COVID-19 as a Social Catalyst for Organizational and Management

Dysfunctions in Higher Education

Galina Makovich

and Sergei Arzhanukhin

Ural Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Yekaterinburg, Russia

Russian Academy of National Economy under the President of the Russian Federation, Ural Institute of Management,

Yekaterinburg, Russia

Keywords: Mobilization Digitalization, Mobilization Model of Informatization, Mobilization Measures for

Informatization, Organizational and Managerial Dysfunctions and Pathologies, Structure of Human Capital.

Abstract: Based on the method of modeling abstract ideologized objects and the method of participatory observation,

the paper identified organizational and managerial dysfunctions and pathologies in the development of

modern higher education, which manifested themselves in the situation of the coronavirus pandemic with the

declared mobilization informatization of higher education in Russia. Dysfunctions manifested themselves in

absence of conceptual certainty of the final result, orientation towards quantitative rather than qualitative

results, decentralization of responsibility for the quality of the result, and the absence of resource calculations

for project implementation. The paper shows that the mobilization model of informatization was not

implemented, but mobilization measures were taken in an emergency situation of forced self-isolation of the

actors of the educational process. In essence, the managerial interest was reduced to adapting the available

standard analog materials and teaching methods to the digital mode of operation. Education followed the path

of socio-cultural and socio-structural simplification, launching mechanisms for adapting education models

that preceded the crisis associated with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. This became a stabilizing factor

in the situation of the coronavirus pandemic, but sharply raised the question of Russian state priorities, among

which the key is stability to the detriment of development.

INTRODUCTION

COVID-19 has led to a change in the priorities of

social development, to a change in social institutions,

roles and statuses of the social structure. Among the

priority tasks of this period was an intensive transition

to digital education, which necessitated the active

development of online courses, use of online

platforms, and formation of a new digital space. The

mode of mobilization digitalization was launched.

Mobilization digitalization in education shall be

understood as a situation when key resources are

concentrated on transferring the learning process and

the process of administering the educational process

from analog to digital as the only opportunity to

continue the activities of an educational organization

in a situation of forced self-isolation of students.



https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0565-915Х

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3066-5428

The purpose of the paper is to identify

organizational and managerial dysfunctions in the

development of modern higher education at the

present stage of its development. The object of the

study is the system of management of higher

education in Russia, the subject is the functions and

dysfunctions (norms and pathologies) in the

management of processes in the system of higher

education in Russia.

The methods used in the paper are theoretical, the

method of modeling abstract and idealized objects,

the method of participatory observation, sociological

analysis and analysis of statistical data.

The theoretical basis of the study was the papers

devoted to the analysis of social crises (IMShaluf, F.

Ahmadun, A. Mat Said, A. M. Osipov, R. Khan), the

study of digital transformation processes (E. I.

Leuven, A. B. Suslov, A. Prokhorov, L. Konik),

254

Makovich, G. and Arzhanukhin, S.

COVID-19 as a Social Catalyst for Organizational and Management Dysfunctions in Higher Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0011118800003439

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Scientiﬁc and Practical Conference "COVID-19: Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals" (RTCOV 2021), pages 254-259

ISBN: 978-989-758-617-0

identifying the characteristics of the COVID-19

coronavirus pandemic as a social phenomenon

(N.Kh. Gafiatulina, V.V. Kasyanov, P.S. Samygin,

S.I. Samygin). The methodological basis for the study

of organizational dysfunctions was the theory

developed in the study by N.N. Masyuk,

M.A. Bushueva, N.A. Mosolova.

The starting point is the theory of cyclical phases

of the crisis in education, according to which the

crisis presupposes such stages as: 1) an emergency, a

sudden and chaotic event, a disruption in the

functioning of a system or organization; 2) recovery;

3) reconstruction; 4) development; 5)

institutionalization; 6) formation of a post-crisis

institutional education system [10]. The article

analyzes the stages of the crisis in the system of

higher education in Russia.

