DECISION-MAKING VS. PROFESSIONAL CULTURE: MODERN RUSSIAN UNIVERSITIES' DILEMMA

Decision-making constitutes and expresses the universal features of management and public administration systems. However, the basic functions of decision-making are not isomorphic to the functions of management. Modern Russian universities come through drastic organizational changes, during the last five years. Moreover, these changes are touching not only the administrative superstructure and its subordinate functioning within federal higher school ministerial institutions, but these changes mingle with grass-root processes within vocational community of university professors. The latter is nothing but a staff of employees safeguarding the main technology to guarantee the existence and development of the university education. Professional interests and professional motivation of the educating staff are going through deprivation tests thanks to constant administrative changes aimed at purely external forms of control. This article offers a fresh look at the possibility to solve the existing contradiction in the actual management of modern Russian universities through the rehabilitation of key academic liberties and the restructuring of administrative superstructure via decentralization of decision-making somewhat similar to Industry 4.0 decentralization of 'clever' infrastructure.