Unequal coexistence: governance lock-in among academic mission logics in a multidisciplinary faculty

Introduction

Multidisciplinary faculties have become a common organizational response to pressures for consolidation, coordination, strategic positioning, and interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education Barbato et al., 2021; Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; Pinheiro et al., 2016). Such structures bring academically distinct units under shared leadership, decision-making procedures, and resource-allocation systems. They may improve coordination and create opportunities for cross-disciplinary development, but they also raise a governance problem: formally common arrangements may affect academic units differently when those units have different missions, output profiles, cost structures, and resource dependencies.

This problem is closely related to mission diversity in higher education. Previous research has shown that institutional missions, strategic plans, and organizational profiles shape how universities position themselves and respond to competing expectations (Frølich and Stensaker, 2021; Morphew et al., 2018; Seeber et al., 2019). Mission diversity is often discussed in relation to broad institutional functions such as teaching, research, societal engagement, and regional development. This study uses the term more narrowly. Here, mission diversity refers to the coexistence of different academic mission logics within a multidisciplinary faculty. The analysis focuses on two locally expressed mission logics: a research-oriented mission logic and a professional-education mission logic. The study therefore does not examine the full range of university missions, but analyzes how two academic missions were expressed, evaluated, and governed within a shared faculty structure.

Governance arrangements are understood as internal decision-making arrangements through which values, missions, resource allocation, and authority relations are organized within higher education institutions (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; OECD, 2019; Seeber et al., 2015). This definition focuses on the faculty level, where strategic priorities, leadership roles, staffing decisions, and allocation principles are developed and authorized. The intra-faculty level is analytically important because asymmetry may be less visible there than between separate faculties. Units may be formally included in the same governance system while still having unequal capacity to influence strategic priorities, evaluative criteria, and developmental resources.

Institutional-logics research provides a useful lens for analyzing this problem. Universities are institutionally complex organizations in which multiple logics coexist, reflecting different understandings of academic value, legitimate performance, resource needs, and organizational responsibility (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011; Thornton et al., 2012). Existing research has shown how organizations respond to such plurality through coexistence, selective coupling, compartmentalization, and hybridization (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Pache and Santos, 2013; Pache and Santos, 2021; Reay and Hinings, 2009). Recent reviews also emphasize the need to specify whether logics are treated as societal-level orders, field-level patterns, or locally reconstructed value orientations (Cai and Mountford, 2022; Mountford and Cai, 2023).

However, continued coexistence does not necessarily mean balanced influence. A logic may remain formally present, organize substantial activity, and be recognized in official documents, while still exerting less influence over how strategic priorities are defined and how resources for future development are allocated. The theoretical issue is therefore not only whether multiple logics coexist, but how coexistence becomes organizationally ordered. In multidisciplinary faculties, different academic missions may coexist formally, while governance arrangements make some missions more consequential than others.

This study addresses this gap by examining how centralized faculty governance shapes unequal influence among coexisting academic mission logics over time. It develops the concept of governance lock-in to capture the cumulative stabilization of such unequal influence through recurrent governance processes. Governance lock-in is used as a descriptive and analytical concept. It does not imply determinism, irreversibility, or the disappearance of alternative logics. Rather, it highlights how routine governance arrangements may repeatedly privilege certain definitions of academic value while leaving others formally present but less influential.

The empirical setting is a single Norwegian multidisciplinary faculty comprising two science-oriented units and a large business school. The case is analytically relevant because it combines mission diversity with centralized authority over strategy, leadership, staffing, and resource allocation. This makes it possible to examine how common faculty-level arrangements operate when units differ in disciplinary orientation, teaching volume, research infrastructure needs, and resource dependencies. A longitudinal documentary analysis of governance material produced between 2009 and 2024 allows the study to trace how different academic missions were expressed, evaluated, and translated into organizational decisions across time.

The study asks: Through which recurrent governance processes do centralized faculty arrangements translate mission diversity into unequal influence and governance lock-in among coexisting academic mission logics over time?

The article contributes to higher education governance research by developing a process-oriented account of how formally inclusive faculty arrangements may produce unequal influence among academic missions. It also contributes to institutional-logics research by distinguishing coexistence from balanced organizational influence. The argument is not that one logic necessarily displaces another, but that formally coexisting mission logics may become hierarchically ordered through governance arrangements that shape participation, attention, interpretation, and developmental capacity over time. The study also has practical relevance for multidisciplinary faculties, where formal inclusion of diverse units should be assessed alongside their capacity to influence strategic priorities and resource decisions.

Theoretical framework

Institutional logics, academic mission diversity, and local value orientations

Institutional logics are historically developed social orders composed of assumptions, values, cultural symbols, and material practices through which actors give meaning to organizational activity (Thornton et al., 2012). They do not originate within a single organization, but may be translated locally through disciplinary norms, justificatory vocabularies, funding arrangements, evaluative criteria, professional obligations, and material practices. In higher education, institutional logics are visible in competing understandings of academic value, legitimate performance, resource needs, and organizational responsibility (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Cai and Mountford, 2022; Greenwood et al., 2011).

This study follows recent work emphasizing that institutional-logics analysis in higher education must specify both the level at which logics are identified and the empirical basis on which they are reconstructed (Cai and Mountford, 2022; Mountford and Cai, 2023). The analysis therefore does not treat infrastructure, publications, grants, teaching volume, accreditation, or labor-market responsiveness as institutional logics in themselves. These features are interpreted as documentary expressions of broader value orientations because the case faculty repeatedly used them to justify strategic priorities, academic legitimacy, resource needs, and organizational development.

The two logics analyzed in this study are best understood as locally expressed academic mission logics. A research-oriented mission logic was expressed through claims about research infrastructure, external funding, scientific capacity, publications, and long-term research development. A professional-education mission logic was expressed through claims about teaching volume, accreditation, student access, program delivery, labor-market relevance, and stable staffing capacity. These labels do not imply that science-oriented units are only research-oriented, or that business schools are inherently non-research-intensive. They identify the dominant local patterns through which the documentary material justified academic value and resource needs.

Mission diversity is therefore not used here as a general typology of university missions. Universities and faculties may combine units that differ in disciplinary cultures, professional obligations, output profiles, cost structures, and resource dependencies (Becher and Trowler, 2001; Cho and Taylor, 2019). Recent research on university missions and strategic positioning shows that higher education organizations balance expectations related to excellence, relevance, institutional profiling, public responsibility, and system diversity (Frølich and Stensaker, 2021; Morphew et al., 2018; Seeber et al., 2019). In this study, mission diversity denotes intra-faculty variation in locally expressed academic value orientations, resource dependencies, and claims about organizational development. This narrower use supports the article's focus on how governance arrangements mediate the relative influence of coexisting mission logics within a single faculty.