2 STUDY METHODS

According to Rosstat, at the start of the pandemic, the

number of personal computers used for educational

purposes was 283 units per 1,000 students, of which

241 computers had access to the Internet for the

indicated number of students. The volume of e-

learning courses in universities for bachelor's

programs was 14.9 %, for specialty programs 11.4 %,

for master's programs 12.9 %, and the growth

dynamics over the three years preceding the

coronavirus pandemic was 3-5 percentage points. The

courses taken into account by statistics also include

online training courses located on the Coursera and

Open Education educational platforms, which have

been integrated into the educational process of

universities. Only 9.53 % of young people aged 16-

24 used e-learning courses for education [11].

Therefore, on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic,

the share of e-learning in the higher education system

was extremely small, although there was a tendency

to increase it.

The situation of self-isolation has become a

trigger for the digitalization of higher education.

However, the innovative organizational and

personnel potential of the higher education system

turned out to be unable to fully respond to the

challenges of the time and work in a new digital

paradigm based on information technologies and a

network method of communication between subjects

of the educational process at a qualitatively new level

of interaction. On the personal, individual level, a

significant number of teachers coped with the ever-

increasing volume of digital innovations at the

university, making significant efforts, or did not cope

at all.

At the organizational and managerial level, no

calculations were made of the labor costs of teachers

to fulfill the task of mobilizing digitalization of

education, the design of their working time was not

carried out, which could not be done in the absence of

a clear statement of specific tasks at the level of the

federal center. The managerial processes turned out

to be built unsystematically, fragmentarily, and the

level of managerial competencies of the

administrative apparatus essentially did not allow the

Russian education system to make a qualitative leap

in development. The coronavirus pandemic revealed

organizational, managerial and personnel pathologies

in the development of Russian education and

exacerbated existing dysfunctions.

Solutions to a number of important education

problems that have been postponed for years and did

not feel urgent have been pushed as urgent by the

COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. There was a need

for immediate active actions to implement these

decisions, moreover, in a situation of uncertainty and

taking into account possible risks and threats of an

emergency.

3 STUDY RESULTS

In a situation of mobilization informatization,

changes occur in the disposition of social strata to

each other. The social sphere begins to qualitatively

change according to the interests and needs of

innovative social groups. An innovative social group

is traditionally understood as a group that creates,

assimilates, distributes and uses goods, services,

technologies with new qualities, and it is

characterized by a special, innovative result, process,

quality of management, and organizational culture.

For the transformation of education, both innovative

professional groups and innovative customers of an

educational product and students are significant. A

special kind of innovative social group is an external,

global educational community that has passed the

stage of digitalization of higher education.

The state of social groups - actors of the

educational process is characterized by the action of

such parameters as goal-setting activity of the subject,

technological effectiveness of activity, clear

planning, active coefficient, self-motivation, resource

availability. The difference in professional groups in

the field of education is due to the heterogeneity of

personal resources and value orientations, an

assessment of the inadequacy of the ratio of one's own

COVID-19 as a Social Catalyst for Organizational and Management Dysfunctions in Higher Education

255

contribution to the development of innovative

processes and remuneration for labor, a feeling of

alienation from the results of one's own activities to

develop innovations in education. The innovative

professional core, which has motivational, resource

and activity potential, carried out activities in a

situation of lack of professional and managerial

integration, consolidation regarding the

understanding of the vectors of education

development, in a situation of limited resources. The

decision-making bodies, whose functions are related

to the resource and legal support of the

implementation of the mobilization model of

informatization of education, exercised control over

the implementation of the project according to formal

indicators, focusing their main attention on the

process, and not on the emerging problems of the

formation of a new digital society. In essence, the

managerial interest was not limited to encouraging

the diversity of innovative potential, which would be

a real opportunity for structural changes in education,

but to adapting the existing standard analog materials

and teaching methods to a digital mode of

functioning. In fact, the education system made the

reconstruction phase a key segment of the distance on

the way out of the crisis, and postponed development

tasks to a further perspective, interpreting them as

optional by the quality of its management processes.

