the
numbers about [RGI]. I don’t know how many other institutions would do
something like that.

Within the context of this respondent’s anecdote, RGI’s president has very
skillfully used a teaching environment both to help his students to understand a point
about large organization finance, and as an opportunity for the institution to engage an
important constituency in a conversation about RGI’s financial decision making. Just as
in a previous anecdote, in which an RGI leader used an industry leader’s keynote at the
RGI planning retreat to engage her more deeply in institutional decision making, what
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began as a teaching exercise has become a way to involve RGI’s students as “owners” of
the institution.
Along with communicative openness, respondents describe how RGI’s
organizational culture is seen as demonstrating openness to experimentation through its
forgiving approach to failed innovations. A staff respondent illustrates the role of
experimentation in her position, “I have been encouraged to try things, just to try things.
And if they work, great. And if they don’t, there’s no repercussions.” To participants, the
institution’s openness to experimentation takes two forms. First, in their descriptions,
openness to experimentation communicates to respondents that although the institution
assumes that many innovations will fail, even the mistakes add value to the overall
knowledge base of the institution. From this perspective on experimentation, the
institution communicates to participants that individuals and the institution can learn
from mistakes, which will naturally follow experimentation and innovation, along with
the successes. Reflecting on the institution's support for experimentation, the previous
staff member later posits, “… they’d rather have me try and say, ‘that’s not a fit for our
group,’ than not to try at all.”
Second, openness to experimentation can be perceived as another aspect of the
theme of “making things up as they go along.” Along with a commitment to pragmatism
and practicality, making it up as they go along assumes a naive approach to organization
building. In an organization that is making things up as they go along, surprises,
catastrophes, and serendipity are all expected parts of the everyday life of the institution.
A staff respondent recalls the role of the unexpected in the start-up process, “We had
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wonderful plans for a new campus and we had already drawn up plans to show to
prospective donors and then there was all this chaos and resistance.” To this founder,
even the best, most comprehensive plans could not have anticipated what actually
happened in the organization’s start-up phase. A common response to interview questions
is delivered by a founding faculty respondent, who, when queried about the evaluation
process, answered: “this is one of the things I can’t tell you much of how it’s going to
come out because we haven’t done it yet! (laughs).” In the passage, the respondent
decides not to engage in a conversation about the institution’s plans, to discuss national
best practices in evaluation processes, or even to make his own individual predictions of
what is likely to happen. This reaction is a common example of the “making it up as we
go along” perspective. The respondent throws his hands into the air and laughs, as if to
say, “we have made our plans, but anything is likely to happen!” The assumption among
participants is that plans are likely to fail, and the unexpected is the only dependable
occurrence in a start-up organization. A faculty respondent, reflecting on the start-up
phase of the organization, comments on the presence of the unexpected at RGI: “Of
course you have to expect the surprises, right? That's kind of…it’s just part of it. It’s just
a natural part of it.” Within this context, failures are anticipated, and an individual has the
responsibility to learn from mistakes and disasters.
A third aspect of openness described by participants is support for creativity
through giving open-minded consideration to new ideas that are generated from within
the organization. This aspect is grounded in the image of RGI as an institution that seeks
distinctiveness and originality. Participants in such an organization characterize it as one
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that values their ideas, and, furthermore, encourages them to think creatively about
institutional problems and opportunities because of its newness. A faculty member
describes the newness of everything at RGI as an asset that has attracted her to the
institution: “You have a lot of flexibility, but you sort of have to make things up as you
go along. It’s not as if you walk into this well established thing, you know. This is a good
thing.” To this respondent, part of the attraction of RGI is the extemporaneous nature of
day-to-day work in an institution in which everything must be invented. A founding
administrator describes the excitement and uniqueness of the opportunity to create a new
institution “from whole cloth:”
Actually, there are so few precedents for academic startups, that there’s no
real model for doing this. It’s not like a bio-tech company, where you can
say, “well I want to be like such-and-such company,” where such-and-
such company’s history is well known and there are many examples and
things have been tried and shown to be useful or not. Academic startups
being sufficiently rare, occurring at different times in different sectors, it’s
a very, very sparse image, with no real good examples to follow.

To this respondent, since so few higher education start-ups exist in recent
memory, the creativity of each participant is especially valued because of the necessity of
inventing almost everything, without established pathways to determine how this is to be
done. Another administrator involved in fundraising comments further on the link
between having to create everything and institutional support for personal creativity:
I think we’ve had a lot of freedom. Ideas are always welcome. I can’t say
that [university management have] been in my way, because there’s plenty
of ideas, as you can look around and see (laughs, gesturing to piles of
paper organized around the office)! There is plenty to do, and we would be
encouraged, anything, if we could think of a better way to get it out the
door and in front of donors. That would be more than welcome.

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Contrasted with the image of a conventional higher education institution where
good ideas might languish for years before finding a champion and the right timing to be
implemented, this respondent paints a picture of the institution as one in which there is so
much to be accomplished just to start up normal functions that participants must exhibit a
great degree of creativity merely to keep up with the institution’s immediate needs. The
respondent continues:
We’re able to move quicker though, if we have a funding opportunity,
because we’re new and it’s sort of been a clean slate, as we say. We can
take a fresh approach to it. It’s not like moving around an organization that
just is not going to go in…we can think very creatively before we say,
“oh, this prospect isn’t really a good fit.” You can really look at: is this
relationship with this donor get us where we really should be going? I
think that’s really the entrepreneur kind of attitude.

To this respondent, newness also creates some space within which to consider the
future of the institution. If one is continuously inventing original ways of doing things,
founding staff and faculty must also consider that future generations of staff and faculty
are likely to take their cues from the particular choices that are made now. Rather than
hesitating under this responsibility for the future actions of institutional participants,
participants describe this idea as especially empowering. The idea of creative openness
also promotes an image of RGI as a completely new institution where the founders can
create original ways of doing things rather than inheriting processes that are not as suited
to the needs of the existing faculty or students, or the bio-tech industry. A faculty
member describes this aspect of the institution in curriculum development: “Here, you
know, everything is sort of from the beginning, so it’s much more, you know, you can
figure out what’s the best way to run a curriculum and do it.” For this respondent, in the
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absence of an established curriculum, the institution is more open to his ideas on the
subject, allowing him to apply what he considers the best approach.
In the previous section’s discussion of strategy, my focus was on how the two
primary organizational tasks of resolving the complexity of organizational identity and
resolving issues of power and authority are integrated in the articulation of the
organization’s purpose through strategy. In this section, my discussion of culture has
focused on how this organization expresses its identity through its espoused values and
then translates that identity into a unique configuration of power and authority. This
configuration is expressed through a “real world” culture that expresses an
entrepreneurial business plan that integrates both the organization's identity as an
academic institution and its business and management functions. In the next section, I
will turn to the institution’s structure.
Organizational Structure
If strategy integrates the two tasks of establishing identity and configuring power,
and culture is the expression of the institution’s identity, then structure institutionalizes
identity. Structure is the establishment of a unique configuration of power and authority
that supports the institution’s identity, establishing and normalizing that configuration
through self-reinforcing lines of authority. RGI’s structure expresses its institutional
identity as an entrepreneurial, start-up institution through its mirroring of the
entrepreneurial business start-ups that are most common in the bio-tech industry. As in a
start-up business, respondents describe the institution’s structure as supportive of rapid
decision making and responsiveness to change, as well as of intense, non-hierarchical
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relationships between participants. They portray the organization as small, informal,
simple, and organic, and characteristically engaging its participants in face-to-face
relationships.
“Smallness” is a common theme in respondents’ descriptions of RGI’s structure.
The theme of smallness supersedes the institution's geographic boundaries or the relative
number of faculty hired. Smallness has more to do with the sense that respondents have
of an individual’s access to the other members of the organization and involvement in
important institutional decisions. In this way, quick decisions are possible, and the
institution is able to react quickly to a rapidly changing environment, while maintaining a
sense of involvement in those decisions for all of its participants. For many respondents,
smallness translates into an increased ability to act like an entrepreneurial business by
quickly responding to available opportunities. One faculty respondent contrasts RGI’s
structural smallness with that of a conventional academic institution:
If you're in a traditional academic setting you have pretty well-defined
boundaries. You have extremely well-defined boundaries, you have
extremely well-defined revenue streams. You're going to be tuition-driven;
you're going to be endowment-driven, whatever, research-driven. You
basically have well-defined ventures you will work with and then you try
to enhance those. Here, we're much broader, more open. We're not
restricted to..."we're going to get all our money from tuition or we're a
research institution and that's going to be it." We have a much broader
scope and we're looking at…licenses, we're looking at commercial
ventures, at innovating, a developing advancement effort. And being small
really helps you to do that.