Relations among logics: coexistence, coupling, hybridization, and displacement

Institutional-logics research has developed several concepts for analyzing relations among logics. Coexistence refers to situations in which multiple logics remain organizationally present over time. Reay and Hinings (2009) show how competing logics may continue to coexist rather than one logic simply replacing another, while Besharov and Smith (2014) emphasize that the implications of multiple logics depend on their compatibility and centrality within organizations.

Other concepts describe more specific organizational responses to plurality. Selective coupling refers to attempts to combine selected practices from different logics without fully integrating them (Pache and Santos, 2013). Hybridization describes more integrated combinations of elements from different logics (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Pache and Santos, 2013). Compartmentalization refers to arrangements in which different logics are kept partly separate across organizational domains, roles, or practices (Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache and Santos, 2013). Displacement, by contrast, occurs when one logic replaces another as the primary basis for organizational interpretation and action (Greenwood et al., 2011; Thornton et al., 2012).

These concepts are useful, but they do not fully capture the condition this study examines. The issue is not only whether multiple logics coexist, are selectively coupled, become hybridized, or displace one another. The relevant question is whether formally coexisting logics exercise comparable influence over strategic attention, evaluative criteria, leadership priorities, and developmental resources. Continued coexistence may therefore conceal a hierarchy among logics that remain organizationally present.

This study uses unequal coexistence as an author-developed analytical concept to describe this condition. Unequal coexistence refers to a situation in which multiple institutional logics remain organizationally present but do not exercise comparable influence over central organizational priorities and resource decisions. The concept does not imply formal exclusion, full displacement, or the disappearance of the less influential logic. It specifies a hierarchy within continued coexistence.

Dominance is used in a similarly relational sense. A logic is treated as more dominant when it has greater influence over strategic attention, evaluative criteria, leadership priorities, and developmental resources. Dominance is therefore not defined as exclusivity. This definition allows examination of whether formal coexistence is accompanied by balanced or unequal organizational influence.

Table 1 summarizes how the key concepts are used in this study and distinguishes literature-based concepts from author-developed analytical concepts.

Table 1. Conceptual status and analytical use of key institutional-logics concepts.

Governance arrangements and the distribution of influence

Governance arrangements are understood here as internal decision-making arrangements that organize values, missions, authority relations, and resource allocation within higher education institutions (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; OECD, 2019; Seeber et al., 2015). In a university faculty, such arrangements include faculty-level authority, the composition of governing bodies, the advisory or decision-making status of departments, agenda-setting procedures, leadership appointments, and principles for resource allocation and performance evaluation.

Governance arrangements do not determine outcomes independently of actors, but they are not neutral channels. They structure access to decision arenas, direct organizational attention, and establish which forms of evidence and justification carry authority. The attention-based view is useful here because it explains how organizational structures affect which issues decision-makers notice, prioritize, and treat as actionable (Ocasio, 1997). In a multidisciplinary faculty, governance arrangements may therefore shape which locally expressed mission logic translates most readily into strategic decisions.

The analysis focuses on four recurrent governance processes. Representational asymmetry concerns unequal access to central decision-making arenas and builds on higher education governance research on formal authority, board composition, and internal representation (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; OECD, 2019; Seeber et al., 2015). Agenda formation concerns the differential framing of issues as strategic, developmental, operational, or capacity-related, and draws on the attention-based view (Ocasio, 1997). Leadership-background continuity concerns the disciplinary and organizational experiences represented in central leadership and case preparation. It draws on research on leadership background and strategic interpretation, without assuming that background mechanically determines decisions (Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Seeber et al., 2015). Allocation and evaluation concerns how resource-allocation rules, performance indicators, and funding practices translate recognized activities into material and developmental capacity (Golden et al., 2021; OECD, 2025).

These processes are treated as analytical categories rather than deterministic mechanisms. They provide observable channels through which coexisting mission logics may acquire unequal organizational influence. Their significance lies in their interaction. Repeated alignment across participation, attention, leadership-background patterns, and resource allocation can stabilize a hierarchy even when no formal rule excludes the less influential logic.

The allocation dimension requires particular caution. Resource differences between academic units do not, by themselves, demonstrate unequal governance influence. Higher education funding systems typically combine historical allocations, formula-based elements, performance indicators, institutional discretion, and strategic steering (Golden et al., 2021; OECD, 2025). Units may also differ in infrastructure needs, teaching obligations, staffing profiles, external funding opportunities, and dependence on national funding. Allocation and evaluation are therefore analytically relevant only when resource patterns are interpreted alongside documented governance arrangements, agenda formation, performance indicators, and contestation over allocation principles.

Governance lock-in and related concepts

Governance lock-in is an author-developed process concept describing the cumulative stabilization of unequal coexistence through recurrent governance processes. It denotes a condition in which formally coexisting mission logics remain organizationally present, but repeated governance processes make one logic more influential than another over time.

The concept draws on path-dependence theory, but it does not advance that literature. Path-dependence research has shown how initial decisions, increasing returns, sequencing, and self-reinforcing processes may stabilize organizational patterns over time (Pierson, 2000; Sydow et al., 2009). Governance lock-in is used more narrowly. It does not require demonstrating a critical juncture, increasing returns, irreversibility, or deterministic actor behavior. It focuses on how routine governance arrangements may repeatedly validate certain definitions of academic value while making alternative definitions less consequential for strategic priorities and developmental resources.

Governance lock-in is useful for analyzing multidisciplinary faculties because formal inclusion does not necessarily ensure balanced influence. A professional-education mission may remain formally represented, generate substantial activity, and receive official recognition, yet have less influence over strategic attention and long-term resource allocation. Conversely, a research-oriented mission may become more consequential not because other missions disappear, but because it is more consistently aligned with prevailing governance categories, strategic language, and discretionary allocation practices.

The analytical framework links three elements. First, coexisting mission logics define academic value, legitimate performance, and resource needs differently. Second, governance arrangements distribute opportunities to advance these definitions through representation, agenda formation, leadership recruitment, and resource allocation. Third, recurrent governance processes shape how these definitions acquire different degrees of organizational influence through participation, strategic attention, leadership-background patterns, and developmental capacity.

Governance lock-in overlaps with adjacent concepts, but its analytical value lies in its focus on hierarchy within coexistence. Institutional maintenance explains how institutions, norms, or logics are preserved. Organizational inertia explains slow adaptation or resistance to change. Structural power explains durable asymmetries embedded in organizational arrangements. Path dependence explains self-reinforcing trajectories shaped by sequencing and increasing returns. Governance lock-in specifies a narrower problem: how formally inclusive governance arrangements can repeatedly convert mission diversity into unequal influence over strategy, evaluation, and developmental resources. It is therefore especially useful where the central question is not whether multiple missions exist, but whether they acquire comparable organizational consequence.

