Third-party funding is central to university financing and research performance in Germany, reflecting broader shifts toward market-oriented governance (Schneijderberg et al., 2022). As loosely coupled systems (Weick, 1976), German universities operate within a fragmented landscape of federal-state responsibilities and organizational complexity (Teichler, 2018). Although securing third-party funding is a key objective, success rates and opportunities vary across institutions and disciplines (Al Mahameed et al., 2024; Ylijoki, 2024). Yet it remains unclear how expectations regarding third-party funding are communicated to academics (Wilkesmann & Lauer, 2025). This study addresses this gap through two questions: (RQ1) How has third-party funding evolved in North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) between 2011 and 2022? (RQ2) How does the university management communicate expectations to acquire third-party funding?

Drawing on Resource Dependence Theory (Pfeffer & Salancik, 2003), which views organizations as reliant on external resources, a mixed-methods, explanatory sequential design is adopted (Ivankova & Creswell, 2009). The quantitative phase (RQ1) analyzes funding trends using national (Federal Statistical Office) and regional (IT.NRW) reports, supplemented by three case universities (Yin, 2012), with data analyzed in Excel and R (Grömping, 2015; Neyeloff et al., 2012). The qualitative phase (RQ2), with interviews planned for January 2026, will explore managerial expectations through content-structuring qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz, 2012). NRW serves as the research context due to its strong third-party funding shaped by NPM reforms (Leisyte et al., 2022; IT.NRW, 2023).

Preliminary results for RQ1 indicate that third-party funding has steadily increased across Germany, with NRW recording a 39% rise per professor between 2011 and 2022. However, funding remains stratified: Medicine, natural sciences, and engineering dominate, while law, theology, and the humanities remain marginal. These patterns illustrate how external funding reinforces disciplinary hierarchies (Jongbloed, 2011; McGivern et al., 2015) and provide a foundation for examining how managerial expectations shape academic practices in NRW’s competitive higher education landscape.