Coping with managerialism: academics' responses to conflicting institutional logics in business schools

This article discusses the implications of conflicting institutional logics guiding business schools and builds a conceptual model on how such conflicts manifest in academics' identity work. Four coping strategies for conflicting institutional logics by Pache and Santos (2010) known as compromise, avoidance, defiance and manipulation are discussed in how academics have developed coping strategies to manage their identities. Various coupling strategies are identified as part of academics' identity work mechanisms in how they simultaneously accommodate and resist some of the practices and goals of conflicting institutional logics. Along with this process, academics are found not only to engage with traditional coupling processes (decoupling and selective coupling) but also with two new types of couplings, mental decoupling and manifest decoupling, which are used for developing and maintaining a dual identity to manage the conflicting demands of institutional logics.