The Place Makes the Teaching! Linking Institutional Settings to Unitarist HRM Education in Austria

The adoption of unitarism in human resource management (HRM) education remains little understood, especially in countries with corporatist traditions for managing work and employment issues. We use a mixed-methods approach to explain why teachers deliver unitarist courses in Austria. The quantitative analysis of 452 course descriptions from 27 higher education providers highlights the relevance of the institutional setting for the course frame and shows that unitarism is particularly common in Fachhochschulen (universities of applied science) compared to universities. Subsequent ethnographic research reveals two ways how institutional settings drive teachers' personal decisions for unitarist teaching. In Fachhochschulen, unitarism results from compliance with management pressures and external governance. In universities, unitarism is a by-product of prioritizing scientific reputation and coping with administrative burden. We conclude that in Austria, despite its corporatist tradition, deregulation in the higher education sector facilitates unitarism in HRM education, especially through the creation of Fachhochschulen.