Socio-culturally formed collegial contexts in the midlevel of higher education organizations have attracted increased attention from higher education researchers. It is assumed that development, change and stability are dependent on norms, habits and traditions in these contexts. This text introduces a framework useful for identifying and investigating these collegial contexts. The framework is applied on a material describing five academically strong "microcultures." The result is promising as the framework illuminates critical features of these microcultures without depriving them of originality and uniqueness. The article concludes that the framework presents a promising alternative to state-driven and bureaucratic perspectives as well as to market-inspired perspectives.