Responding to regulatory jolts in the English higher education sector

Abstract

Throughout the world universities are having to face constantly changing environments. A particular type of important change is public policy reforms or regulatory jolts. The English higher education sector is an example of the latter, where constant regulatory jolts have been seen in past decades. Leaders at universities have needed to interpret these environmental changes and decide how to cope with them. In this paper, the case of the post-Browne Review reforms in England’s higher education sector is used in order to explore how senior leaders in universities make sense of regulatory jolts. Based on primary qualitative research, which involved 47 semi-structured interviews with senior university leaders in England, including 24 vice-chancellors, I explore how senior leaders in universities interpreted, or made sense of, the post-Browne Review regulatory jolt. The paper suggests that senior university leaders’ interpretations might be deeply intertwined with their identity interpretations of who they are throughout these periods of turbulence.

Keywords:

• policy change
• regulatory jolt
• sensemaking
• adaptation
• university leadership

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Geoff Whitty, Julia Balogun, Jürgen Enders and Yiannis Gabriel for their advice, and the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.