Playing with perpetuity? How universities are strategising time

This paper examines the (pro)active role which higher education institutions are taking in navigating the complex temporalities they are facing. The concept of chronostrategies is introduced as a way to conceptualise the ensemble of framings through which organisations employ different temporalities – manifestly and latently – to their advantage and therefore shape the relationship with their relevant environments. Empirically, this research is based on 44 agreement contracts between Austrian public universities and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research, tracked over two contractual periods. Presenting and describing four different chronostrategic approaches distilled from the data, the paper makes a case for time being a key factor in governance and management schemes, proposing to increase the use of temporal lenses in higher education research.