Implicit in this faculty member’s understanding of smallness is the absence of
barriers to the pursuit of particular projects that might result in (especially financial)
benefit to the institution. Simply put, a side effect of smallness is that RGI has few
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established income streams that can be threatened by any specific venture that an
entrepreneurial faculty member or administrator might explore. The absence of
institutional financial interests that might be motivated to discourage certain kinds of
institutional ventures is similar to the absence of individual financial interests that might
be threatened. To this respondent, this is another aspect of smallness that supports
exploration of new opportunities. Later, he expounds on this theme:
You don't have the barriers like you have at large state institutions, like
intellectual property…especially at state institutions, they're overbearing,
it's almost,…hard to operate in any kind of entrepreneurial way. Being
small and being entrepreneurial from the start, it just has a very different
culture. The culture is much more accepting of ventures, and much more
willing to experiment and to try different things, and much more willing to
build applied work into the curriculum.

In this respondent’s account of RGI, entrepreneurism and smallness are linked
because both are responsible for a culture that is tolerant of creativity and initiative, both
in launching ventures that might have financial benefit to the institution and
experimenting with teaching and research.
In their descriptions of smallness at RGI, respondents describe it as supporting the
institution’s ability to make quick, inclusive decisions. These decisions rely on personal
relationships built between colleagues, rather than upon the formal structure of the
institution. One administrator describes the effect of smallness on his personal experience
of RGI in his comparison of RGI with his former institution:
You know, I came from one of the biggest universities in the country to a
small startup. And that to me has been just a … It was a great transition …
I know every faculty member, obviously … I know what they are. I know
what they do for science. I know a little bit about their family. And about
them as human beings. And that’s a whole lot more fun. I mean, I was at
[former institution] for fifteen years. There were a huge number of faculty
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I never got around to see or meet or whatever. If we didn’t interact for
some purpose, some meeting, whatever, I had no clue they were around.
Not just faculty or whatever, but entire departments! (laughs). Entire
disciplines! I don’t know if I ever met a professor of philosophy, although
I believe they had them. I’m sure they did, you know? (laughs). Probably a
whole lot of them! But that really does change the dynamic. We really are
all a family. And it makes things easier and more difficult … It certainly
makes it easier because it makes communication not nearly so difficult
and you get feedback much more quickly. You know, if we want to do
something, if we want to change something, we can meet with the faculty
at 2:30 and have a decision at 3:30 and decide what we want to do.

Beyond merely creating a more enjoyable, less isolating working environment for
this senior administrator, smallness accelerates decision-making because there are less
people involved in any given decision, and access to the critical decision makers is
greatly improved. Another administrator echoes this feeling, adding, “I think the most
rewarding thing is I have good access to the faculty. If I need to get something done, I
have plenty of assistance from them.” Although decisions can be made rapidly,
respondents often express their feelings of being involved in every important decision.
Another respondent adds a comment from a faculty perspective on the experience of
smallness within the context of institutional change:
You know, it’s a small place, so there’s not much to hide. And we do have
our strengths and weaknesses in different areas. And it’s not much of a
secret, and [the president is] pretty open, and [the former president] was
before him. You know, there are things we need to work on, and as long as
steps are being taken to work on them in those areas, what else can you
say or do?

To this respondent, smallness creates transparency between institutional
leadership and faculty so that although everyone experiences rapid change, individuals
nevertheless feel engaged and involved in the important decisions of the institution.
Increased access between senior administrators and faculty can go in both directions,
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creating both accountability for the leadership and a sense of involvement and
engagement for faculty.
Smallness allows RGI to act like a start-up entrepreneurial business in terms of its
rapid decision-making and quick responsiveness to change because of participants’
personal engagement with the institution and sense of involvement in institutional
decision-making. When respondents talk about the possibility of institutional growth and
other threats to “smallness,” both literal and subjective, they often speak of their fears of
RGI not being “fun” anymore, or not being as “involved” in the organization. One faculty
respondent reflects on his experience at RGI up to this point, in comparison to that which
he expects of faculty in the future:
…for the most part the people are willing and enjoy participating in those
committees. They help shape the institute, and a lot of us came here
because we could help to shape the future of the institute. I think as we get
bigger, though, some of those issues aren’t present … some of the faculty
that join later aren’t as vested in the entrepreneurial side, and so some of
them view it as a more established institute, where some infrastructure is
expected to be provided to them, and so that logically has to change and
you would expect it to over time. Ten years from now a new faculty
member will view this place as a more established institution and they
won’t expect to be participating in its growth and change … as much.

The engagement with the organization and with institutional decision making that
comes with smallness seems to have been a powerful draw that originally attracted the
founding faculty to work at RGI. Conversely, the prospect of institutional success
through growth both attracts and troubles participants. Growth seems to be an
acknowledged signifier for institutional success, but also represents the decline of the
type of institution that lured these pioneers away from conventional higher education. A
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founding administrator’s comments epitomize this conflicted stance on institutional
growth:
We are doing, I think, pretty well, and reaching financial equilibrium, is
the way I like to put it…but I think the organization, right now, is feeling
some strains of less participation and collaboration among everybody.
Now, part of that is growing up a little bit. I’ve spent some time with small
companies in my life, and as they grow, you inevitably hear people who
lament that the good old days are gone; the good old days when you knew
what everybody was doing. I loved those days. I love them in industry,
and I love them here. But that can’t go on forever. You’ve got to have
delegation, and you’ve got to have confidence in the people to whom
you’re delegating. It isn’t quite as much fun as doing it all yourself, if
you’re an entrepreneur.

