Designing the Organizational Future
Authors: Graf Angela , Lueg Klarissa 
Published: December 2022

Purpose: Over the last decades, universities in general have seen an increase in managerial top-down policies, often pertaining to strategic organizational communication. This paper, in addressing such managerial policies, does focus on German universities as they provide an interesting context to explore the rise of strategic organizational communication as a managerial practice. German universities grant full legal autonomy to their chairholders, and thus, faculty compliance with top management policies cannot be exacted. From there, it seems worthwhile exploring how university management tries to initiate compliance by communicative means. One prominent communication strategy pertains to Corporate Design (CD): university administrations disseminate guidelines as to the use of all forms of planned, visual communication. With this managerial practice in view, we explore arguments employed in exemplary CD guidelines. The overall aim is to show how management attempts to initiate faculty compliance via rational and persuasive communication.

Frame: This case study combines Bourdieusian field theory with neo-institutionalist and narratological approaches. In order to explore how university leadership tries to assert governance claims, we refer, in particular, to the concepts of field struggles, isomorphic change, and legitimacy.

Approach: Our case study concentrates on the attempted implementation of CD in German universities. Our sample comprises 40 CD manuals, most of them with official prefaces by university presidents. In order to detect dominant themes in these manuals we employ thematic analysis.

Findings: We find that CD policies are being used, by management, as a strategic marketing instrument for external communication, as well as a soft, internal governance instrument. We identify two dominant themes: First, university leadership argues in favor of CD by referring to external and internal stakeholders (legitimation). With a view to external stakeholders, management argues that CD is an important communication instrument of differentiation in a perceived university ‘market’. As to internal stakeholders, CD is intended to integrate both individual scholars, as well as scholarly sub-units into an overarching organizational structure. In this case, we consider CD to be a specific symbolic mode of communication aiming to have impact on the university’s perception externally and internally. Second, we find different persuasive management strategies supposed to actually make faculty employ the new CD (governance). Here, we identify highly different communication strategies, ranging from direct orders to appeals. The variety in strategic communication reveals the organizational paradox of restricted legal governance options, and the new managerial claim to governance.

Implications: We contribute to higher education and organizational communication research by revealing homogeneic rationales for an isomorphic change process that are being described as differentiation. We alert that legal professorial autonomy may slowly be eroded by means of consistent strategic communication.