Study Of The Strategy Management For Disciplinary Development In Universities With Industrial Characteristics

Universities with industrial characteristics (UICs) belong to a very important and special category in the higher education system of China. So far the academic circle has not reached an agreement on the definition of UICs and even the name itself. However, UICs have borne great responsibilities ever since their existence and made important contributions to the economic development and improvement of the higher education system in China. But since the implementation of market economy and the reform of higher education system, the development for UICs has faced many difficulties, which are shown in the following three aspects. First, since UICs are no longer administered by the original industrial departments, they are in the predicament that the channels for getting resources to run the universities have been blocked, which has a negative impact on the universities’development. Second, due to the restrictions and influences of multiple factors, the disciplinary development in UICs has shown the trend of pursuing excessively being "uniform, complete, and grand", which to different extents has exerted influences on the competitiveness of their key disciplines and the maintaining of disciplinary characteristics. Third, the development of related industries has a great impact on UICs, and especially in the case of declining industries, they would have significant negative impacts on related universities.Agricultural universities are representative in UICs. From the perspectives of Resource-Based View (RVB), competitive advantage theory and ecological niche theory, this dissertation aims to conduct an experimental study of the status quo of disciplinary development in UICs with a case study of four agricultural universities directly under the Ministry of Education and a comparison between the four universities and a comprehensive university, and the following three findings are generated. First, compared with the key comprehensive university, UICs are not short of subject resources in its major disciplines, the capacities of UICs to obtain resources are basically in the same section with the comprehensive university. Second, through experimental analysis, the major inputs in key disciplines of UICs are not closely related to the major outputs, which shows that the subject resources have not been utilized in an efficient way and the outputs should be higher than the current level. Third, the traditional major disciplines in UICs are strong in terms of academic competitiveness, but enjoy no absolute market competitiveness, and the newly emerged disciplines in the past twenty years do better than traditional major disciplines in terms of market competitiveness. The three findings indicate that the subject resources of UICs are not efficiently utilized and in their strategies for disciplinary development the improvement of traditional major disciplines’ market competitiveness has been neglected.According to the status quo of UICs, this dissertation first analyzes and summarizes the experience of disciplinary development in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands, and then on the basis of the current situation in China makes several proposals. For example, China should set forth related supporting policies and regulations and foster related higher education agencies, and UICs should establish related allies.As for how to improve the strategies for disciplinary development in UICs, the dissertation proposes several important hypotheses, and based on which builds its analytical framework:(1) The relationship between discipline and competitiveness. Disciplines in UICs fall into traditional major disciplines and newly emerged ones, while competitiveness in UICs comprises academic competitiveness and market competitiveness. For raditional major disciplines and newly emerged ones, each has its own advantages in terms of academic competitiveness or market competitiveness, but never both. For instance, agricultural disciplines, the traditional major disciplines in agricultural universities, enjoy strong academic competitiveness but comparatively weak market competitiveness; while before the newly emerged disciplines in agricultural universities develop into new major disciplines, they enjoy certain market competitiveness but no academic competitiveness.(2) The relationship between discipline and resources. Discipline resources can be divided into unique resources and general resources. Disciplinary development requires certain resource input, and in the meantime it produces certain resource output. For the development of traditional major disciplines, in addition to the input of general resources, unique resources should also be invested, and their development can promote the increase of both general resources and unique resources. While the development of newly emerged disciplines only requires the input of general resources, they only produce general resources.(3) The relationship between disciplinary competitiveness and the transformation of disciplinary resources. If the board of UICs includes a part of newly emerged disciplines into the focuses of their disciplinary development and keeps investing unique resources into them, it is possible that the newly emerged disciplines can transform into new major disciplines after certain stage of development, and they can bring unique resources to the UIC in question.On the basis of the above-mentioned analyses and experimental studies, this dissertation "suits its methods to the situation" and proposes the "incline--symbiosisi-ntegration--improvement" strategy for the disciplinary development in UICs. In this strategy, the strategic goal of "disciplinary incline" aims at maintaining academic competitiveness of the traditional major disciplines;In this strategy, the strategic goal of "disciplinary symbiosis" aims at breaking the resource restraint of UICs and gradually enhancing UICs’ capacity of absorbing and possessing market resources while maintaining the reliable academic competitiveness of traditional major disciplines; the strategic goal of "disciplinary integration" aims at fostering newly emerged disciplines and interdisciplines within UICs through the integration of disciplines, and promoting the development of newly emerged disciplines, especially creating favorable conditions for the further development of disciplines with great potential; the strategic goal of "disciplinary improvement" aims at strengthening both the academic competitiveness and the market competitiveness of disciplines, eliminating hidden obstacles for the development of UICs, providing the inner drive for the long-term and benign development and laying a solid foundation for the disciplinary development of UICs.According to the above-mentioned four strategic goals, UICs should adopt multi-level models for implementing the strategic goals. For maintaining the academic competitiveness of trditional major disciplines, different development strategies should be adopted, and the key to which is to efficiently utilize different disciplinary resources, promote the cooperation of industry, education and research, and commercialize research findings by using unique disciplinary resources. For the newly emerged disciplines, the "copy" development model should be adopted at the initial stage to seek development by utilizing market demand and general resources. Meanwhile, for those newly emerged disciplines that have the potential to grow and mature, the "investing unique resources" development model should be adopted to help them grow into new major disciplines. In addition, the right ecological niche should be positioned between traditional major disciplines and newly emerged disciplines to promote the development of UICs in a mutually beneficial way.The author finds that the key to the development of major disciplines in UICs lies in the maintenance of their competitiveness, especially to utilize the unique resources efficiently, which has proved the core viewpoint in RVB. While for the development of minor disciplines in UICs, the situation is more complex and different strategies should be adopted under different circumstances. Generally speaking, low-cost strategy should be adopted for the development of newly emerged minor disciplines; innovation strategy should be adopted for the development of mature minor disciplines that have interdisciplinary features to make them develop into new major disciplines.In the end, this dissertation also analyzes the external development conditions for UICs, especially focusing on the role of governments and higher education agencies, in the hope of establishing a favorable external environment for the development of UICs. Only when both the internal and external environments are mutually beneficial and moving forward in the right direction can the long-term, stable and reliable disciplinary development in UICs be guaranteed.