This respondent characterizes growth and bureaucratization as necessarily linked,
and the decline of smallness as linked to a decline in engagement. The “good old days”
are characterized as an initial period in the institution of intense engagement with the
organization. Some respondents characterize the passing of these “good old days” as an
inevitable outcome of growth. Others characterize the “good old days” as a critical aspect
of the start-up institution that should be retained. Regardless of whether this aspect of the
culture is temporary, it is credited by most respondents with the success of the institution
thus far of creating interdisciplinarity and responsiveness. A respondent captures both of
these approaches to engagement in her assessment of RGI’s success so far:
We have the budget numbers at the all-[RGI] meeting, and, from that point
of view, and, I think that, as a whole institution, we haven’t quite calcified
to the point where we can’t celebrate, for example, when we have
milestones accomplished. When we went through epic major
[accomplishments], like the…accreditation, or other things where people
really feel like, “yeah, this is something that we’ve accomplished. Let’s
get together and celebrate!” So I think…people really are invested in
[RGI], and people who are here really have made this decision to be a part
of this unusual academic start-up institution, and I think we all have — or
at least I would hope that we all have — a desire to make it work. People
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really are engaged and involved. And, you know, you get very active
discussions (laughs). You know, people won’t hold back with their
opinions. And I hope we maintain a college where this is valued, and we
have a lot of openness.

Here, the respondent captures the sense of a stage passing away in the
organization’s development as RGI moves from smallness and the engagement that
comes with it, to “calcification.” At the same time, she maintains a hope that the
organizational culture can be maintained in which participants can openly share opinions
in public meetings as well as share the credit for the achievements of the institution.
The informal, nonhierarchical relationships between institutional participants are
perhaps what make it possible to maintain their feeling of engagement and involvement,
despite a rapidly changing environment and the constant necessity to quickly respond to
it as an institution. As respondents often say, everyone is involved in everything. This is
perceived as increasing the likelihood of research collaboration for faculty. One faculty
respondent comments on the informal relationships between faculty: “you can’t really
force people to collaborate, and I think if they really wanted to collaborate they would
seek out — it’s a small enough place, you know, we have eighteen faculty — so if you
want to collaborate with someone you go and walk into his office.” Later he goes into
more detail on how these informal research collaborations form at RGI in relation to the
formal organizational structure:
Collaborations tend to be a lot more fluid. They’re project-based rather
than ability-based. You keep having these small groups that get together,
collaborate on a certain paper or teaching project, and then they sort of
disassemble and then you get other groups forming collaboratively. We
have a much more fluid structure.

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To this respondent, the formal structure supports repeated formation and re-
formation of collaborative research relationships. In another example of the relationship
between structure and collaborative work, an administrator explains one of the core
aspects of RGI’s structure: the absence of departments:
We’re one institution, we’re small, we’re a team, and we could start
naming things, but they’d just start laughing at you. So we can sit down
and say, “how do we put a curriculum together that is best for the
students?” We can start at a different level of the discussion. At the large
institutions, they start the discussion by saying, “well we need more
molecular biology.” Well, who’s going to teach that? Who gets credit for
that teaching? Well, do we have enough chemistry? Well, we’re
chemists”…You just have some discussions that really are just mumbo
jumbo that academicians just excel at. Here, we’re faculty, and we sit and
decide that the curriculum needs to be more innovative, so maybe we
should try this on here…it’s on a totally different level and way more
effective and made quicker and much more responsive to [the] real time
needs of the students and our industrial partners.

To this respondent, the absence of departmental loyalties that come between a
decision and what is best for students contributes to a collaborative approach to problem
solving, and eventually to decision making. To this respondent, within the context of
institutional planning, participants’ identities as faculty supersede their identities as
members of a disciplinary community or their position within an institutional hierarchy.
The primary metaphor for making a decision for this respondent is both literally and
figuratively sitting down at a table and deciding through the medium of face-to-face
interactions between colleagues.
Although many respondents do specify the absence of academic departments as
responsible for a vibrant collaborative environment, others characterize that absence as
just one aspect of a simple organizational structure that diminishes structural and
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hierarchical distinctions between organizational participants. From this perspective, an
environment that supports creativity and collaboration stems from an organizational
structure that, by design, minimizes bureaucracy and entrenched interests that might
struggle against responsiveness and change. The founding president credits this simple
organizational structure with his ability to innovate within his leadership role:
We are an open, academic institution. We publish our results. We do the
best we can to transfer technology in places where it can be
commercialized for the benefit of society…In all those ways we’re similar
to every other institution…The difference, of course, is we have very
much less structure and bureaucracy at this place. We’re beginning to have
some bureaucracy, inevitably, but we have a lot, a lot less. As the
president, I probably had — because I was the founder, I guess, I hired
most of the people here — I had a degree of freedom that a president of an
established place doesn’t have. I could get things done, just by the force of
personality, and just by being the entrepreneurial founder. Not because
I’m so goddamned clever, but just because of the, because of the role.

For the founding president, at an institution in which decisions can be made by a
small number of people with little hierarchical difference between them, the result is a
large amount of empowerment for the president to accomplish his vision. To this
respondent, the layers of bureaucracy common to a large, traditional institution are absent
at RGI, although, to him, the prospect of growth will “inevitably” result in a complex
organizational structure, and, hence, more “bureaucracy.” Other, less highly-placed,
members of RGI suggest that the simple organizational structure is responsible for an
entrepreneurial environment that also supports other participants’ individual autonomy.
For example, a faculty member praises the simple institutional structure for freeing up
innovation in her individual teaching:
You’re not dealing with a situation where you’re going to be teaching a
certain course and we’ve taught it in a certain way for fifty years and
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you’re not going to change that. So there’s not any entrenched structures
or given frameworks on the institutional side, and, again, you know, I sort
of like to try a lot of different things in the way that I teach. And, because
I think that in order to enable students to learn you have to give them the
opportunity to learn it in a lot of different ways…So I can say, okay, I
want to have the students this hour here and this hour I want them in the
computer lab, then they come back here, and then they’re going to do this
in the lab...And then again in the teaching it’s nice because you can really
integrate different disciplines. You know, you can see how can you mesh
these together and how can it make sense so that the students can
understand how to put it all together. So I definitely can do a lot more in
terms of my teaching than I could at other institutions.

This respondent identifies “entrenched structures or given frameworks” as
structural forces at work within traditional, established institutions that prevent
innovation in teaching. In her explanation, her idea of innovative teaching and use of the
best pedagogical tools available operate in direct opposition to these structures. Another
faculty member refers more specifically to these “entrenched structures or given
frameworks,” expressing doubt that the level of interdisciplinarity collaboration that he
has found at RGI might be possible in a conventional institution:
…you see these innovative programs coming up, where I'll take this
program in genomics, where I'll take a few biologists here, a physical
chemist here, some computer scientists, and I'll put them in this program.
But still their home departments are, still are traditional departments and
even though these guys are put together…it's hard to meld them because
they're still not resident in that program; they're still residents in their own
departments. But here, they're just melded together without departments.
So organizationally that's a huge difference.

To this respondent, the department structure in conventional institutions pushes
faculty to put loyalty for their “home” departments ahead of the pursuit of
interdisciplinary work, even in innovative programs that are explicitly interdisciplinary.