Management decision-making bodies have remained

in the old system of values of the industrial, not the

digital age.

Constructive professional innovation turned out to

be constrained, on the one hand, by object factors -

the resource capabilities of both educational

organizations and students, on the other hand, by

subjective factors - the managerial potential of the

education system as a whole and the quality of

managerial decisions made. Education followed the

path of socio-cultural and socio-structural

simplification, launching mechanisms for adapting

"analog" models of education that preceded the crisis

associated with the COVID-19 coronavirus

pandemic. Use of the potential of the past is, of

course, an additional stabilizing factor in a crisis

situation, but the question of Russian state priorities

and key tasks clearly arises: sustainability and

reliability of development. A crisis situation produces

risks and opportunities, and while working to reduce

obvious and priority risks, the system, by missing

development opportunities, inevitably lays the

sources of new crises. Reducing risks was

automatically aimed at arresting the development

vector.

The mobilization model of informatization of

higher education was not implemented, since the

mobilization informatization of education is a state

policy that requires a clear concept, clear

management decisions at the federal level, regulation,

resource infusions, possibly to the detriment of other

activities within the higher education system. The

situation of mobilization informatization requires the

speed of decision-making and the speed of their

implementation, active measures aimed at

overcoming the inertia of all actors in the education

system, including students. Informatization of higher

education presupposes the formation and normative

consolidation of new norms and rules for assessing

and financing the activities of the teaching staff and

administrative staff of universities. In reality, instead

of mobilization informatization in Russian education

in an emergency situation, mobilization measures

were implemented to address immediate, current

tasks in order to preserve the functioning of higher

education organizations to the detriment of its future

development.

A persistent failure to solve a social or

organizational problem indicates dysfunctions in

management or managerial pathology. The creative

development of the category "organizational

pathology" belongs to A. I. Prigozhin and

management consulting specialists united around him

in the 80s of XX century. They described the types of

pathologies and described the mechanism of their

detection [1], [5].

Dysfunction is understood as a deviation from the

norm in the management system, when some

managerial functions fail or large resources are

expended on the implementation of goals [1]. A stable

deviation from the norm in the control system

associated with the failure to achieve goals is a

managerial pathology. The risks of dysfunctions

increase with a significant change in the operating

conditions of the organization and the system as a

whole. COVID-19 has become a social catalyst for

organizational and managerial dysfunction in higher

education.

Diagnostics of the management situation in

solving the problem of mobilization informatization

of higher education showed the presence of several

dysfunctions in education management.

4 RESULT DISCUSSION

Effective management activities since the 10s of the

21st century have been described in terms of project

management, considering project management as a

RTCOV 2021 - II International Scientiﬁc and Practical Conference " COVID-19: Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals

(RTCOV )

256

special type of management activity, which is based

on a pre-developed model of actions to achieve a

specific goal. The digitalization of higher education

and its implementation in a mobilization mode was

supposed to become a federal project that would

make Russian education competitive at the global

level.

Determining the degree of project efficiency at

any level of initiation is impossible without

designating planned quantitative values of the

expected results of projects, without indicators of

economic and social efficiency. Focusing on specific

quantitative target indicators and target standards for

the desired state of the object provides a certainty of

the project goal. In quantitative terms, both the direct

results of the project and the indirect socially

significant results of the project, remote from it in

time, are planned. The effectiveness of the higher

education digitalization project shall be assessed

according to the following indicators:

 financial efficiency – the financial results of the

project, the amount of real money received as a

result of the project, taking into account the

contribution of each project participant,

 budget efficiency – the difference between

budget revenues and expenditures associated

with the implementation of the project,

 national economic efficiency – efficiency that

goes beyond the direct interests of the project

participants [2].

