In comparison with other European countries such as Great Britain or the Netherlands, Germany is a latecomer with respect to reforms of its university system, although complaints about problems started to accumulate as early as the 1960s. Some reforms in the early 1970s did not really improve the situation. On the contrary, for 20 years their failure discredited further efforts of reform and reinforced those who claimed that German universities were basically ‘healthy’ were they only to receive better funding from the state. Although German re-unification seemed to briefly open a window of opportunity for an overall change in higher education structures through the necessary reform of East German universities, it did not help reform-oriented actors much (Mayntz, 1994). With respect to universities, as in other societal sectors in East Germany, the enormous time-pressure to come to terms with the installation of a working system allowed only the substitution of politically discredited persons; those West-German professors who acted as temporary or permanent agents of renewal did nothing more than implement the West German status quo.
Serious efforts of reform started just a few years ago, thus change is still at the very beginning. Therefore, reliable interpretations of what is happening and predictions of what will happen are difficult to ascertain. We shall nevertheless attempt to give an overview of the German situation. After a very brief description of basic structures of the German university system, reflections on overall societal changes, which brought with them new demands on universities since the 1960s, are given. We then concentrate on the governance regime of the German university system and show that the traditional regime no longer fitted these demands. With regard to the process of attempts to install the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) regime, two questions have to be asked:
Will it be successfully and completely implemented in some years, or will it be stopped at a certain point by strong resistance – and if so, what would the mixture of the traditional regime and the NPM regime look like?
Is the NPM regime an adequate way to meet the new demands that universities face in teaching as well as in research – or are critics correct in claiming that it enforces management principles from the economy, which do not fit the public sector in general, and universities in particular?
We shall raise these questions not only with respect to the general governance structures of the German university system, but also with respect to two “tracers” of the effects of these governance changes: modes of research funding and doctoral training.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schimank, U., Lange, S. (2009). Germany: A Latecomer to New Public Management. In: Paradeise, C., Reale, E., Bleiklie, I., Ferlie, E. (eds) University Governance. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9515-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9515-3_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-8637-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-9515-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)