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Building Entrepreneurism from the Ground Up
I began this chapter with two composite profiles of RGI’s founding faculty,
presenting a picture of two faculty members at different points in their careers who
nevertheless find themselves establishing a unique start-up institution founded with the
intention of creating a scholarly environment that supports entrepreneurial innovation and
interdisciplinary collaboration. Locating this new institution within the context of bio-
tech, an emergent industry dominated by start-up entrepreneurial ventures, contextualizes
the institution’s work within an industrial culture in which entrepreneurism and
innovation are the norm. I constructed a theory of this institution that combines the work
of Birnbaum (1988) and Bolman and Deal (1991) into a unified theory of start-up
organizational development that identifies two primary tasks that organizations seek to
accomplish through each of their component elements: environment, strategy, culture,
and structure. These tasks are: 1) to resolve the complexity of the organization’s identity;
and 2) to resolve issues of power and authority within the organization in support of that
identity.
In the unique case of RGI, the theme of entrepreneurism and interdisciplinarity in
the service of innovation shapes both of these primary tasks. Throughout this chapter, I
have used Covin and Slevin’s (1991) framework of entrepreneurial posture to
demonstrate how a powerful central concept drives the task of resolving the complexity
of identity. Within Covin and Slevin’s framework, entrepreneurial organizations are
characterized by their tendency toward risk taking, acting competitively, and dedication
to innovation. In participants’ depictions of RGI, the institution’s environment, strategy,
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culture, and structure embody RGI’s unique resolution of these two primary
organizational tasks under the guiding theme of entrepreneurism. Environment provides
both the supportive soil in which to grow and the foil against which the new organization
pushes in both the establishment of its identity and the configuration of power and
authority. Strategy translates identity into purpose in the establishment of the
organization’s identity, integrating the two tasks of establishing identity and configuring
power and authority so that the organization’s overt functions have a good fit with its
identity. Culture expresses the organization’s identity through its espoused values, and
then translates that identity into its unique configuration of power and authority. Structure
institutionalizes the organization’s unique configuration of power and authority in line
with its espoused values and its overt functions.
Having examined RGI through the prism of entrepreneurism, resolving identity,
and configuring power, in the next chapter I will examine RGI within two additional
contexts: sustainability and privatization. In this way I intend to address the likelihood of
the success of this unique institution, and what its success might imply for higher
education.
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Chapter 5: Privatization’s Promises Kept and Unkept

