Universities belong to a wider and increasingly important category of knowledge-based professional organizations (Hinings & Leblebici, 2003) such as hospitals or professional service firms, operating as public or private organizations within highly regulated orders. Notwithstanding, organizational literature has rarely been employed to understand variations in intra-organizational mechanisms of resource allocation, especially in the university context. We show that, even in an increasingly hierarchical- bureaucratic organizations like Italian state universities, a combination of different organizational models is likely to be at work at the same time. Hence, individual actors -in this case rectors- can influence resource allocation by exert...