Universities are intimately intertwined with their environments. They are subjects of a wide variety of expectations from external parties, and rely on meeting these expectations to maintain funding, trust and access to valuable infrastructure and information. Research has shown that universities are highly reactive to these pressures, both adapting to and attempting to influence their external realities. Part of this adaptation has taken the form of increasingly complex internal management structures, with growing management teams, new groups of support staff, and hybridisation of both roles and organisational principles.

This chapter examines what happens to these complex structures when put to the test by disruptive crises: Which interests, which actors and which values take priority – and what comes out on the other side? The theoretical approach is based on a combined lens of resource dependence theory and crisis management theory, applied to a material of 21 interviews at three different Swedish higher education institutions.

The results show a breakdown of established pathways during crisis conditions, where the complex structures aimed at anchoring, securing acceptance and reaching consensus are set aside in favour of speed, efficiency, and security – illustrating a disconnect between vision and implementation generated by the tension between fluid, hybrid conceptualisations and the binary system they appear in.