STEERING PATTERNS IN THE AUSTRIAN UNIVERSITY SYSTEM

Inspired by Burton Clark's “triangle of coor‐dination” whereby a university is steered according to its relationship to “state authority”, the “academic oligarchy”, and the “market”, the author analyses the debate going on in Austrian higher education circles today about the proper way for the universities of the country to be steered. The general proposal is to supersede the University Organization Act of 1975, which had really been a reformulation of the traditional ministerial bureaucratic centralism typical of Austrian university governance, in favour of market‐oriented and decentralized approaches with many of the functions of the Ministry of Science and Research to be handed over to a buffer organization to be created. The chances are, however, that fundamentally very little of current practice will be changed because of the strength of set patterns and because of the inner contradictions within the principal reform proposals.