Environment analysis in university management: an outline from social systems theory

Abstract

Throughout the last decades, Latin American universities have strengthen their integration into the global university system, which has implied radical transformations and trends toward complexification. This essay comprehends the university as a complex organizational system, which reproduces itself through decision-making. From this perspective, it is set out that an observation of the environment deploying institutional research is a fundamental tool to neutralize potential disintegration processes which could threaten university when faced with increasingly uncertain contexts as the Latin American one. In this sense, the following premises are taken into account: (1) traditional management models presume a stable environment in the future, (2) such schemes reduce the university's capacity to react to external changes, and besides, it may derive into the routinization of the decision-making process, (3) in uncertain contexts, the possibility of adapt/respond to the environment is essential for the institutional sustainability, and (4) that capacity only exist if the decision-making process involves an environment analysis. The argumentation is carried out using the Chilean university subsystem as analysis case. The conclusions suggest that to operate efficiently in the actual context, universities require to transit to evidence-based management models, since they offer a greater capacity to reduce the increasing complexity of the general and competitive university’s environments.