Understanding the Varieties of New Public Management at the Institutional Level

This chapter explores New Public Management (NPM) in higher education from a historical perspective. Research analyzing NPM in higher education has generally focused on policy change at the system-level. But how organizational change within universities takes place is still scarcely studied. It is argued that a combination of social-science insights (revolving around the concept of NPM) and historical perspectives (especially focusing on context and making use of a variety of sources, e.g., in-depth interviews and organizational archives) will increase our understanding of how NPM played out in universities. Thus, this chapter combines a social-science-based analytical framework for NPM in higher education with a variety of historical sources, to shed light on to what extent and how NPM-style ideas, techniques, and concepts were implemented by two Dutch universities: Leiden University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1970s to 2010s). The analysis reveals that NPM-style organizational changes were not only the result of changes in national regulations, but were also driven by actors at the institutional level, sometimes well ahead of system-level changes.