Business School Mission and Market in Tuition-Driven Academic Programs: An Institutional Logics Perspective

Business schools, and universities more generally, find themselves within a constant tension between different and often conflicting institutional logics. Scholars have identified two primary and coexisting institutional logics in particular—an academic logic and a market logic—that universities must reconcile. To date, however, we still know little about how university leaders navigate persistent frictions between these institutional logics. To fill this gap, we conduct a grounded qualitative study of business schools’ top leaders who have recently introduced new revenue-generating programs. We develop a process model of institutional alignment that explains how leaders navigate and resolve tensions between competing logics over time. Our aim was to explore how these administrative leaders navigated frictions across institutional logics throughout the process of introducing, motivating, developing, and implementing these programs. We find that frictions between the competing institutional logics were indeed prominent in decision-makers’ minds and actions throughout the entire process. These frictions occurred at various levels, both within and outside the business school. To reduce these frictions, leaders describe employing adaptive strategies such as framing, collaboration, and structural adjustments to align the logics and position the new program as consistent with both. That is, the new programs are interpreted as institutional innovations that serve to align the logics.