Introduction
In the previous chapter I discussed Reynolds Graduate Institute’s environment,
strategy, culture, and structure within the context of institutional tasks. I presented a
model of organizational development that could help us to understand a unique institution
like Reynolds Graduate Institute: a start-up research-focused graduate institute offering
one degree program that is organized around promoting entrepreneurism, innovation, and
interdisciplinarity in a specific industry, bio-tech. In this model, organizations
continuously seek to perform two primary tasks: resolving the complexity of institutional
identity and configuring internal manifestations of power with that identity. Having
analyzed how RGI pursues each of these organizational tasks using the theme of
entrepreneurism as a guiding narrative, in this chapter I will address the other side of
entrepreneurism within the context of higher education: privatization, its promises, and
whether Reynolds Graduate Institute fulfills or fails to fulfill those promises.
This chapter will discuss privatization within higher education, the promises of
privatization’s adherents to successfully address the problems of higher education, and
ultimately whether Reynolds Graduate Institute succeeds in this project. The chapter
begins with a discussion of the main promises of privatization, using Ellen Chaffee’s
(1998) work as a starting point. I will address the main benefits that have been attributed
to privatization of rapid internal and external responsiveness, assertive managerial
leadership, and innovative partnerships with industry, and whether they seem to have
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been delivered in the case of RGI. Then I will address the most important benefit
attributed to privatization for higher education institutions of efficiency and financial
sustainability. I will turn to the work of Collis (2001) for a discussion of privatization’s
promises here. I will conclude the chapter with some discussion of the possible
implications of the case of Reynolds Graduate Institute for future research.
Privatization and its Promises
Students of higher education have paid a large amount of attention to
privatization, as both savior and scapegoat for higher education’s more intractable
problems. Perspectives on privatization can be divided into three versions: 1) higher
education institutions that are either run for profit or serve as a educational wing of a for-
profit corporation; 2) nonprofit higher education institutions that outsource part or all of
their operations to for-profit entities; or 3) public or private nonprofit higher education
institutions that adopt a corporate, “customer”-focused approach to education into their
organizational ethos. Reynolds Graduate Institute might be characterized as the latter
variety. In response to charges that higher education has become unresponsive to students
and the public interest, an approach to higher education institutions’ stakeholders that
treats them as “customers” or “beneficiaries” (Chaffee, 1990, Chaffee and Sherr, 1992,
Chaffee, 1998) has been endorsed as a potential way to make higher education
institutions both more responsive and more efficient. Others have lauded corporate
business’ tendency toward innovation in solving organizational and managerial problems,
and pointed out that these concerns are common to both business and higher education
organizations. These innovative managerial strategies have often found their way to
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higher education institutions (Birnbaum, 2000, Benjamin at al, 1993, Buckley and
Hurley, 2001).
In the last chapter, I described Reynolds Graduate Institute’s historical and
political context as one aspect of a hostile and unforgiving environment that might
necessitate increased innovation and entrepreneurism among participants. To many
respondents, RGI’s close relationship with the bio-tech industry and its replacement of
the tenure system with corporate-style renewable contracts firmly categorized the
institution as an example of privatization. Although Reynolds Graduate Institute is a
nonprofit private higher education institution, many aspects of its organization do seem to
place it within the bounds of privatized institutions. Along with the aforementioned
industry relationships and contract employment system, RGI’s core value of
entrepreneurism and goal of commercializing bio-tech research for the benefit of
humankind seem to lend themselves more toward private industry than the public sector.
Ultimately, as the institution continues to reward faculty who initiate corporate
partnerships and consulting, as well as others who start up for-profit firms based on their
research findings, RGI is likely to take on a more privatized flavor.
Private sector approaches to management have been applied within higher
education contexts with the intent to increase both internal and external responsiveness,
empower institutional leadership with a decisive, assertive managerial style, and promote
innovative partnerships with the for-profit sector. Whether this can be attributed to its
structural affiliations with the bio-tech industry or its start-up status, this study’s
participants would argue that Reynolds Graduate Institute represents an improvement in
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internal and external responsiveness over traditional higher education institutions.
External responsiveness to the bio-tech industry has been deliberately designed into
RGI’s structure through heavy participation of industry leaders in both the board of
trustees and the advisory council. RGI faculty and administrators intentionally involve
bio-tech industry leaders in every aspect of organizational planning, such as decisions
about future degree program offerings, institutional accreditation, or the creation of a
strategic plan. Faculty have planned industry responsiveness into the curriculum by
requiring industry-based group projects as the culminating activity for the degree
program, and seeking out real life bio-tech cases and examples in their teaching. The
contract renewal system is also employed to support this responsiveness, rewarding
entrepreneurial work that RGI faculty and administrators believe to be at best tolerated in
conventional institutions, such as consulting work and commercializing research into
corporate ventures.
Internal responsiveness is less of an acknowledged success than external
responsiveness. In interviews, respondents describe internal responsiveness as similarly
maximized, although this seems to have more to do with RGI’s start-up status and the
small size of the organization. In response to the idea that higher education institutions
might be more responsive if they treated stakeholders like “beneficiaries” RGI seems to
show that some beneficiaries are more likely to pay dividends than others, and hence get
more of a priority. RGI faculty get none of the traditional safeguards to their intellectual
freedom or continued employment status, such as tenure or shared governance.
Nevertheless, respondents seem universally eager to work long hours, over and above the
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standard faculty workload of research and teaching, to create new laboratories, develop
new curricula and classes, and to rule on their colleagues’ contract renewals. One
respondent described having made arrangements for a long-term hotel room near to
campus so that he could avoid having to sleep in his lab after so many late night work
sessions. Perhaps it is the initial smallness of a start-up institution that creates this sense
of responsiveness, the idea that one could literally walk into the president’s office to
discuss one’s salary or the size of the neighbor’s lab space. No doubt many do. This “face
to face” culture is likely to be most responsible for internal responsiveness, the idea that
if anyone has the freedom to approach the president directly about a particular problem
then one should also be able to approach any other member of the RGI faculty or staff.
As mentioned in the last chapter, the sense of precariousness that pervades the
institution may explain some of the internal and external responsiveness. The start-up
status of the institution elevates the importance of internal and external relationships. Not
unlike a start-up private sector business, every external contact is critical, and every new
hire is exceptional. Respondents often tell stories of how an unremarkable conversation
in a professional setting ends up attracting a distinguished hire. Others tell of how a
mundane conversation with an industry contact about a student master’s project or a class
presentation results in an important long-term industry champion for the institution.
Again, whether this factor can be attributed to RGI’s privatized status or its start-up status
is in doubt.
Privatization has also been pursued to empower the executive leadership of the
institution, with the intent to reproduce the assertive, decisive managerial style for which
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private sector corporations have been lauded. Members of Reynolds Graduate Institute’s
leadership might certainly describe the leadership environment as empowered. To
respondents, the perceived lack of bureaucracy and ability to make quick decisions that
involve a large number of people are universally mentioned as both an expectation upon
coming to work at RGI, and a positive aspect of each individual’s experience at RGI.
This empowered leadership environment has two elements: one involves the formal
institutional leadership and the other involves the overall participants of the institution.
Members of the institution’s formal leadership describe RGI as especially empowering,
even in comparison to leadership positions that they have held at other traditional
institutions. One respondent describes the ability to use his personal influence to effect
decisions to a greater extent at this institution than at others in which he has held formal
leadership positions. Another formal leader enjoys the simple ability to get everyone
involved in a decision together at short notice to discuss the issue, and presumably to
make the decision. Others involved in formal leadership praise the flexibility to make
decisions quickly and inclusively without being slowed by bureaucratic obstacles or
politics.
Participants who do not hold formal leadership positions also seem to appreciate
the lack of bureaucracy. To these respondents, the freedom to make important decisions
with few established barriers translates into the everyday decisions associated with
founding a campus. Faculty describe feeling empowered to innovate in their teaching, or
to pursue unusual solutions to problems that might not have been considered in a
conventional institution. Administrators describe receiving direct input from a much
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larger variety of institutional members when making decisions. In this way, the
engagement of so many members of the organization with so many aspects of the
organization is believed to generate novel approaches to universal problems. With so
many aspects of the new institution being created “from the ground up,” this sense of
freedom might be attributed to the lack of entrenched investment of organizational
participants in any structures or processes that are currently in place. Participants feel no
sense of legacy inherited from previous participants. On the contrary, RGI’s founding
staff and faculty articulate a deep burden of responsibility for the future of this institution
and perhaps for higher education as a whole. Respondents report having given significant
thought to many processes having to do with the new institution that were taken for
granted at their previous traditional institutions, either because they were part of a long
established way of doing things or because they were handled there “invisibly” by lower
level administrative staff.
Created explicitly to harness the energy of a vibrant industry dominated by start-
up companies and spin-off corporate ventures, and then apply it to a higher education
context, RGI’s founders have placed a high priority on generating innovative partnerships
with industry. These partnerships have been described as one potential source of vitality
in a stagnant higher education industry increasingly in danger of being taken over by
corporate and for-profit providers (Collis, 2001). Partnership with these corporate
providers has been proposed as a way to forestall their further encroachment on the
higher education market, while both increasing responsiveness to employers and
importing innovation to colleges and universities. These partnerships are seen as having
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the potential to marry higher education research with industry entrepreneurism to more
efficiently apply research discoveries to the improvement of human life. Respondents
describe RGI’s culture, structure, and environment as supporting the creation of these
innovative partnerships.
Respondents at RGI describe an enterprising culture that supports these kinds of
partnerships between the institution and the bio-tech industry. Many respondents describe
one institutional goal as preparing students for positions in a bio-tech industry that is
constantly changing. The best way of achieving this is perceived as focusing teaching
experiences on that industry. Faculty report pursuing this goal in their teaching through
means such as the use of real world business cases and creating student learning
experiences such as the Team Master’s Projects that have tangible benefit for the
business as well as curricular merit for the students.
Likewise, RGI’s culture expresses the institution’s valuing of partnerships in
general. Institutional founders have shown their conscious valuing of collaboration and
teamwork by writing both into the mission in order to promote creativity and synergy.
This can be seen in the choice to team teach in all courses, and the focus on building
interdisciplinarity into the institutional culture through the hiring and socialization
process. Faculty describe having been recruited and sought for valuing partnership and
interdisciplinarity, and being specifically asked at the job interview to identify potential
partnerships with current faculty. The exposure to multiple disciplinary perspectives is
described as strengthening both the institution’s ability to prepare students for the
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interdisciplinary culture of the bio-tech industry and faculty’s creative approaches to
research.
RGI’s culture seems to support partnerships that range outside of the immediate
institution. Respondents describe an institutional culture that supports the external search
for innovation, especially in the bio-tech industry. This can be seen in the large amount of
direct contact that faculty and administrators describe having had with individuals in the
bio-tech industry, as advisors, guest speakers, participants in the institutional planning
process, and sponsors of team masters projects. The value that participants have for
external partnerships can also be seen in the theme of staying current with the industry.
Faculty report needing to know the mood of the industry, to “keep up” in order to better
prepare students to enter positions in that industry. Industry contacts are portrayed as
critical for faculty to understand that industry’s expectations for well-prepared graduates.
Similarly, researchers pay close attention to the industry to better understand the
commercialization process and for inspiration for future research directions.
Like its culture, RGI’s structural design supports the creation of innovative
partnerships with industry. Themes that promote internal and external collaboration and
connection, such as smallness, involvement, and informality, have been incorporated into
the design of its organizational structure. The close, intense relationships that this kind of
structure creates among founding faculty and administrators lend themselves to quick,
inclusive decisions that are responsive to both internal and external stakeholders. In an
organization with few members, and little sense of bureaucratic anomie, participants
report a strong sense of internal and external accountability for the individual and
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collective decisions that they make. Similarly, the ability to swiftly organize the other
participants in the organization to make that decision allows RGI to quickly set up
relationships and agreements with external entities.
The inclusion of an organic, simple organizational structure in the institution’s
design template mirrors that of RGI’s private sector models. Not unlike the small,
entrepreneurial start-ups that the institution emulates, RGI’s simple structure encourages
participants to rely on their own initiative and ability to create partnerships and solve
problems. The lack of bureaucratic steps toward winning institutional approval
encourages individual members to view the creation of relationships and agreements with
industry as opportunities and potential solutions to organizational problems, rather than
immediate bureaucratic obstacles.
Similar to its culture and structure, RGI’s environment plays a role in encouraging
the creation of innovative partnerships with industry in order to solve urgent problems
and to keep the organization afloat. An unforgiving business environment for start-ups in
both higher education and the bio-tech industry favors the pursuit of unorthodox
approaches to intractable challenges. RGI is more similar in both culture and structure to
bio-tech start-ups than it is to other established colleges and universities. As a start-up
institution, RGI requires swift decision-making and rapid problem solving. The very
bureaucratic obstacles to creating partnerships that have driven many faculty and
administrators away from conventional institutions to their current positions at RGI are
unlikely to attract those RGI participants to seek relationships and agreements with
traditional colleges and universities, driving them further toward seeking industry
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partnerships. Sharing a similar business context with bio-tech start-ups (start-up, high
risk-high reward, immediate risk of unemployment) creates an affinity between
individuals working in RGI and bio-tech start-ups, such that RGI is likely to pursue
solutions to obstacles through establishing partnerships with industry, rather than through
traditional sources of assistance for colleges and universities. RGI’s controversial status
with other higher education players -- and even with its sister institutions in the
consortium -- strengthens the likelihood that RGI will turn to non-higher education
sources in search of solutions to immediate problems.
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Pursuing Increased Efficiency
One of the claims of privatization’s adherents has been that the application of a
private sector ethos to higher education might improve the sustainability of individual
colleges and universities by enabling savings in efficiency not currently available to
conventionally managed institutions. The promise of higher education privatization is
that colleges and universities might be empowered to pursue cost saving strategies not
currently available within a non-profit management philosophy. Privatization promises
the ability to supersede many written and unwritten rules that may have contributed to
colleges’ and universities’ high operating costs, yet remained relatively unquestioned. For
example, privatized higher education institutions might tie their costs to the consumer
value of their degree programs, varying the cost of different degree programs with
consumer demand, or quickly eliminating degree programs that do not show a profit for
the institution or creating ones that show financial promise.
It may be too early to judge whether RGI is likely to benefit from this aspect of its
privatized status, mainly because RGI’s ability to control its costs is constrained by its
start-up status and small size. Additionally, RGI must continue to operate within the
higher education industry, and cannot avoid being influenced by the norms of other
colleges and universities within the industry, especially positioned within the larger
consortium. For example, respondents refer to professional norms that they use
individually to guide their actions, and respondents report continuing to operate within
professional academic networks. Influencers from outside of the institution may be as
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likely to discourage innovative approaches to efficiency as to encourage it as a negative
example.
The most noticeable move that RGI has pursued to increase efficiency has been
the decision of RGI’s founders to institute a hiring policy involving short-term contracts
rather than the traditional tenure agreements. In this case, privatization seems to promise
the ability to quickly hold accountable and even eliminate unproductive personnel,
freeing up budget for more new contracts with more productive faculty. However, faculty
who are potentially desirable candidates for positions at RGI also exist within a larger
faculty economy heavily influenced by the rest of the higher education industry.
Promising scientists with an understanding of the bio-tech industry, an entrepreneurial
bent, and their own thriving research and consulting practices in bio-tech unfailingly have
a large number of choices with respect to their employment situations. New faculty hires
must be paid competitive salaries that offer an inducement to leave or refuse offers from
more established institutions that offer conventional promises of tenure, shared
governance, endowments, state support, and a recognizable institutional name.
RGI’s ability to pursue efficiencies by taking advantage of price sensitivity faces
similar challenges. Using price sensitivity to gain efficiencies depends on the larger
economy for graduate degrees working in the RGI’s favor, which, as in the market for
faculty candidates, often depends itself on the branding of the institution’s degree
program. In a start-up institution with virtually no name recognition, respondents
complain of the low numbers of students who are willing to pay for full tuition. Although
a privatized institution might conceivably be able to quickly move resources from areas
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of low demand to areas of high demand by rapidly emphasizing and de-emphasizing
degree programs with differing consumer demand, RGI’s singular degree program puts
these kind of efficiencies out of reach. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine how or when
RGI might distract itself from issues of immediate survival to build the capacity to
eventually benefit from these kinds of price sensitivity efficiencies. This is a paradox,
since the very things that make an institution like RGI more successful at responsiveness
also distract attention from long term planning that will make the institution more likely
in the long term to survive. In the last chapter I described RGI’s institutional culture as
heavily geared toward responsiveness. Institutional traits like precariousness, lack of
established ways of doing things, and dependence on students and the industry for
immediate financial survival tend toward an institutional culture that is organized around
meeting immediate needs and responding directly to the demands of proximate
stakeholders. However, institutions that fulfill the promise of privatization to capture
efficiencies must also demonstrate traits that support endowment generation, distribution
of risk among several degree programs, and branching out to several industries to guard
against economic instability in any one industry if they are to eventually reap those
efficiencies.
One insight into the shift from a non-profit to a privatized approach to managing a
higher education institution is that if one promise of privatization is the ability to reduce
or eliminate certain kinds of costs, then one must consider the possibility that the
definition of costs may have changed in this shift. Through a combination of careful
shaping of RGI’s founding faculty and administrators, and intentional affinity with an
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industry dominated by entrepreneurs and start-up ventures, RGI’s internal players
identify themselves more as peers of start-up private sector corporations. Consequently,
in their pursuit of efficient financial management, the “rules” have changed from
attempting to control costs in a large, non-profit higher education institution to doing the
same in a start-up private sector corporation.
Under the guidance of industry representatives, the financial behavior of start-up
corporations in the bio-tech industry differs markedly from start-ups in higher education.
Although proponents of privatization extol the possibility of gaining efficiencies from the
ability to break unspoken rules that create constraints for traditional higher education
institutions, within the new landscape of the private corporate start-up, new rules may
arise to create new constraints. For example, businesses seek profit, tending to gravitate
toward actions that advance that goal, and avoid actions that threaten it. Some
respondents with experience in both the bio-tech industry and higher education point out
increased freedom to choose one’s research projects as a noticeable difference between
higher education and industry work. The image of the iconoclast scholar/scientist seems
one that has both continued value to higher education’s role as truth seeker and
knowledge creator, yet is increasingly at odds with an institutional culture that elevates
faculty ability to collaborate in research and act entrepreneurially. Might future research
directions with little immediate commercial value be explicitly or implicitly discouraged?
Similarly, the ability to quickly pare down an organization’s unproductive work force in
lean financial seasons appears to be one unwritten rule that a privatized institution might
pursue to increase its sustainability, but research may require years of patient effort
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before yielding commercial results. As the institution identifies itself more with the
values of this industry, will the impatience for commerciable results that the market
demands of a for-profit business find its way into the culture of this higher education
institution? These are important questions that bear asking of future studies of this unique
institution. It is unclear whether the shift to a start-up venture culture means that RGI
might eventually reap cost efficiencies that have yet to be gained, or shoulder additional
unanticipated costs, such as insufficient financial resources directed toward marketing,
which was pointed out by an advisory committee member, and then repeated by a
respondent.
Sustainability
The pursuit of financial efficiencies out of reach within a non-profit higher
education management strategy is an attempt to address the larger issue of institutional
sustainability. For a start-up institution that aspires to industry leadership through its
innovative culture and entrepreneurial posture, sustainability also involves maintaining its
many distinctive institutional characteristics – smallness, responsiveness to the bio-tech
industry, and entrepreneurism. This is a unique moment in this institution’s
organizational development; a moment in which its organizational philosophy seems to
be balanced between equal warring forces, as external pressure to gain the resource
advantages of growth is pitted against internal pressure to retain the organizational
advantages of distinctiveness. This debate is mostly acted out through a sustained internal
dialogue about the relative advantages and disadvantages of growth. However, beyond
the single issue of growth, RGI is forced to address the larger issue of institutional
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sustainability, both in terms of its distinctiveness and its day-to-day survival. RGI is
experiencing external pressure to become more like a conventional higher education
institution from a number of directions. RGI’s location in the organizational life cycle,
intense competition from within the higher education industry, the weak financial base
that comes with start-up status, and the less sustainable elements of the individual faculty
experience at RGI all conspire against institutional distinctiveness. The glowing accounts
of RGI’s successes offered by this study’s respondents must be tempered by these unique
and considerable challenges to sustaining the characteristics that make this institution
unique.
Many respondents in this study describe an ongoing debate within the institution
about whether to grow the institution or attempt to maintain its distinctiveness. In many
ways this debate is perceived as tied to RGI’s small size and its start-up outlook. The
struggle between the forces for and against institutional change is often expressed as a
debate surrounding the relative advantages and disadvantages of growth. One respondent
describes internal conversations about organizational identity regarding “what to keep
and what to retain.” Another predicts the next great challenge for the institution as
“whether to define and preserve the organization's core values or let it evolve into what it
does.” Pitted against the strengths of the institution’s distinctive identity and culture that
are strongly tied to its small, intimate scale, are very real challenges tied to small
institutional size, such as the inability to take advantage of economies of scale. For
example, one administrator described the institution’s inability to purchase expensive
equipment as limiting the kinds of research that individual faculty could pursue. The
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respondent described this same equipment as more affordable when several departments
that each had a use for it could share the cost. RGI could not pursue this strategy with its
single degree program. Another example of the disadvantages of small size is the
inability to delegate responsibilities to take advantage of individual specialized skills. I
have quoted an administrator and a faculty member, who regret the time spent doing
administrative work such as ordering laboratory supplies and answering telephones as
time taken away from their research. Weighed against these advantages is the likely
reduction in openness, engagement, and responsiveness that might accompany growth
and bureaucratization.
The issue of growth captures just one aspect of a larger struggle within RGI that
pits immediate issues of institutional survival and institutional growth against the benefits
of RGI’s distinctive culture. Against these material challenges to the sustainability of this
culture, the likelihood of an organizational culture that maintains its responsiveness,
engagement of faculty, and support for entrepreneurism relative to conventional colleges
and universities seems remote. The immediate challenge for RGI is to weigh the benefits
of its distinctive experience for faculty and administrators against other kinds of
organizational development that accompany growth: competition within the higher
education market, challenges to maintain financial solvency, and emerging complaints
about working conditions from individual faculty.
One possible external challenge to the sustainability of RGI’s distinctive culture is
RGI’s possible progression along the organizational life cycle. Quinn and Cameron
(1983), in their review of theories of the organizational life cycle, predict many of the
238

