Unequal coexistence: governance lock-in among academic mission logics in a multidisciplinary faculty

Abstract

This study examines how centralized faculty governance shapes the relative influence of different academic missions in a multidisciplinary university faculty. It focuses on two locally expressed academic mission logics: a research-oriented mission logic and a professional-education mission logic associated with a business school. Based on a single-faculty qualitative case study and a bounded analytical corpus of 43 governance documents selected from a broader archive of 186 documents produced between 2009 and 2024, the study traces how these logics were expressed, evaluated, and translated into organizational decisions. The analysis identifies four interconnected governance processes: representational asymmetry, agenda formation, leadership-background continuity, and allocation and evaluation. These processes structured access to decision-making arenas, shaped which issues were framed as strategic, influenced the disciplinary experiences represented in leadership and case preparation, and translated strategic recognition into developmental capacity. The findings show that the professional-education mission logic remained formally present but exerted less influence on strategy and on converting teaching-intensive outputs into developmental resources. Dominance therefore emerged within continued coexistence, rather than through formal exclusion or displacement. The study contributes to higher education research by showing how formally uniform governance arrangements may have differentiated effects across units with heterogeneous missions, output profiles, and resource dependencies. It conceptualizes governance lock-in as the cumulative stabilization of unequal coexistence through recurrent governance processes.