Table 2 distinguishes governance lock-in from adjacent concepts used to analyze stability, reproduction, and asymmetry in organizations. It clarifies governance lock-in's specific analytical role in this study.

Table 2. Governance lock-in and related concepts.

Methods

This study uses a longitudinal qualitative document analysis of governance processes within a multidisciplinary faculty in Norway (Bowen, 2009; Morgan, 2022; Prior, 2008). The case was selected because it combines academic mission diversity with centralized faculty-level authority over strategy, staffing, and resource allocation. This makes it well-suited to examining how locally expressed academic mission logics are articulated, evaluated, and ordered through formal decision-making processes.

Data collection and corpus

The empirical material was constructed in two stages. First, the study assembled a broader archive of 186 documents and records produced between 2009 and 2024 from faculty-level governance records, strategic plans, budget documents, internal reports, consultation materials, staffing records, and publicly available institutional statistics. Second, the study selected a bounded analytical corpus of 43 governance documents from this archive for systematic coding and close analysis.

Documents were included in the analytical corpus if they met three criteria: they were produced or formally used in faculty-level governance; they contained information on strategy, resource allocation, staffing, organizational development, academic priorities, or performance evaluation; and they contributed to tracing the relationship between faculty governance and the relative influence of coexisting academic mission logics over time. Documents were excluded if they were purely administrative, duplicated information contained in later formal case documents, concerned routine matters unrelated to the research question, or did not contain evidence relevant to representation, agenda formation, leadership-background continuity, or allocation and evaluation.

The 15 faculty board documents reported in Table 3 do not represent all faculty board papers produced during the period. They represent a subset of board documents addressing governance arrangements, strategic priorities, resource allocation, organizational structure, staffing, or faculty-level development. The analysis excluded routine board items, ceremonial matters, individual personnel cases, and documents not relevant to the analytical focus. Supplementary institutional statistics on PhD positions through 2025 captured the most recent available development in doctoral capacity.

Table 3. Analytical corpus and its role in tracing governance arrangements and processes.

Table 3 provides an overview of the analytical corpus, including document types, time periods, number of documents, source status, analytical use, and the governance process each document category informed. Table 4 provides an overview of case documents cited in the empirical analysis.

Table 4. Case documents cited in the empirical analysis.

The anonymized labels in the Results section identify the case documents from which empirical claims are drawn. These documents are treated as part of the empirical corpus rather than as published scholarly references.

This corpus aligns with higher education research that treats strategic plans, mission statements, governance documents, and funding-related documents as traces of organizational priorities and institutional positioning (Frølich and Stensaker, 2021; Morphew et al., 2018; Seeber et al., 2019). The documents are not used to infer individual motives. They are used to reconstruct how missions, priorities, resource needs, and evaluative criteria were expressed and authorized in formal governance settings.

Analytical approach

The analysis followed an abductive qualitative coding procedure combining open coding with sensitizing concepts from institutional-logics theory and higher education governance research (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). First, the documents were read chronologically to identify recurrent statements about academic value, strategic priority, resource needs, organizational responsibility, staffing, and performance evaluation. The researcher developed initial codes inductively from the material, including research infrastructure, external funding, publication activity, teaching volume, accreditation, program delivery, staffing pressure, student growth, doctoral capacity, and budgetary discretion.

Second, the researcher grouped these codes into broader patterns of justification and evaluation. This step supported reconstructing two locally expressed mission logics: a research-oriented mission logic and a professional-education mission logic. The researchers did not assign these logics to units in advance. They were reconstructed from repeated documentary claims about which academic activities were treated as valuable, legitimate, resource-demanding, and strategically important.

Third, the coded material was analyzed longitudinally to identify recurrent governance processes through which the two mission logics acquired different degrees of organizational influence. The four governance processes were developed through iterative movement between the empirical material and the theoretical framework. Representational asymmetry was identified through material on board composition, formal decision-making authority, and departmental representation.

Agenda formation was identified by comparing how issues were framed as strategic, developmental, operational, or capacity-related. Leadership-background continuity was identified through staffing and leadership records showing which disciplinary experiences were represented in central leadership and case preparation. Allocation and evaluation were identified through budget documents, performance indicators, PhD-position data, and consultation material concerning resource allocation.

The analysis considered alternative interpretations throughout. In particular, the study examined whether the observed patterns could be explained primarily by cost structures, external funding opportunities, infrastructure needs, teaching obligations, or national funding indicators rather than by faculty-level governance processes. These explanations were incorporated into the interpretation, especially in the allocation analysis, where resource differences are interpreted only in relation to documented governance arrangements, strategic framing, performance indicators, and contestation over allocation principles.

No qualitative analysis software was used. Coding was conducted manually using document matrices, analytical memos, and iterative comparison across document types and time periods.

Methodological limitations

As a single-case study, the findings are not statistically generalizable. The aim is analytical transferability to multidisciplinary faculties with similar governance structures, centralized authority, and mission diversity. Reliance on formal governance documents also means that informal negotiations, interpersonal dynamics, and decision-preparatory interactions are not directly observable. The analysis is therefore limited to patterns supported by written records, formal decisions, documented justifications, and cross-document comparison.

Trustworthiness, reflexivity and ethical considerations

The author is employed at the university examined in the case and is affiliated with one of the academic units included in the analysis. This position provided contextual knowledge of the faculty's governance structure and access to internal organizational records, including faculty documents, consultation materials, staffing information, and budget-related documents. The author's proximity to the case is therefore both a resource and a potential source of bias (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2018). This enabled a detailed reconstruction of governance processes over time, but it also required explicit safeguards against selective interpretation.

Several safeguards were used. The analysis was limited to written documents and organizational records, and the author makes no claims about individual motives unless documentary evidence supports them. The corpus was constructed using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, and Table 4 lists and anonymizes the key case documents used in the empirical analysis. Empirical claims were checked across document types, including faculty board papers, budget documents, strategic plans, consultation responses, staffing data, and institutional statistics. The analysis also considered alternative explanations, especially differences in cost structures, funding dependencies, infrastructure needs, teaching obligations, and national performance indicators. Analytical memos distinguished empirical observations from theoretical interpretation and identified where the evidence supported description rather than causal inference.

Because the study concerns sensitive issues of governance, representation, and resource allocation, the analysis focuses on organizational arrangements and documented decision-making patterns rather than individual actors. The faculty, departments, internal documents, and officeholders are anonymized. The purpose is not to assess individual performance or intent, but to analyze how formal governance arrangements and recurrent governance processes shaped the relative influence of locally expressed academic mission logics over time.