favorable characteristics of RGI’s culture, locating RGI within the start-
up/entrepreneurial stage of the life cycle. To Quinn and Cameron, many of RGI’s
distinctive institutional characteristics, such as smallness, flexibility, immediacy, and
responsiveness to external stakeholders, are predictable aspects of RGI’s stage of
development. From this perspective, the credit for RGI’s unique culture can be given less
to the institutional founders and more to its status as a start-up.
Life cycle theory predicts that start-ups get more conventional and less innovative
as they get larger and the business environment becomes more favorable, eventually
facing pressure to reinvent themselves, possibly through spin-off ventures, mergers or the
purchase of start-ups that might bring innovation into the firm. As organizations progress
past an initial entrepreneurial stage, Quinn and Cameron continue, there is a shift in
emphasis from flexibility and growth toward cohesion, internal process, and efficiency.
Accordingly, the organization’s attention turns internal, and it attempts to strengthen its
stability and rationality by elaborating organizational structure and growing in
organizational complexity.
If the vision of organizational life cycle theory holds for RGI, the likelihood of
maintaining the institution’s unique culture has poor prospects for sustainability. As the
organization experiences further growth, one might expect a decrease in smallness (literal
and psychological), openness, flexibility, external responsiveness, and a shift in focus
from creativity and innovation toward goal setting and productivity. There is some
evidence for this shift already occurring. Respondents with start-up experience point at
239

