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“Institutional Diversity in Higher Education”

Strategic Agency and System Diversity :Conceptualizing Institutional Positioningin Higher Education

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Strategic Agency and System Diversity : Conceptualizing Institutional Positioning in Higher Education

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Strategic Agency and System Diversity:Conceptualizing Institutional Positioning in HigherEducation

Tatiana Fumasoli • Jeroen Huisman

Published online: 31 March 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This paper argues that the impact of individual higher education institu-

tions’ strategies on system diversity should be explored. By looking at how universities

respond strategically to governmental policies as well as to the actions of other (com-

peting) institutions, our understanding of determinants of diversity can be enriched. A

conceptual framework focusing on institutional positioning is explained using the

dimensions deliberateness of organizational actions versus environmental influence, on

the one hand, and differentiation versus compliance, on the other. We posit institutional

positioning as the mechanism through which organizational and environmental levels

are linked. Our model features multiple dimensions and relations reflecting how higher

education institutions locate themselves in specific niches, i.e. positions where they are

able to gather the necessary resources for their core activities. The implications for

research on diversity and for policymaking are discussed.

Keywords Diversity � Positioning � Niche

T. Fumasoli (&)

ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, P.O box 1143 Blindern, 0318 Oslo,

Norway

e-mail: [email protected]

J. Huisman

International Centre for Higher Education Management, School of Management, University of Bath,

Bath BA2 7AY, UK

e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

J. Huisman

Department of Sociology, University of Ghent, Korte Meer 3-5, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

123

Minerva (2013) 51:155–169

DOI 10.1007/s11024-013-9225-y

Challenges in Studying Diversity

Studies on institutional diversity in higher education have revealed two key factors

that impact the level of diversity. An argument often used in the pertinent literature

(see e.g. Birnbaum 1983; Huisman 1995; Meek 2000; van Vught 2008) is that

governmental regulations limit the scope for higher education institutions to develop

their own profile and consequently decrease diversity. Market mechanisms,

particularly competition, would offer leeway for institutional profiling and niche-

seeking behaviour and therefore lead to or sustain high(er) levels of diversity.

Intuitively, this seems to make sense, but empirical research contradicts some of the

expectations. Birnbaum (1983) found that a two-decade period of considerable

growth of the US higher education system, further characterized by serious levels of

market competition, did not lead to an impressive increase in institutional diversity.

In the same vein, Morphew (2009) observes that a variety of institutional strategies

do not automatically generate an increase in the level of diversity. Huisman et al.

(2007) found that binary systems – i.e. systems with two different types of higher

education institutions, defined by the government – are often more diverse than non-

binary systems, which would imply that governmental intervention not necessarily

limits diversity. It could even imply that governmental intervention is needed to

combat processes of academic drift. Much earlier, Teichler (1988, p. 102–103)

cautioned that patterns of changes as a result of increasing competition and

decreasing governmental control are not automatically in the direction of increasing

diversity. Finally, Kyvik (2004) analysed structural changes in higher education

systems by focusing on the development of the non-university sector. He notes (p.

405) that competition and regulation do matter, but that national cultures and

geography have impacted the trends in structural change as well.

As such, there is sufficient scope for further empirical explorations of how the

two key factors actually affect the level of diversity. On the one hand, this seems

largely a matter of detailing the mechanisms. That is, much would be gained by

asking more specific questions: which governmental or government agency

regulations have a positive or negative impact on diversity and how does

competition – and if so, in which respects – affect levels of diversity? But, at the

same time, a conceptual enrichment of the explanatory model is needed. So far,

most of the studies have only implicitly addressed the scope for strategic choice at

the level of individual higher education institutions (but see Frølich et al. 2013;

Huisman et al. 2002). That is, with respect to governmental policies, most studies on

higher education have described and analysed the regulations and assumed these

would impact institutions, while there are only a few that looked at institutional

responses to regulations from a strategic perspective (Maassen and Potman 1990;

Kraatz and Zajac 1996). Also, with respect to market mechanisms like competition,

it is assumed that universities1 respond similarly to the operations of the ‘‘invisible

hand’’ of the market, but this is empirically not (yet) established (Hazelkorn 2009).

1 The term ‘‘university’’ is used here as a synonym of ‘‘higher education institution’’ and covers both the

university and non-university sector (e.g. universities of applied sciences).

156 T. Fumasoli, J. Huisman

123

Incorporating Institutional Positioning in the Analysis of Diversity

The crucial point to be made is that universities themselves have scope for strategic

action. Although this scope for action may be limited in certain higher education

systems and may be more limited in certain respects (e.g. deciding to grant PhD

degrees may be strictly regulated by national regulations) than in others (e.g.

institutions are – generally speaking – free to make changes in their curricula,

without needing the government’s consent), undoubtedly higher education institu-

tions have strategic intentions and scope.