Deductive identification and use of internal documents

The study concerns a potentially identifiable organizational case. Although the faculty, departments, internal documents, and individual officeholders are anonymized, deductive identification cannot be fully ruled out because the case combines a distinctive faculty structure, publicly available student and staffing indicators, financial information, and references to related prior research. The anonymization strategy should therefore be understood as risk reduction rather than a guarantee of full anonymity.

This risk was considered when preparing the manuscript. The analysis avoids naming the university, faculty, departments, and individual officeholders. Internal documents are cited through anonymized case labels, and sensitive information is reported at an aggregated organizational level where possible. The purpose is to reduce personalization and limit unnecessary exposure of internal actors while preserving sufficient detail for analytical transparency.

The author had access to the internal materials through his organizational role at the university and through documents made available in connection with faculty governance processes. The author informed faculty leadership that the material could be used for scholarly analysis. The manuscript does not reproduce confidential personal data, and no claims are made about individual motives or performance.

Empirical context

The empirical setting is a multidisciplinary faculty at a Norwegian university, formed through the merger of previously separate academic units. The faculty combines two science-oriented units with a professional business school within a centralized governance structure. This configuration brings together disciplinary domains characterized by different patterns of academic activity, performance evaluation, and resource dependency (Becher and Trowler, 2001; Cho and Taylor, 2019).

Norwegian higher education governance and funding context

Norwegian public universities operate within a state-regulated and publicly funded higher education system with substantial institutional autonomy. The Universities and University Colleges Act (Lov om universiteter og høyskoler, 2024) defines higher education institutions’ broad purposes as education, research and academic development, dissemination, and societal contribution. Institutional boards are ultimately responsible for strategy, education, research, academic development, and institutional governance. Within this framework, universities have discretion to organize internal faculties, departments, leadership structures, and budgetary allocation procedures.

The national funding system combines public block funding with performance-related components linked to both education and research. During the period analyzed, performance indicators included ECTS credits, graduates, doctoral candidates, EU funding, Research Council funding, other externally funded activity, and publication points. These indicators formally recognized both teaching and research, but they did not mechanically determine how resources were distributed internally within faculties. Internal allocation models, strategic priorities, and faculty-level discretion shaped how national funding signals were translated into departmental resources.

This context is important because the case does not concern a market-based or tuition-dependent higher education setting. It examines how mission diversity was governed inside a publicly funded university where national indicators, institutional autonomy, and centralized faculty discretion intersected. The faculty operated within a system that formally valued both education and research, but faculty-level governance arrangements mediated how these values translated internally.

Table 5 summarizes the Norwegian governance and funding features most relevant to the case. The table clarifies how national higher education arrangements shaped, but did not mechanically determine, faculty-level decision-making and internal resource allocation.

Table 5. Norwegian institutional features relevant to the case.

Historical development and initial structural placement

The faculty was established approximately 15 years ago through the merger of three academically distinct units: a natural-science institute, a hybrid institute combining biology, resource management, and applied fields, and the university's business school. Although the hybrid institute included interdisciplinary elements, it remained largely aligned with natural-science research traditions.

The business school followed a different trajectory. It originated as a small unit and later expanded through the merger of regional business programs into a multi-campus organization with a large student population. Its development was therefore shaped primarily by teaching, program delivery, and professional education rather than by infrastructure-intensive research.

The business school's placement within the faculty reflected organizational consolidation more than close disciplinary alignment. The merger therefore created a governance challenge associated with multidisciplinary restructuring: academically distinct units became subject to shared decision-making arenas and common allocation principles (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; Misra and Stensaker, 2024; Pinheiro et al., 2016).

Governance structure and centralized decision-making

Governance authority within the faculty was centralized. The faculty board and central management structure held decision-making power and were responsible for strategy, leadership decisions, budgeting, and major staffing priorities.

A dean led the faculty, supported by a central management team and a faculty board. The business school operated as one of three departments within the faculty. Toward the end of the study period, its formal governance structure consisted of an advisory institute council rather than an independent governing board. The faculty therefore made core decisions on budgets, strategic priorities, and recruitment. This centralization made representation, agenda formation, leadership recruitment, and allocation principles particularly consequential.

The permanent academic representatives on the faculty board were formally attached to the three departments, with one representative from each department. Other board members represented external, administrative, temporary academic, and student constituencies. This structure gave each department formal representation, but it also meant that differences in student volume, teaching responsibilities, and mission-specific resource dependencies were not directly reflected in guaranteed academic representation.

The case is not treated as evidence that one disciplinary group intentionally controlled another. It examines how formally common governance arrangements can have unequal effects when applied to units with different missions, scales, and resource dependencies.

Figure 1 illustrates the centralized governance structure and the formal principle of one guaranteed academic representative from each department. This configuration provides the basis for analyzing representational asymmetry in the Results section.

Disciplinary profiles and locally expressed mission logics

The faculty combined units with different disciplinary profiles and locally specific mission claims. Across the documentary material, the science-oriented units repeatedly associated academic value with discovery, external grants, infrastructure, publications, and long-term research capacity. The business school, by contrast, repeatedly associated academic value with professional education, student access, accreditation, program delivery, student credits, and stable teaching capacity. These differences reflect locally expressed research-oriented and professional-education mission logics, not fixed attributes of units or individual actors (Becher and Trowler, 2001; Cho and Taylor, 2019).

The association between the business school and the professional-education mission logic is case-specific. It does not imply that business schools are inherently non-research-intensive. In this faculty, the business school's documented claims were strongly connected to teaching volume, accreditation, program delivery, student access, and staffing capacity. These documentary patterns form the empirical basis for interpreting it as primarily associated with the professional-education mission logic in this case.

Table 6 summarizes these differences as an analytical abstraction derived from recurrent patterns in the empirical material. Read it as a synthesis of documented value claims, resource dependencies, and evaluative emphases, not as an a priori classification of the units.

Table 6. Analytical summary of local mission orientations, value claims, and governance relevance.

The categories summarize recurrent patterns in the documentary material. They should not be interpreted as exhaustive institutional logics or as fixed attributes of units or individual actors. The table identifies the empirical basis for distinguishing locally expressed research-oriented and professional-education mission logics in the analysis.

Analytical relevance of the setting

The coexistence of locally expressed research-oriented and professional-education mission logics within a centralized faculty structure makes the case analytically relevant for higher education policy and management. The case illustrates a broader governance problem: whether common decision-making arrangements accommodate mission diversity or unintentionally privilege the academic activities most compatible with prevailing definitions of strategy, performance, and resource need.

