Creating a New Management University

Tracking the Strategy of Singapore Management University (SMU) in Singapore (1997–2019/20)

Howard Thomas, Alex Wilson, Michelle P. Lee

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000606423
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Education Administration

This book provides an in-depth exploration of one of the most significant success stories of the development of an entrepreneurial university in recent times as well as its role within society and the economy. Written by leading business school Dean and scholar, Howard Thomas, and Alex Wilson and Michelle Lee, the book tracks the genesis of the idea of a third local university in Singapore to its fruition as Singapore Management University (SMU). It provides important insight and lessons for senior university and business school leaders, as well as regional and national governments.

The increasing emphasis on the importance of innovative, entrepreneurial universities for social and economic growth has prompted this review of the strategy and impact of SMU. The book addresses the strategic evolution of SMU itself, from its origins as a single business school, into a multi-school, social science-focused school of management. It examines whether it has fulfilled its promise as an entrepreneurial university and a change agent in the context of Singapore's strong economic growth and educational strategy. More broadly, it explores how investment in education, and entrepreneurial universities such as SMU, can facilitate and enhance economic growth.

University leadership teams, policy analysts, faculty and students of entrepreneurship education, education management and policy in general, and business education in particular, will find this book an invaluable insight into building a genuinely entrepreneurial university.

Part I The Study of the Strategic Processes of Founding, Evolution and Transformation of a New Management University Singapore Management University (SMU)

Introduction The Logic of the Study A Processual Analysis of the Founding and Strategic Evolution of SMU

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017844-2

This book examines the evolution of the Singapore Management University (SMU) from a strategic management perspective – it maps the genesis of the idea of a third local university to the founding of SMU in 2000, and finally to its current day profile and ambitions. Hence, it tracks the strategy, strategic development pathways, and cycles of change in SMU by identifying patterns in the stream of organisational actions over a 20-year period. Note that we define strategic management here as “a process that deals with the entrepreneurial work of the organisation, with organisational renewal and growth, and, more particularly, with developing the strategy which is to guide the organisation’s operations” (Schendel & Hofer, 1979, p. 11).

Singapore’s economic and political strategy sets the opening scenes of the book and provides the environmental context and framework within which we identify how Singapore’s educational investments were designed and developed. We then explore the logic of SMU’s origins and founding principles and its evolution in the context of the more than five decades of Singapore’s growth as a modern economy and society. This book also examines the trajectory of growth and performance outcomes of SMU, from a university that started with a single school – the School of Business – to a multi-school, social science-focused university of management.

Of strong interest is also whether SMU bears the characteristics of an innovative, entrepreneurial university in its development (Clark, 1998; Sporn, 2001). We examine the evidence from our processual analysis of strategic change and present our observations and findings from a pluralistic perspective (Bowman, 1990) in Chapter 9.

The Motivation for This Book

The lead author of this book, Howard Thomas, accepted the unexpected opportunity in the most recent decade of his career (2009–2018) to be the Dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) and LKCSB Distinguished Professor of Strategic Management at SMU. He has described this as a thoroughly enjoyable and continuing experience (he is currently Professor Emeritus at SMU), which has afforded him the opportunity not only to explore the different cultures and contexts in the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) countries but to also develop a deep understanding of the evolution of Singapore and SMU.

Prior to SMU, Howard Thomas was Dean at Warwick Business School (WBS) in Warwick University, a university that has been described as having an entrepreneurial culture (see Fraguiero and Thomas’ (2011) and Clark’s (1998) description of “The Warwick Way”). He was also previously Dean of the Business School at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Foundation Professor of Strategic Management and Research Dean at the then newly founded Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and a founding faculty member and the first director of the doctoral programme at the London Business School (LBS). He has been an advisory board member at the business schools of Vienna University of Economics and Business (VU), Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), UIUC Urbana-Champaign, WBS, and University of Birmingham.

It should be noted that WBS, LBS, AGSM, GIBS, and SMU were all relatively new business schools in expanding business school markets in the UK, Australia, Africa, and Singapore. It is because of this varied experience in start-up schools that a strong research interest in understanding how new, innovative business schools become successful was developed.

Insightful Conceptual Approaches for Examining Strategic Processes

Apart from the lead author’s experience as a Dean of business schools in Europe, Asia, and North America, he has maintained a record of scholarship in the fields of decision analysis and strategic management. Three of his more influential colleagues in these fields have been Henry Mintzberg (McGill University), Joe Porac (Stern School, New York University), and Andrew Pettigrew (Said Business School, Oxford University). The characteristic that links these three scholars together is their interest in researching strategic decision-making processes from a range of alternative perspectives: Mintzberg, from the perspective of strategic decision-making as an emergent realised process as opposed to a deliberately planned process (Mintzberg, 1978); Porac, from the perspective of strategising as a sense-making, cognitive process; and Pettigrew (1992) from the perspective of the processual analysis of strategy development, which involves attempting to catch strategic “reality in flight” by closely examining strategic processes and outcomes over time. In particular, Mintzberg’s work on tracking strategies has involved studies of industries as diverse as automobiles, supermarkets, and architectural partnerships. Porac’s (2011) studies of the Scottish knitwear industry illustrated clearly the presence of cognitive communities in that industry, which included cognitive “mindsets” and sense-making beliefs about markets and consumer preferences in the industry. Pettigrew’s work has involved tracking strategies in major companies, such as ICI and the National Health Service (NHS), a major public service organisation in the UK.

