Implement simultaneously opposite strategies when institutions face decline: external entrepreneurship paired with internal stability¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The chapter offers tentative guidelines from the author's research on institutions under conditions of decline. The most effective responses combine aggressive, entrepreneurial, externally oriented strategies aimed at enacting and manipulating the environment with a focus on building and reinforcing strong institutional roots and internal stability. Successful institutions also implemented both deviation-amplifying and deviation-reducing actions, and both adaptive strategies and symbolic strategies, addressing and altering constituency interests simultaneously.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Adequate resources and personnel flexibility to foster four paradoxical kinds of activities simultaneously as well as in sequence

Constraints¶

• The article warns that introducing opposition and contradiction on a haphazard basis will likely produce conflict and anarchy rather than improvement and adaptability

Target Learners¶

• administrators and leaders of colleges and universities facing declining revenues or enrollments

Target Learning Goals¶

• institutional turnaround, adaptation, and maintenance of excellence

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Cameron, Kim. (1984). The Paradox in Institutional Renewal. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED257351