signs that the institution is already becoming more conventional through the “normal”
process of delegation, efficiency seeking, and growth.
Another external challenge to the sustainability of RGI’s distinctiveness is
competition within the higher education market. Although I have said elsewhere that a
hostile business environment might be given partial credit for creating RGI’s unique
culture by forcing the new institution to be more externally focused and responsive to
both internal and external stakeholders, financial exigencies might ultimately pressure the
institution to pursue strategies that appear to have been successful in other, more
established institutions. This is especially likely when these more established institutions
are pitted in direct competition for faculty, students, and grants with RGI. Some
respondents complain of RGI’s inability to compete directly with either doctoral
programs in the sciences or professional business degree programs because of its unique
degree program that combines elements of both.
Financially, respondents speak of RGI as a risk and an experiment, not failing to
outline its shaky financial base. RGI is neither well capitalized by industry connections
nor especially efficient. There is no strong alumni base, no recognizable name, and a
degree program and mission that are hard to recognize. Nevertheless, for all its
distinctiveness, RGI is not immune to concerns common to the conventional higher
education institutions with which it competes, such as enrollment management and
fundraising. It is not difficult to wonder how much longer RGI can compete directly with
traditional doctoral programs and business schools without adopting some of the
practices and cultural traits that have been successful in those contexts.
240

What may be the greatest challenge to the sustainability of RGI’s distinctive
culture is the factor also most likely to maintain it – the faculty and administrators
currently working at RGI. Founding faculty and administrators have been attracted to
RGI by the institution’s promise of an exciting institutional culture that supports
interdisciplinarity, innovation, and entrepreneurism, as well as the ability to build a new
university from the ground up. Consequently, RGI depends on founding faculty and
administrators – and their successors – to sustain the internal pressure necessary to
defend against sustained external pressure to make RGI more like its established
competitors. However, although faculty and administrators report that RGI has met most
of their expectations, the faculty working conditions that are responsible for this unique
culture may be the least sustainable aspect of RGI. The large amount of ambiguity and
change described as an established part of life at RGI, and the persistent demand overload
that respondents recount in interviews, might conspire to drive exhausted participants
toward more established conventional institutions where they might find more predictable
working conditions with more tolerable expectations.
Although RGI does not seem particularly averse to retooling its practices and
procedures, the scope of institutional practices that are subject to change results in a
certain amount of ambiguity and anxiety that tests the patience and trust of the faculty
and staff. Having recently completed the first set of contract renewal processes, many
faculty members are more interested in talking about the lack of clarity or resolution on
the exact criteria for contract renewal than about the fairness of the recent decisions that
have been made. Disagreements about the exact mix of research and teaching that should
241

be weighed in the contract renewal decision highlights a larger concern of faculty and
administrators with RGI. If RGI continues to maintain its unique blend of responsiveness
to the bio-tech industry and flexibility in its approach to its own practices and procedures,
faculty and administrators might begin to put internal pressure on the institution to
sacrifice some of its distinctiveness in order to gain some measure of predictability. The
irony of faculty attracted to an institution that promises unorthodoxy attempting to put
boundaries around the scope of change at that institution is not lost here. However,
respondents who bring start-up experience to RGI view the process of organizational
stratification and growth beyond the start-up phase as necessary and inevitable.
An issue related to the problem of ambiguity, time crunch or demand overload do
not show signs of alleviation, as one might expect from an institution with such a focused
mission. Unlike more established institutions, the small size of RGI requires a much more
intense level of involvement from all faculty in decision making. Important decisions
continue to be made in committee meetings that many faculty consider to be even more
arduous than in a traditional higher education institution. Although, as I wrote earlier, this
aspect of RGI decision making does seem to encourage a culture of involvement and
mandate a large amount of internal responsiveness on the part of the institution, working
out essential functions like curriculum and personnel policies in committee necessarily
takes place outside of class preparation, research, and pursuit of grants, which also
intensifies faculty service demand. Most respondents can point to specific actions that
have been sacrificed in order to participate in institution building activities that might
have benefited one’s individual professional standing outside of RGI.
242