Social and national economic efficiency is of key

importance in the digitalization project of higher

education. Social efficiency is a positive consequence

of the implementation of the project for society (labor

market, employer, specialist graduate), which is

expressed in improving the quality of life while

increasing the volume or supply of new services,

increasing the availability, timeliness and regularity

of their provision. Both social results and social

effects are important, which are usually distant in

time and represent not only direct, but also indirect

socially significant results of the project. The social

effects show the positive results that can occur as a

result of the digitalization of higher education not

only among the immediate beneficiaries, but also in

society as a whole.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has raised

the issue of education as a public good, a stabilizing

factor of society in a situation of social crisis.

Declared as a public good in the Bologna Declaration

and the Federal Law "On Education", higher

education has undergone significant transformations

that have affected its content base. As a result of the

changes that have taken place, instrumental, practical

knowledge, which underlies the formation of

narrowly professional special competencies, have

acquired primary importance in the content of higher

education. Higher education began to focus on a

specific, instrumentally measurable result, which has

a pragmatic, utilitarian value, on the solution of

applied problems that are urgent today. Higher

education has practically turned into corporate

training according to the needs of a specific customer

in a number of cases – industrial groups, a city-

forming enterprise or another key in the region or in

the industry. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic

has become a situation in which there has been an

instant obsolescence of practical skills and abilities; it

showed that this approach to higher education is

flawed and that education itself is primitive.

The basis of this split was the conflict of interests

of the subjects of the educational process in

understanding education as a “public good” and

understanding education as a “service”, i.e. business

activities aimed at making a profit by meeting the

needs of the customer. In essence, a situation arises of

the domination of the administrative structure of

education management over function (in the entire

vertical hierarchy – from federal to university), when

the organizational system created to perform a certain

function, in this case, the function of formation,

development and management of education as a

public good, seeks to self-sufficient behavior,

becomes a state corporation, turning the end into a

means, and a means into an end. The tragedy of

modern education is that the transformation of “the

end into a means, and means into an end” has already

passed the stage of institutionalization with a whole

set of formal and informal rules, prescriptions,

patterns of behavior, sanctions, and etc. As a result,

there is a disregard for the vertical of power aimed at

maintaining and developing education as a public

good.

The classical canon of higher education was the

study of the mechanisms of adaptation of social and

cultural experience to new conditions, including in a

situation of uncertainty, the formation of the value-

semantic foundations of the personality, the skills of

intensive acquisition of new knowledge and their

inclusion in the system of existing ones, the ability to

analyze and generalize, to work with information,

organize high-quality communications. It is this

canon that is the basis of classical education as a

socially significant good, carried out in the interests

of a person, society and the state. Modernizing the

national system of higher education in the 2000s

within the Bologna process with the aim of

COVID-19 as a Social Catalyst for Organizational and Management Dysfunctions in Higher Education

257

integrating into the European educational space, the

reformers acted as apologists for the so-called

universities of applied sciences. In Western practice,

these universities exist along with prestigious

classical universities that provide basic knowledge in

various fields of science, combine the teaching of

natural sciences and humanities, form moral and

cultural values, and teach fundamental study.

Introduction of competencies into education

standards, the convergence of the system of

educational competencies with the system of

professional competencies to date has turned almost

all universities into universities of applied sciences.

In turn, the bureaucratization of the educational

structure reinforced the interests of industrial groups.

The activities of universities are no longer regulated

by the requirements for formation of a public good,

but responds to the individual preferences and goals

of its administrative personnel. The COVID-19

coronavirus pandemic revealed the loss of flexibility

in the organizational structure of education

(stagnation) and indicated the need to adjust the

priorities of higher education and methods, forms of

its implementation.

