The Matrix of Academic Organizing

The aim of this paper is twofold. It firstly aims to account for the Matrix of Excellence, Funding and Omnipresence characterizing academic organizations, and more precisely their constitutive three dimensions: managerial discourse, formal and parallel structures (Friedberg, 2012). Secondly, drawing on the metaphor of shadow organizing (Gherardi et al., 2017), we will illustrate some informal coping mechanisms occurring in the parallel structure of academic organizations. We will then discuss how these coping mechanisms are or are not being translated in managerial discourse and inscribed in formal structures.