Furthermore, creating innovative partnerships with industry means putting in the
time to nurture relationships and respond to concerns immediately. It almost goes without
saying that working in a responsive institution means putting time into responding. At
this time, most faculty and administrators at RGI continue to find their way to the
institution from conventional higher education institutions. Lacking direct experience in
start-up ventures or the bio-tech industry, the pressure to establish these contacts only
adds to their sense of demand overload.
It is certain that faculty and administrators at RGI acknowledge that many of the
promises of entrepreneurism, support of innovation, and interdisciplinarity have been
delivered, but there is also an admission that, for some, these promises have come with a
price. Perhaps anxiety from a high degree of demand overload and a large amount of
ambiguity are just a temporary part of the landscape of start-up organizations, one that
these individuals will be able to weather. This study comes too early in the life of the
institution to tell whether the external pressure to become more conventional and the
internal desire for relief will eventually outweigh the advantages of RGI’s distinctive
culture.
Suggested Future Research
This study represents an attempt to generate some understanding of
entrepreneurism, innovation and interdisciplinarity through the lens of a start-up higher
education institution. Future research might address some different aspects of these
issues, or help to test its claims. As this study was done on a higher education institution
under unique circumstances, future studies might be done to shed light on institutions that
243

have different institutional priorities, colleges and universities at different stages in the
life of the institution, or even RGI itself at a different moment in its organizational life.
Other studies might be designed using different methodological assumptions.
Future comparative studies might highlight differences in institutional
commitment or theme. For example, one might explore how entrepreneurism, innovation,
and interdisciplinarity is supported and promoted at colleges and universities that are less
explicitly committed to these ideas. A comparative approach might take a specific theme
in detail, addressing issues of benchmarking of entrepreneurism, innovation, and
interdisciplinary between institutions. This approach might also attempt to explore other
kinds of differences between institutions other than culture, environment, structure, and
strategy that might account for differences in entrepreneurism, innovation, and
interdisciplinarity. For example, different institutions differ in less intentional, planned
ways from one another, such as in their history or their geography, that might account for
these differences.
A study of a more conventional research institution might help to explore the
contention of this study’s respondents that traditional institutions discourage
entrepreneurism, innovation, and interdisciplinarity. A future study might explore the
construct of the “nemesis institution,” intentionally choosing a college or university that
seems to embody that image in orders to gain a sense of the experiences of faculty and
administrators with an inclination toward entrepreneurial, innovative, and
interdisciplinary work. Studies of more conventional institutions might help to determine
which aspects of RGI’s unique circumstances might be responsible for the support for
244

entrepreneurism, innovation, and interdisciplinarity that respondents describe in this
study.
Future studies might also address similar themes of entrepreneurism, innovation,
and interdisciplinarity in an institution at a different stage in the organizational life cycle.
For example, a study of a more established institution that nevertheless has an outspoken
commitment to entrepreneurism might provide some insight into how institutional
commitment to this issue is maintained and promoted within different circumstances.
According to organizational life cycle theorists, as organizations become more
established they prioritize functions other than growth, such as formalization of the
organizational structure, or diversification. Although most other theorists of the
organizational life cycle do not support the conceptual stage as a distinct stage in the life
cycle, an institution that seems to be in Adizes’ (1979) institutional decline and death
stage might generate some insight into institutional support for these issues at the
opposite end of the organizational life cycle. In this stage, an institution must decide
whether to undergo revitalization and radical organizational reinvention or cease to exist.
Exploring these issues at a different life cycle stage might reveal whether some of the
distinctiveness of RGI’s culture might be attributed to its start-up status or to the vision
and planning of the institution’s founders.
This study used the lenses of culture, structure, environment, and strategy to
analyze one institution’s approaches to entrepreneurism, innovation, and
interdisciplinarity. Future studies might use different lenses to show institutional support
for these themes. An analysis of financial investment in support of entrepreneurism or
245

innovation might yield a different picture of how an institution integrates these themes
throughout its operations. Similarly, using a baseline such as financial investment,
founding of ventures, or the assignment of personnel, another study might test the
perception of this study’s respondents by comparing RGI’s commitment of resources to
entrepreneurism to that of another research institution or business school.
One function of this study was to explore issues of entrepreneurism and
innovation in a start-up institution at a specific moment in its history. Future studies
might examine that institution at another moment in its history, either to show how
attitudes toward these issues change over time at RGI or to ask how this institution resists
internal and external pressure to become more like conventional higher education
institutions. Some time has passed since the data collection for this study, and many of
the influential leaders within the organization were eager to have someone to record this
moment in the institution’s development for posterity. If life cycle theory persists in
explanatory power for RGI, the institution might likely enter one or more stage in its
development as its founders begin to accomplish their initial benchmarks for growth and
achieving market niche. The intersection of a given life cycle stage and institutional
support for entrepreneurism and innovation would yield a compelling study of how a
higher education institution persists in promoting these issues throughout the life cycle.
246

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Appendix One: Interview Protocol
I. What attracted you to come to work at [Reynolds] Graduate Institute?
II. What were some of your expectations about working in a newly founded higher
education research organization, and have those changed at all, since you’ve been
here?
III. What are some of the differences and similarities between the entrepreneurial
culture of [Reynolds] Graduate Institute and other higher education institutions or
other organizations , universities or otherwise, at which you've worked?
IV. How does [R].G.I. support innovation in your teaching and research?
V. How are you evaluated? Or how do you know that you’re doing a good job?
VI. How do you know that [R].G.I. is doing a good job, that this organization is
performing optimally?
VII. [R].G.I. has defined its core constituency as the bio-sciences industry. Its stated
mission is to practice leadership in this industry through innovative teaching and
research, and an entrepreneurial culture. How does [R].G.I. stay responsive to the
bio-sciences industry?
VIII. How does the bio-sciences industry affect your day-to-day work at [R].G.I.?

257

Appendix Two: University Park IRB Human Subjects Approval Notice

258

259

Appendix Three: Sample Consent Form

260

261

262

263

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wong, Michael Paul Anthony (author)

Core Title Entrepreneurism from the ground up: entrepreneurism, innovation, and responsiveness in a start-up university

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Education

Degree Conferral Date 2008-05

Publication Date 05/07/2009

Defense Date 01/26/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag biotechnology,entrepreneurism,faculty,graduate education,Higher education,innovation,interdisciplinary,OAI-PMH Harvest,professional education,responsiveness,Science education,start-up

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tierney, William G. (committee chair), Astor, Ron Avi (committee member), Hentschke, Guilbert C. (committee member)

Creator Email michaelpaul.wong@ucr.edu,mpawong1968@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2203

Unique identifier UC153937

Identifier etd-Wong-2650 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-249944 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2203 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Wong-2650.pdf

Dmrecord 249944

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Wong, Michael Paul Anthony

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu