Archetypes of organizational actorhood in multiple competitions
基于13个国家33个案例的质性元研究，提出大学在应对多重竞争时形成的三种组织行动者原型：适应型、协调型和共建型，挑战了单一最佳模式的假设。
As competition in the higher education system has intensified at multiple levels, universities have undergone significant transformations, evolving into organizational actors. This paper contributes to university actorhood research by zooming in at the meso-organizational level of analysis: We develop an empirically grounded framework that shows how new archetypes of organizational actorhood emerge when universities organize their responses to multiple competitions. Utilizing a configurational approach, we conceptualize an archetype as an interrelated response and configurational strategy-structure pattern and its underlying interpretive scheme. A qualitative meta-study based on 33 case studies across 13 countries forms the basis of our analysis. The analysis indicates that there is not one best way for universities to perform actorhood when transforming from initially loosely coupled systems into new forms of organizing. Instead, a variety of robust archetypes of organizational actorhood – adaptational, orchestrational, and co-constructional – have emerged, going beyond a simple isomorphic adoption of one globally dominant institutional template and country-specific idiosyncrasies of national higher education systems.