In all these cases, several basic steps are normally undertaken in examining the strategy-making process. They include data gathering about the chronology of the organisation(s) and its actions, identifying patterns (strategic pathways) in a stream of decisions and actions over defined periods of time (cycles of change), analysing both secondary data and data from interviews with key individuals in each of these time periods, and finally synthesising all sources of evidence to draw conclusions about organisational leadership, strategies, patterns of strategic change, and performance outcomes as the organisation evolves through time.

We draw on these approaches in our examination of SMU’s strategies and performance over the more than 20 years of its development.

Theoretical and Analytical Frameworks Adopted in This Study

It is important at the outset to outline the rationale for the theoretical and analytic frameworks used in the conduct of our research.

This research addresses the relative scarcity of studies of strategic change and leadership in management education that adopt a processual perspective (a notable exception being Fraguiero and Thomas’s (2011) study of strategic leadership in the business school). Crucially, it provides insight into linkages between the leadership and strategic management fields. Many leadership scholars disconnect leadership from its organisational context and focus mainly on “who leaders are” and “what leaders do”, but not on how strategic leadership works as a strategising process embedded within the organisational context, culture, content, processes, and the external environment. Therefore, we propose a broad analytical framework for our research as shown in Figure I.1.

Figure I.1 Analytical Framework (Based on Pettigrew [1985, 1990, 1992, 1997, 2012] and Mintzberg [1978, 1979, 2007])

Long Description for Figure I.1

A framework containing three text boxes labelled context, content, and processes. Context is comprised of inner and outer context. Outer context concerns socioeconomic/academic conditions, research funding, competition and corporations, government and civil society. Inner context concerns core beliefs and values, resource availability, power and politics, and incentives and career structure. Context connects to strategy content. Content concerns strategic initiatives or programmes, research capabilities, and service activities. Context also connects to strategy processes. Strategy processes concerns the vision, direction or intent of an organisation, communication, alignment, and organisational performance.

This perspective views strategic leadership as an adaptive and flexible process embedded in an organisational and environmental context, drawing together insights from leadership and strategising frameworks. We therefore regard strategy as the interconnection between contextual factors, (leadership) processes, and (strategy) content. In adopting this viewpoint, we are very close to the theoretical positions advanced by Pettigrew (1985, 1990, 1992, 1997, 2012) and Mintzberg (1978, 1979, 2007) as shown in Table I.1 where we identify and develop potential theoretical lenses for this study. Indeed, a core challenge for theorising strategy has been to account for how macro (or meso) level entities such as organisations or strategies come to be in relation to the processes or practices of leaders, managers, or any number of organisational actors (e.g., Johnson et al., 2007; Whittington, 2006). The challenge to link micro- and macro-organisational elements in strategy research has produced a variety of innovative theoretical approaches under the umbrella of process and practice studies in the strategy literature.¹ This presents a variety of theoretical lenses to choose from, which, in turn, influences our treatment of data and how we conceptualise the strategy of SMU in this study. Table I.1 summarises the theoretical approach taken: First and foremost, we are interested in understanding how strategies and the organisation change over time and how (and why) they have evolved. Secondly, to guide our study we adopt an overarching philosophy of processual analysis in our research (after Pettigrew, 1990). Thirdly, with a guiding philosophy in place, we address choices and debates in three areas: A: What constitutes strategy – adopting a definition directs our research in what to look for empirically, B: What approaches to use for theorising from process data, and C: What unit of analysis to adopt. Our approach establishes strategy as an emerging phenomenon, as described in column A of Table I.1, and then draws on various approaches for theorising, as outlined in column B. As Johnson et al. (2007) note, the strategy process can be theorised from different units of analysis, including organisations and individuals. Thus, column C indicates a final choice about the unit of analysis in our study, which is the adoption of the perspective of the ‘change process school’ and maintaining the organisation level as both unit and level of analysis. This is as opposed to the perspective of the ‘strategy as practice’ school, which focuses on how strategy is constructed through managerial activity rather than how firms change (Whittington, 1996).

Table I.1 Developing a Theoretical Lens for Studying Strategy Processes in SMU

Developing a Theoretical Lens for Studying Strategy Processes in SMU
In essence, process research is focused on understanding how things change over time and how they evolve (Van de Ven & Huber, 1990)
↓
Philosophy of processual analysis (after contextualism (Pettigrew, 1990)): study of organisations as unit of analysis study organisational processes directly and select methods which allow the researcher to ‘see’ strategy processes in their data data analysis demands that researchers plunge directly into organisational processes collect fine-grained qualitative data – often but not always, in real time attempt to extract theory from the ground up (Bower, 1970; Pettigrew & Van de Ven, 1992)
↓
A. Strategy as an emergent pattern of decisions	B. Approaches for theorising from process data	C. Change Process School: Organisations as the unit of analysis
Central theme Strategy formation as the interplay between a dynamic environment and bureaucratic momentum with leadership and decision-making mediating between the two forces. Mintzberg’s research (1978, 1979) on the process of strategy formation shifts the focus of strategy research whereby – “strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions”. Patterns of strategic change Strategy formation (over time) follows important patterns in organisations, no...