Under these conditions, governance arrangements do more than coordinate activities. They structure how priorities are articulated, evaluated, and acted upon. This makes it possible to examine how recurrent governance processes shape participation, organizational attention, leadership-background patterns, and resource allocation across successive decisions. The setting therefore allows the study to trace how asymmetries in the relative influence of coexisting mission logics may become stabilized over time.

Results

The results present a longitudinal analysis of how centralized governance arrangements shaped the relative influence of coexisting mission logics through recurrent governance processes. The first subsection examines how faculty-level authority and board composition structured representational asymmetry. The second analyzes agenda formation and the differential strategic attention given to research-oriented development and teaching-intensive concerns. The third examines leadership-background continuity as a governance condition shaping the disciplinary experiences represented in central leadership and case preparation. The fourth analyzes how allocation and evaluation translated recognized activities into different levels of developmental capacity. The final subsection integrates these processes and identifies governance lock-in as their cumulative outcome.

Representational asymmetry: access to centralized decision-making

Following the merger in 2009, the faculty operated through a centralized governance structure in which authority over strategy, budget allocation, and major staffing decisions was concentrated at the faculty level (Case Faculty 2023a, p. 7). Departments retained operational responsibilities but lacked independent governing boards. Toward the end of the study period, the business school's formal governance structure consisted of an advisory institute council rather than a decision-making board (Case Faculty 2023d, pp. 1–2). This arrangement placed academically distinct units under a common governance system while leaving key decisions to the faculty board and the central administration.

The faculty board's composition created a second source of asymmetry. The board consisted of nine members, including one permanent academic representative from each of the three departments (see Figure 1). The business school therefore held one guaranteed departmental seat, despite accounting for approximately one-fifth of the university's students (Case Faculty 2023a, p. 7). Members affiliated with the two science-oriented units were collectively more numerous. The documentary record does not establish that these members acted as a coordinated voting bloc. It does, however, show an imbalance in the disciplinary composition of the central decision-making arena.

This analysis does not evaluate representational asymmetry against a single normative benchmark. If representation is assessed only by the number of departments, the arrangement appears formally balanced, since each department has one guaranteed academic representative. The asymmetry becomes visible when this formal equality is compared with other organizational dimensions: student enrollment, teaching workload, dependence on faculty-level allocation decisions, and the need to represent different academic mission logics in strategic decision-making. The business school's limited guaranteed presence in the faculty board is therefore interpreted not as formal exclusion, but as an imbalance between departmental representation and the organizational weight and mission-specific resource dependencies of the unit most strongly associated with the professional-education mission logic.

The contrast was therefore not between inclusion and exclusion. The business school participated in consultations and governing bodies, but its access to central decision-making was more limited than its organizational scale and teaching responsibilities might suggest. Its ability to address teaching capacity, staffing, accreditation, and program-delivery concerns depended on decisions made in arenas where science-oriented units were more strongly represented.

Representational asymmetry thus provided one starting point for unequal coexistence. All three units remained formally included in the same governance system, but they did not have equivalent access to the arenas where strategic priorities and resource decisions were shaped.

Agenda formation: strategic and operational framing

Within this centralized structure, faculty strategy and planning documents repeatedly gave strategic prominence to research-oriented development. Documents on the faculty's future direction presented research infrastructure, external funding, internationally leading research environments, and long-term scientific capacity as central priorities (Case Faculty 2023a, pp. 5–6; Case Faculty 2023b, pp. 1–4).

Strategy documents called for “academically strong and sustainable research groups” and urged the faculty to “actively seek funding and build more international research networks” (Case Faculty 2023b, p. 5). These formulations linked research expansion to the faculty's future position, external visibility, and societal contribution.

The same orientation was visible in management communication and faculty-level targets. Faculty reports emphasized external funding as a central priority, including a target of 30 percent externally funded income in 2023, compared with the university-wide target of 25 percent (Case Faculty 2023c, p. 6). External funding was therefore reported not only as an income category but also as an indicator of strategic development and future organizational capacity.

Agenda formation was analyzed by comparing how issues were framed in the core case documents. Strategic attention was coded when an issue was framed as future-oriented faculty development, long-term capacity building, external positioning, investment, strategic priority, or a collective faculty-level initiative requiring discretionary support. Operational attention was coded when an issue was framed primarily as workload management, staffing adjustment, compliance, program delivery, budget adaptation, or short-term capacity pressure within existing resource constraints. Table 7 summarizes the main framing pattern.

Table 7. Illustrative patterns of strategic and operational framing in the core case documents.

The pattern was not that teaching, accreditation, or program delivery were absent from the documentary material. These issues were recognized, but they were often framed differently from research-oriented development. Research capacity, infrastructure, and external funding were more consistently framed as long-term strategic investments in the faculty's future. Teaching volume, student growth, supervision, and examination workload were more often framed as operational capacity pressures to be managed through staffing measures, program adjustments, adjunct appointments, workload management, and adaptation to existing financial constraints (Case Business School 2023a, pp. 6–16).

Business-school documents reported 3,191 students in 2023, representing approximately one-fifth of the university's student population, as well as an online course with 1,330 examination candidates (Case Business School 2023a, pp. 1–7). They also documented an increase to 35.4 students per academic full-time equivalent in 2022, compared with 2.0 at the Science Institute, 3.6 at the Hybrid Institute, and between 14.8 and 16.2 at selected Norwegian business schools (Case Business School 2023a, p. 4). These figures were used to justify claims about staffing, teaching capacity, and operational risk, but they were less consistently translated into a dedicated strategic investment agenda.

Agenda formation thereby produced differential strategic attention. It shaped which claims were treated as investments in the faculty's future, and which were treated as capacity constraints to be managed (Ocasio, 1997). This process contributed to unequal coexistence by giving the research-oriented mission logic greater organizational consequence, while the professional-education mission logic remained formally present but less able to define the terms of strategic development.

Leadership-background continuity

Leadership recruitment displayed substantial continuity across the period studied. A review of selected faculty leadership positions shows that most position-years were held by individuals recruited from the two science-oriented units (Table 8). Across the faculty's first 15 years, none of the deans came from the business school. The business school was represented in education leadership, but not in the dean, research-leadership, or senior administrative positions included in the table.

Table 8. Recruitment backgrounds of selected faculty leadership positions, 2009–2023.

Percentages represent the share of position-years held by individuals recruited from each unit. Source: Author's compilation based on internal faculty leadership records and archived organizational webpages, 2009–2023.

The evidence does not establish that disciplinary background determined individual decisions. Nor does it show that leaders acted as representatives of fixed disciplinary interests. The table documents a narrower but analytically relevant pattern: the disciplinary experiences represented in central leadership and case preparation were drawn disproportionately from the science-oriented side of the faculty.