5 CONCLUSION

Considering the scale of the pandemic and the crisis

in education it caused, and also considering that the

crisis disturbs order and prompts the systems to move

from one phase of the crisis to another not linearly,

but recursively, we will expect that the education

system retains the ability not only to work on

minimizing the risks of functioning, but also moving

into the development stage, subject to improving the

quality of management actions. To implement a

digitalization project for higher education, it is

necessary:

 to study the market situation and best practices

(domestic and foreign) in order to determine

the technical and quality standard of products

(services), increase the economic efficiency of

the production of an educational product,

rational use of all types of reserves and

resources;

 to arrange the activities of a higher education

organization in the direction of changing and

improving the production of educational digital

products, considering the social and market

priorities, the quality and competitiveness of

products, their compliance with world

standards in order to conquer the market, meet

the needs for an educational product and

implement education as a public good, a

stabilizing factor of society and a tool for the

formation of human capital in society;

 to formulate scientifically grounded standards

of material, financial and labor costs for

fulfilling the tasks of digitalization of

education, develop technologies to increase the

efficiency of digitalization of higher education,

monitor and supervise compliance with the

requirements of labor protection legislation;

 to take measures for the rational use of

qualified personnel in the digitalization project

of higher education, develop their professional

knowledge and experience;

 to arrange the interaction of higher education

organizations and electronic educational sites

within the framework of the education

digitalization project;

 to ensure the observance of the rule of law in

the implementation by higher education

organizations of economic and economic

relations, financial management and

functioning in market conditions;

 to protect the copyrights of developers of

electronic educational products in court,

arbitration, government and administrative

bodies;

 to conduct an audit of the organizational

structure of education management.

REFERENCES

Anufrieva, N.I., 2006. Patologiya organizacii. Vserossijskij

ekonomicheskij zhurnal, 12.

Arzhanuhin, S. V., Makovich, G.V., 2018. Upravlenie

proektami v municipal'nyh obrazovaniyah:

monografiya. Izdatel'skij Dom "Akademiya

Estestvoznaniya".

Gafiatulina, N.H., Kas'yanov, V.V., Samygin, P.S.,

Samygin, S.I., 2020. Rossijskoe obshchestvo v

usloviyah samoizolyacii. Social'nye effekty i posled-

stviya pandemii Covid-19: monografiya. Rusajns.

Leven, E.I., Suslov, A.B., 2020. Distancionnoe obuchenie

naseleniya. Vysshaya shkola ekonomiki:

Informacionno-analiticheskie materialy po rezul'tatam

statisticheskih i sociologicheskih obsledovanij, 22.

Masyuk, N. N., Bushueva, M.A., Mosolova, N.A., 2017.

Innovacionnye upravlencheskie resheniya: na puti k

konfliktno-kompromissnomu podhodu. In IBIMA.

Osipov, A. M., 2020. Krizis upravlencheskih

informacionnyh potokov v obrazovanii: teoreticheskie

osnovaniya i social'nye realii. Vysshee obrazovanie v

Rossii, 4: 16 – 28.

Rogach, O.V., Frolova, E.V., Ryabova, T.M., 2018.

Teoriya "Doveriya" v fokuse issledovaniya Ozhidanij,

RTCOV 2021 - II International Scientiﬁc and Practical Conference " COVID-19: Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals

(RTCOV )

258

kasayushchihsya klyuchevyh aktorov

Obrazovatel'nogo prostranstva. Evropejskij zhurnal

sovremennogo obrazovaniya, 7(2): 392-399.

Prohorov, A., Konik, L. Cifrovaya transformaciya. Analiz,

trendy, mirovoj opyt, https://www.litres.ru/.

Han, R. 2017. Pokazateli v ocenke social'nogo zhiznennogo

cikla: Obzor ramok, teorij i empiricheskogo opyta.

Zhurnal promyshlennoj ekologii, 21(6): 1547 – 1565.

Shaluf, I.M., Ahmadun, F., Mat Said, A., 2003. A review of

disaster and crisis. Disaster Prevention and

Management. An International Journal, 12(1): 24-32.

COVID-19 as a Social Catalyst for Organizational and Management Dysfunctions in Higher Education

259