A Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (UTL) promoveu a 8 de março, no Auditório Lagoa Branca do Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA), da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (UTL), o workshop «A Fusão entre Universidades: Experiências Europeias», que contou com a presença de vários especialistas de renome internacional nesta temática entre eles o Prof. Richard Woorward, Universidade de Edimburgo, Business School, Reino Unido, que proferiu a palestra "Knowledge Exploitation and Exploration in a Higher Education Merger: A Performative view".

1. Knowledge Exploitation and
Exploration in a Higher Education
Merger
A Performative view
Dr. Richard WOODWARD
Mehdi SAFAVI

2. The failure of mergers in business
With hundreds of studies on mergers, we can
estimate that
50-80% of them fail to achieve the goals set for them by
management
– one third create value
– one third destroy value, and
– one third fall short of expectations
• Recent prominent examples: failure of Daimler-
Chrysler merger and Volkswagen-Suzuki alliance
What lessons can be learned from business for
academic mergers?
Central lesson: Failure usually due to problems in integrating
different organisational cultures
2

3. What do we mean by organizational cultures,
and how do you integrate them?
By organizational culture, we refer to the body of
tacit (non-canonical) knowledge embodied in an
organization and constituting its identity
The organization as both a community and a collection of
communities
The difficulty with integration is due to the tacit
nature of the knowledge involved
– Merger management often focuses on “transfer” of explicit
knowledge, neglecting the tacit knowledge that must
accompany it to make it meaningful
– To share tacit knowledge, it is necessary to develop a
common language
3

4. Performative view of knowledge
•Performative view of knowledge as knowing:
– A capability, not an object
– Cannot be transferred, but only recreated
– Enacted in everyday practices and routines; a part
of our action rather than a tool or an aid to it
All of this underlines tacit nature of knowing
•Important: Different levels of tacitness at
different levels of the organization
4

5. Exploration, exploitation and cognitive distance
Organizational communities are divided by varying
cognitive distances
Crossing those divides is done for different purposes, involves
different strategies, and employs different resources depending
on the distance
•Exploitation Vs. Exploration
– Exploitation refers to incremental changes in the use of
knowledge (routines) already existing within the organization;
collaboration for exploitative purposes typically takes place
across a smaller cognitive distance
– Exploration is the search for radically new knowledge which
may lead to organizational transformation and by definition
involves crossing greater cognitive distance
5

6. Why academic merger?
The US and the UK
Many mergers in American higher education since early 1970s
have fallen into four categories (other than bankruptcy/bailout):
– mergers of small women’s colleges into larger coeducational
institutions
– consolidation of public institutions into state systems
– court-mandated mergers for racial desegregation purposes
– mergers of institutions with complementary missions and
strengths
‘The history of the expansion of universities in the United
Kingdom [is] a history of producer-dominated [as opposed to
consumer-dominated] institutions in a dependent relationship to
government with government being by far the major provider of
funds for higher education’
6

7. Why academic merger?
Canada
Eastman and Lang, 2001 (study of two mergers in Canadian Higher Education:
1997: Technical University of Nova Scotia with Dalhousie University in Halifax;
1996: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education with the University of Toronto’s
faculty of Education - both were encouraged, rather than imposed, by provincial
governments)
1980s: Public funding for universities was being reduced as
provincial governments struggled to reduce their expenditures. As
funding shifted from covering average costs to covering only
marginal costs, colleges and universities were forced to seek
other means of delivering programs. Institutional identity became
more difficult to defend
Some colleges and universities, especially smaller and more
specialized ones, came under pressure to seek partner – usually
larger or more diverse ones – to renew the potential of
economies of scale
Reduced public funding also forced institutions to generate
additional revenues from tuition fees and other sources. In other
words, it required them to be more businesslike and sensitive to
the markets
7

8. Why academic merger?
Canada (2)
Striking the correct balance between:
- scale
- breadth
- quality
- distribution
- economic efficiency
is the essence of the political economy of any college or
university. One can argue further that inter-institutional
cooperation in one form or another, including merger, is a
means of recalibrating the balance in ways that would be
either impossible or impractical for a college or university
acting alone (Eastman and Lang, 2001)
8

9. Academic mergers in the United Kingdom
Budget cuts in the UK threatening viability of many
higher education institutions; may lead to
consolidation pressures?
– Dozens of mergers in UK higher education in recent decades
– September 2011: education secretary Michael Russell outlined a
review of higher and further education, calling for mergers between
colleges and closer working between universities
University of Edinburgh: 6 mergers in last century
– New College (during the 1930s) (organizational)
– The Royal (Dick) Veterinary School (1951) (organizational)
– Moray House School of Education (1998) (organizational)
– The Roslin Institute (2008) (A more technical one)
– Edinburgh College of Art (2011) (organizational)
– The MRC's Human Genetics Unit (2011) (a more technical)
9

10. Timeline: pre-merger and merger periods
10

11. Governance vs. competence
Governance Competence
•Organizational knowing •Scientific/technical knowing
•Meta-routines •Routines
•The merger itself is an •Greater cognitive distance
exploratory act (radical across competence
organizational innovation / communities
disruption), but
•At the practice level, it is •Exploration: interdisciplinary
about exploitation work
•More intended outcomes •More emergent outcomes
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 11

12. What is organizational governance about?
If an organization is a community of communities
and knowledge (or knowing) defines its identity, then
governance can be understood as coordination of
knowledge sharing (knowing recreation) among
those communities
The coordination role of the organization consists in
managing cognitive distance between its members
– Sometimes reduces this distance (by establishing common
language)
– Sometimes helps members to cross the distance (by
translating)
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 12

13. Four key processes in recreating knowing
Organizational
•Replication
•Articulation
Scientific / technical
•Integration
•Combination
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 13

14. Replication
Simple duplication of routines from one
organization to another
•In this case, university procedures replicated in art
college
•Ideally suited for codified, explicit knowledge
•But sometimes there are attempts to replicate
procedures with much tacit content
•This leads to problems
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 14

15. Articulation
When the procedures of one organization
incorporate a high level of tacit knowledge and
have no equivalents in the other, they must be
articulated before replication can occur
•In this case, occurred in case of art college
procedures that university was unfamiliar with
•Examples: standardization, classification, and
naming
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 15

16. Integration
In a situation in which a common language already
exists, academics from differing disciplines can
cooperate and build joint institutional structure
•Occurs where there is history of previous
collaboration
•Can occur in the merging of departments or
creation of multidisciplinary schools (in this case,
one example was the school of architecture and
landscape architecture that was formed 2 years
before the merger)
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 16

17. Combination
Bricolage: Most entrepreneurial, but also most
complex and time consuming of the four processes
•Here, knowledge is highly tacit and its
communication across disciplinary communities
particularly difficult
•Difficulty exacerbated by link between sense of
organizational identity and unique character of
knowledge
•(Level of departments rather than whole
institutions)
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 17

18. Take-aways
•Challenges – and in fact the way the very nature of
the merger is seen – will be different for university
administration and academic faculty
•It will be very tempting for administration to see
merger solely in terms of (the very mundane)
replication / harmonisation of codified rules and
procedures
•But this will not result in realisation of full potential
for synergies and creation of new organisational
identity emerging from interdisciplinary cross-
fertilisation
⇒ Risk of “failure”
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 18

19. Obrigado
Q&Q&Q
2011 Knowledge-Based Businesses 19