This pattern is relevant when read alongside the faculty's recurrent priority framing. External funding, research infrastructure, and scientific capacity repeatedly appeared as collective strategic concerns in faculty strategy, planning, and board documents (Case Faculty 2023a, pp. 40–44; Case Faculty 2023b, pp. 1–5). By contrast, the business school’s staffing and teaching pressures were more often addressed through program adjustments, adjunct appointments, high student-to-staff ratios, and requests for accommodation within the existing allocation framework (Case Business School 2023a, pp. 4, 6–16).

Leadership-background continuity is therefore treated as a governance condition, not as direct evidence of individual leaders’ interpretive frames. The relevant point is that the disciplinary experiences represented in central leadership and case preparation may have shaped the range of perspectives available in priority assessment.

Allocation and evaluation

Resource allocation in higher education must be interpreted in relation to activity profiles, cost structures, funding dependencies, and strategic priorities. Comparative OECD work shows that higher education funding systems combine historical allocations, formula-based elements, performance indicators, institutional discretion, and strategic steering in different ways (Golden et al., 2021; OECD, 2025).

The allocation analysis below therefore does not assume that units with different activity profiles should receive equal resources. It examines how different resource needs and recognized outputs were evaluated and translated into developmental capacity within a centralized faculty allocation model.

Faculty budget and financial documents show substantial differences in the units’ funding profiles, including their reliance on teaching-related performance funding, base funding, external research income, and earmarked support (Case Faculty 2023a, pp. 8–23). The business school generated a large share of its income through teaching-related performance funding but received less base funding and fewer developmental resources. In the 2024 budget, it received NOK 7.31 million for research-training positions, compared with NOK 26.02 million for the Science Institute and NOK 24.35 million for the Hybrid Institute (Case Faculty 2023c, pp. 21–22). The two science-oriented units also had larger base-funding allocations, higher levels of externally funded research activity, and greater access to infrastructure-related and strategic support (Case Faculty 2023a, pp. 9–19).

Supplementary institutional statistics from the Database for Statistics on Higher Education (DBH), operated by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, show that the number of PhD positions at the business school declined from 21 in 2021 to 10 in 2025, a reduction of 52 percent (Database for Statistics on Higher Education, n.d.). This contraction reduced the business school's capacity for doctoral training and research development in areas that faculty strategy documents elsewhere identified as important (Case Faculty 2023b, pp. 1–5).

These figures should not be read as straightforward measures of unit efficiency or as stand-alone evidence of unequal governance influence. The units differed in cost structures, infrastructure needs, teaching obligations, staffing profiles, external funding opportunities, and national funding dependencies. The analytical point is narrower: within a centralized allocation model with considerable faculty-level discretion, teaching volume, student growth, and program-delivery pressures were recognized, but were less consistently translated into discretionary developmental resources than research infrastructure, research-training allocations, and long-term research capacity.

The allocation model became openly contested through an internal review, a formal hearing response from the business-school action group, an administrative counter-response, and subsequent faculty-board consideration (Case Faculty 2023a; Case Faculty 2023e; Case Business School 2023b). The business school argued that faculty-level allocations did not adequately reflect its teaching volume, student-to-staff ratios, supervision responsibilities, and examination workload (Case Business School 2023b, pp. 17–36; Case Business School 2023a, p. 4, pp. 6–16). It reported 3,191 students in 2023, representing a 43 percent increase since 2016, and requested additional academic staff to reduce operational risk and safeguard educational quality (Case Business School 2023a, pp. 1–7).

The administrative response acknowledged that base funding was used to support activity in the science-oriented units, but defended this as the consequence of legitimate strategic choices made within the faculty board's authority over resource allocation (Case Faculty 2023e, pp. 67–69). The dispute revealed two coexisting but unequally influential definitions of organizational contribution. The professional-education mission logic emphasized teaching production, workload, and educational capacity, whereas the research-oriented mission logic was more closely aligned with the criteria through which strategic discretion and long-term investment were justified.

Subsequent budget documents indicate that strategic discretion, research infrastructure, research-training allocations, and existing staffing commitments continued to shape the allocation framework (Case Faculty 2023a; Case Business School 2023b; Case Faculty 2023c, pp. 19–28; Case Faculty 2023e). Teaching-related performance funding remained important to the faculty’s overall finances, but strategic base funding, research-training allocations, and long-term infrastructure support remained more closely associated with science-oriented research activities (Case Faculty 2023a, pp. 8–19, 32; Case Faculty 2023b, pp. 1–5; Case Faculty 2023c, pp. 21–26).

Allocation and evaluation therefore contributed to unequal coexistence when read alongside agenda formation, documented contestation, and the faculty's centralized budgetary arrangements. The evidence does not show that resource differences alone demonstrate unequal governance influence. It shows that different activity profiles and resource claims were converted into different levels of developmental capacity through a governance system in which strategic discretion remained concentrated at the faculty level.

Governance lock-in as unequal coexistence

Table 9 synthesizes how the documentary evidence links centralized governance arrangements to the four governance processes and their cumulative outcome. Governance lock-in refers here to the stabilization of unequal coexistence through repeated interaction among representational asymmetry, agenda formation, leadership-background continuity, and allocation and evaluation.

Table 9. Empirical grounding of governance processes and their contribution to unequal coexistence.

The table summarizes documented governance patterns and their analytical interpretation. Leadership-background continuity describes the disciplinary experiences represented in central leadership and case preparation, not individual leaders’ subjective interpretive frames. Governance lock-in is conceptualized as a cumulative, processual pattern, not a deterministic causal sequence.

Figure 2 integrates the four governance processes into a recursive pattern. The model should not be read as a deterministic causal sequence. Rather, it shows how representational asymmetry, agenda formation, leadership-background continuity, and allocation and evaluation can become mutually reinforcing over time. Governance lock-in is therefore conceptualized as the cumulative outcome of recurrent governance processes that stabilize unequal influence among formally coexisting mission logics.

Discussion

The central finding of this study is unequal coexistence. The research-oriented and professional-education mission logics both remained formally present in the faculty, but they did not exercise comparable influence over organizational priorities and developmental capacity. The professional-education mission logic was visible in teaching volume, student access, program delivery, and accreditation concerns, but these contributions were less able to define the terms of strategic development. By contrast, research infrastructure, external funding, scientific capacity, and long-term research programs were more consistently recognized as strategic and investment-worthy. This case therefore shows how dominance can develop within continued coexistence, rather than through formal exclusion, displacement, or full hybridization (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Pache and Santos, 2013; Reay and Hinings, 2009).

