What trumps strategy?: a comparative case study of strategy texts of city colleges in Ontario from 1995 to 2005
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The period 1995 to 2005 was one of significant turbulence for Ontario colleges, marked by increasing globalization, immigration, disruptions in the labour market, new technologies and dramatic reductions in government operating grants. The thesis studies how colleges responded to those strategic challenges, and finds that (1) the strategies of colleges were more alike than different; (2) the strategic content of the texts was relatively weak; and (3) attention to the organizational field was limited. The research applies nine key concepts from organizational theory—resource dependency, markets, value chain, differentiation, organizational field, alliances, organizational learning, technology and leadership—to the analysis of eight strategy texts, and triangulates the findings with 23 in-depth interviews and a survey of 338 college staff. The research draws on institutional theory, which argues that individual institutions and organizational fields evolve because of the interaction of social-political forces that govern their sector, and set the standards for legitimacy in the field. The research methodology included extensive use of the qualitative research tool NVivo. The thesis is a comparative case study, conducted in two phases. The first phase examined the official strategy texts. The second phase included interviews and surveys in four of the participating colleges. The study finds that Ontario colleges are subject to the monopsonistic power (a single buyer) of the government, to the point that monopsony trumps strategy. It also identifies three corollary effects: (1) monopsony trumps differentiation; (2) the quest for legitimacy trumps strategy; and (3) the local imperative trumps strategy. The thesis concludes with four propositions, which suggest that colleges (1) are becoming more strategic over time; (2) should improve the way they do strategic planning; (3) should put more emphasis on the concept of emergent strategy; and (4) should invest more in strategic planning at the level of the organizational field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".