Governance lock-in captures the cumulative outcome of this pattern. As Figure 2 illustrates, the four governance processes were analytically distinct but mutually reinforcing. Representational asymmetry structured access to central decision-making arenas. Agenda formation differentiated between research-related claims framed as strategic investments and teaching-capacity concerns framed primarily as operational pressures. Leadership-background continuity shaped the range of disciplinary experiences represented in central leadership and case preparation. Allocation and evaluation translated differences in strategic recognition into unequal developmental capacity. Governance lock-in therefore did not result from any single decision. It emerged through the repeated alignment of participation, attention, leadership-background patterns, and resources over time.

The findings also clarify how organizational attention operates in higher education governance. Attention was not distributed simply according to organizational scale, workload, or public mission. Governance arrangements, decision-making roles, agenda practices, and evaluative criteria structured it (Ocasio, 1997). In the case examined, teaching was central to both the faculty's income and its public mission. Yet high student volumes and capacity pressures did not acquire the same strategic status as external funding, research infrastructure, and research-oriented programs. Strategic attention was therefore not a neutral reflection of organizational need. It was shaped by the categories through which problems were made visible, actionable, and worthy of investment.

The case further demonstrates why formal inclusion should not be equated with substantive influence. This distinction is central to understanding how hierarchical ordering can persist within formally inclusive governance systems (Bleiklie and Kogan, 2007; Seeber et al., 2015). The business school was not excluded from the faculty board, planning processes, or budget discussions. Its professional-education mission logic remained formally present within the faculty's governance structure. However, formal presence did not translate into comparable influence over the criteria used to define strategic priorities, evaluate organizational contributions, or allocate developmental resources.

Competing explanations

Several competing explanations must be considered. Some resource differences may reflect disciplinary cost structures rather than unequal governance influence. Science-oriented units had infrastructure needs, laboratory requirements, externally funded projects, and technical staffing obligations that differed from the cost profile of a teaching-intensive business school. Similarly, differences in PhD positions and research-training allocations may partly reflect established research environments, doctoral-training capacity, external funding opportunities, and infrastructure-dependent doctoral projects.

The analysis therefore does not treat higher base funding, infrastructure support, or research-training allocations as evidence of unequal governance influence on their own. These differences become analytically relevant only when interpreted together with the faculty's centralized allocation model, the documented use of strategic discretion, and the contrast between how different resource claims were framed and converted into developmental capacity. The relevant finding is not simply that the business school received fewer research-training positions. Rather, the professional-education mission generated substantial teaching output and documented staffing pressures, but these outputs were less consistently translated into long-term developmental resources.

National funding rules and university-level strategic pressures may also have shaped the hierarchy observed in the case. The Norwegian funding system formally recognizes both education and research, but internal faculty allocation is not mechanically determined by national indicators. Faculty-level governance mediated national signals through local strategic priorities, allocation principles, and case preparation. Broader university and sector-level pressures, including external funding expectations, research assessment systems, and international competition, may also have made research infrastructure, grant capture, publication activity, and international positioning more readily recognizable as strategic priorities than teaching-intensive or professional-education contributions.

The documentary material also contains evidence that complicates a simple governance-lock-in interpretation. Teaching and accreditation concerns were not ignored; strategy documents, staffing submissions, and consultation processes recognized them. The business school also participated in formal governance arenas and obtained some support for program development and staffing. These observations show that the case was not one of exclusion or complete marginalization. They support the article's narrower claim: formal recognition and participation did not translate into comparable influence over strategic attention, evaluative criteria, and developmental resources. Governance lock-in is therefore interpreted as a cumulative pattern that interacted with cost structures, funding dependencies, and external pressures, rather than as a single faculty-level cause of all observed differences.

Theoretical contribution

The study contributes to institutional-logics research by refining how coexistence is understood in organizational settings marked by enduring plurality. Existing research has shown how multiple institutional logics may coexist, compete, be selectively coupled, or become hybridized within the same organization (Besharov and Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache and Santos, 2013; Reay and Hinings, 2009). The present study specifies a condition that may occur within continued coexistence: formally present logics may become unequally influential.

Dominance is therefore conceptualized not as the absence of plurality, but as an unequal relationship among logics that remain organizationally present. This refinement distinguishes formal presence from substantive influence over strategic attention, evaluative criteria, leadership priorities, and developmental resources.

The study also shows how governance processes can produce and sustain such unequal coexistence. Representational asymmetry, agenda formation, leadership-background continuity, and allocation and evaluation shaped the relative influence of locally expressed research-oriented and professional-education mission logics. These processes did not eliminate the less influential logic. Instead, they made one logic more consequential for defining strategic priorities, interpreting organizational needs, and allocating resources for future development. The contribution is therefore to show how governance arrangements, through recurrent governance processes, can organize hierarchy within plurality without formal exclusion or displacement.

Governance lock-in specifies this governance-based form of reproduction. The concept is not intended to replace established concepts such as institutional maintenance, organizational inertia, structural power, or path dependence. Rather, it identifies a narrower mechanism: how formally inclusive governance arrangements can repeatedly convert mission diversity into unequal organizational influence. Governance lock-in does not require a full path-dependence argument based on critical junctures, increasing returns, or irreversibility. Its distinctive value lies in explaining an intermediate condition: formal plurality combined with durable asymmetry in organizational influence.

The findings also respond to calls for greater precision in using institutional logics in higher education research (Cai and Mountford, 2022; Mountford and Cai, 2023). The study does not treat the identified logics as fixed societal-level categories or as inherent properties of disciplinary units. Instead, it reconstructs locally expressed mission logics from documentary claims about academic value, legitimacy, resource needs, and organizational development. This separates institutional-logics analysis from a descriptive comparison of activity profiles.

Finally, the study connects institutional-logics research to higher education research on missions, strategic positioning, and institutional diversity (Frølich and Stensaker, 2021; Morphew et al., 2018; Seeber et al., 2019). Whereas much of this literature examines missions and profiles at the institutional or system level, this study shows how mission diversity can become hierarchically ordered within a single multidisciplinary faculty. This intra-faculty perspective is important because formal organizational integration may conceal unequal influence among missions that remain officially recognized.

Contextual scope and analytical transferability

The findings should be interpreted in light of the Norwegian institutional context. The case concerns a publicly funded university operating within a national system that combines institutional autonomy, public block funding, and performance-related indicators for both education and research. The specific allocation patterns, leadership structures, and resource dependencies documented in the case are therefore specific to this context. They cannot be generalized statistically to all multidisciplinary faculties or to higher education systems with different funding regimes, stronger tuition dependence, or different legal governance arrangements.

The study's contribution lies instead in analytical transferability. The findings are most relevant for settings where academically diverse units are placed under common faculty-level governance, where authority over strategy and resources is centralized, and where teaching- and research-related outputs are evaluated through different indicators and translated through internal allocation models. Under such conditions, formal recognition of multiple missions does not necessarily ensure comparable influence over strategic attention and developmental resources.

Comparative higher education research suggests that this challenge is not specific to Norway, although its local expression is shaped by the Norwegian governance and funding context. Universities and higher education systems use different mechanisms to balance research excellence, professional education, regional relevance, and societal engagement, including differentiated institutional types, funding arrangements, governance models, and quality assurance procedures (Frølich and Stensaker, 2021; Golden et al., 2021; Morphew et al., 2018; OECD, 2019; Seeber et al., 2019). This study contributes to the literature by showing what may happen when such mission diversity is governed within a single multidisciplinary faculty through shared decision-making and allocation arrangements.

The transferable insight is not that all multidisciplinary faculties will reproduce the same hierarchy, or that professional-education missions are necessarily disadvantaged. Rather, the case identifies conditions under which unequal influence may become stabilized: academically diverse units are placed under centralized faculty governance; strategic attention is unevenly distributed across missions; leadership and case-preparation structures draw disproportionately on some disciplinary experiences; and internal allocation models translate recognized activities into different levels of developmental capacity. Under such conditions, formal inclusion may coexist with unequal influence.

Although the analysis focuses on faculty-level governance, the observed hierarchy should not be interpreted as generated solely within the faculty. Faculty governance operated within broader university and sector-level pressures, including research assessment systems, external funding expectations, international competition, and strategic ambitions linked to research visibility. Such pressures may make research infrastructure, grant capture, publication activity, and international positioning more readily recognizable as strategic priorities than teaching-intensive or professional-education contributions. The case therefore illustrates how faculty-level governance processes may mediate and amplify broader institutional pressures, rather than operate independently.

Policy and management implications

The findings have practical implications for designing and reviewing multidisciplinary faculties. Centralization may improve coordination, but common governance arrangements can also have differentiated effects when applied to units with different cost structures, output profiles, professional obligations, and resource dependencies. Senior leaders should therefore assess not only whether units are formally included in governance structures, but also whether representation, agenda formation, leadership and case-preparation structures, and allocation and evaluation reflect different missions and contributions.

Four review questions follow from the analysis. First, does representation reflect the organizational weight, mission, and activity profile of the units being governed? This question follows from the finding that formal inclusion does not necessarily prevent representational asymmetry. Second, are research, education, accreditation, and professional engagement all treated as strategic concerns, or are they implicitly ordered so that some are framed as developmental while others are treated as operational? This question follows from the role of agenda formation in producing differential strategic attention. Third, do leadership and case-preparation structures draw on a sufficiently broad range of disciplinary experiences and mission perspectives? This question follows from the finding that leadership-background patterns may shape the range of perspectives represented in priority assessment. Fourth, do allocation and evaluation recognize differences in how academic units generate value, require resources, and incur costs? This question follows from the finding that resource-allocation principles can translate differences in strategic recognition into unequal developmental capacity.

The analysis does not imply that resources should be distributed mechanically according to student numbers, or that research-intensive activities should not receive strategic support. It does imply that redistribution should be transparent, justified, and assessed against the faculty's full range of missions. Mission-sensitive indicators are needed to make teaching capacity, accreditation requirements, professional engagement, research infrastructure, external funding, and doctoral training visible in governance decisions.

Safeguards for mission diversity are particularly important in centralized multidisciplinary faculties. Such safeguards may include explicit criteria for strategic redistribution, regular review of representation in decision-making bodies, assessment of whether different academic missions receive comparable strategic attention, review of leadership and case-preparation structures, and allocation models that distinguish between operational volume, developmental needs, and long-term institutional capacity. The purpose is not to eliminate strategic choice, but to ensure that it remains visible, contestable, and aligned with the faculty's full mission.

Limitations and future research

This study is based on a single longitudinal case. The design enables detailed analysis of governance processes over time, but limits claims about how widespread the identified pattern is across institutions, disciplines, and national higher education systems. Comparative research is therefore needed to examine whether representational asymmetry, agenda formation, leadership-background continuity, and allocation and evaluation operate similarly in other merged or multidisciplinary faculties.

The analysis relies primarily on documentary material. Documents are well suited to tracing formal decisions, stated justifications, agenda formation, leadership recruitment, and resource allocation, but they provide only indirect access to informal negotiations, interpersonal dynamics, and actors’ subjective interpretations. Interviews and observations could therefore extend the analysis by examining how governance arrangements are experienced, contested, and adapted in practice.

Future research should examine the conditions under which governance lock-in is produced, weakened, or avoided. Comparative studies could vary cases along several theoretically relevant dimensions: national governance and funding context; degree of internal centralization; faculty composition; allocation-model design; and the composition of leadership, decision-making, and case-preparation structures. These dimensions would make it possible to distinguish case-specific resource patterns from more general governance processes through which mission diversity becomes either balanced or hierarchically ordered.

More specifically, future studies could compare systems with different balances between block funding, performance-based indicators, tuition income, and strategic agreements. They could also compare faculties where authority over staffing, budgets, and strategy is concentrated at faculty level with faculties where such authority is delegated to departments. Further comparative work should examine how internal allocation models weight teaching volume, external research income, doctoral training, infrastructure costs, accreditation requirements, and professional engagement.

Comparative research should also include cases where multidisciplinary faculties have developed more balanced arrangements. Such cases could clarify which governance safeguards prevent formal mission diversity from becoming unequal organizational influence.

Conclusion

This study has shown how formally inclusive governance can stabilize unequal coexistence among academic missions. In the case examined, the professional-education mission logic remained present in faculty structures and decision-making processes, but exercised less influence over representation, strategic attention, leadership-background patterns, and the translation of recognized outputs into developmental resources. The resulting pattern is conceptualized as governance lock-in: the cumulative stabilization of unequal influence through recurrent governance processes.

The study therefore demonstrates that common governance arrangements are not neutral when applied to units with different missions, activity profiles, cost structures, and resource dependencies. For multidisciplinary faculties, the central governance challenge is not only to coordinate diverse academic units, but to ensure that different forms of academic contribution can be recognized as strategically significant. Periodic review of representation, agenda formation, leadership and case-preparation structures, and allocation and evaluation can help such faculties combine organizational coordination with meaningful mission diversity.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Isabel Pinho, University of Aveiro, Portugal

Reviewed by: David Fowler, Louisiana State University Shreveport College of Business, United States

Zsuzsanna Pálffy, Széchenyi István University, Hungary