This paper aims at enriching the conceptual understanding of how higher

education institutions position themselves strategically in the higher education

system and how this – subsequently – has an impact on diversity. In model terms,

we posit institutional positioning as the linking pin between the higher education

institution (i.e. the organization level) and the higher education system (i.e. the

environment level).

However, not only it is contended that positioning affects diversity. By providing

a fine-grained and tight coupling between institutional positioning and system

diversity, we describe the mechanism through which this relationship is shaped

(Hedstrom and Swedberg 1996). Accordingly, we characterize the behaviour of

entities at a lower level in order to explain system level dynamics (Stinchcombe

1991, p. 367, see transformational mechanisms in Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998,

p. 23).

We think this approach is beneficial for two reasons. First, institutional

positioning must be addressed, for the ways national governments currently steer

higher education institutions explicitly invite a focus on strategic behaviour

(Rhoades 2000; Leslie 1996; Hazelkorn 2009; Bonaccorsi and Daraio 2008) and

institutional positioning (see e.g. Huisman et al. 2002; Stensaker 2004; Morphew

2009). The increase of institutional autonomy (see Neave and van Vught 1991;

Salmi 2007; Estermann and Nokkala 2009) in various countries is evident, as well

as the trend, particularly in Europe, of higher education institutions being under

pressure to become more efficient, financially sustainable and competitive (Amaral

et al. 2002; Amaral et al. 2003).

Though this pressure has been differently experienced in different European

higher education systems, it has affected universities and compelled them to start

positioning themselves, by constructing portfolios through setting priorities and a

more explicit focus on specific competencies. New funding schemes have promoted

direct competition (e.g. for research and for students) and the increasingly

diversified social demands for higher education have produced diversity in terms of

education, research and services (Teichler 2008; Bonaccorsi and Daraio 2007).

Higher education institutions have differentiated either functionally or hierarchi-

cally (Bleiklie 2003; Clark 1978), often featuring their portfolios of activities

including both options. For example, an institution may compete with another in

research and cooperate in education (e.g. joint programmes).

Therefore, the impact of institutional positioning of higher education institutions

needs to be incorporated in research on institutional diversity. Second, understand-

ing how higher education institutions make strategic choices may help us to better

Strategic Agency and System Diversity 157

123

deal with the current contradictory outcomes of research on institutional diversity

(see also Rossi 2009, 2010; Teixeira et al. 2012).

This paper argues that institutional positioning of higher education institutions

reflects their strategic intent, or their capability to locate themselves in a favourable

niche, and to shape beneficial relations with other actors in the higher education

system. The latter implies that not only individual higher education institutions

respond to the challenges posed by the environment, but that this is also – at least

partly – a response to how other actors in the higher education systems behave

strategically.

While recognizing that the interplay between strategies of higher education

institutions and their environments is dynamic and iterative, this paper will

concentrate on how institutional positioning affects the level of diversity within the

higher education system. Although the relation between university and higher

education system is relevant because external actors may play an active role in

university decision-making, this paper concentrates on institutional positioning.

This is a relational concept that accounts for system changes and their outcomes in

the aggregate, while strategy making features university internal dynamics and, if

any, rather describes the opposite influence, i.e. how system characteristics affect

decision-making.

The next section presents a discussion of the different theoretical perspectives

through which diversity and positioning can be investigated. Then, the conceptual

framework is articulated and the implications for research and for policymakers are

delineated.

Comparing Different Approaches to Diversity and Strategy

Different theoretical perspectives are taken into consideration in order to explore the

relation between institutional positioning and system diversity: institutionalism,

identity theories, resource dependency, population ecology, and strategic choice.

They are discussed and compared based on how they address the relation between

university and environment, on the degree of agency they accord to higher

education institutions, and on how they conceptualize legitimation processes and the

differentiation imperative.

The institutionalist perspective sees organizations, hence universities, as socially

constructed legitimacy-seeking entities that are subject to isomorphic pressures

leading them to become similar (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Consequently,

environments determine organization behaviour, which aims at complying with

institutional norms and values. Recent developments in institutional theory go

against this rather deterministic framework, and scholars have argued that

organizational change is possible through embedded agency and institutional

entrepreneurship, that is ‘‘activities of actors who have an interest in particular

institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or

to transform existing ones’’ (Maguire et al. 2004: 657). In general, the institution-

alist perspective assumes that university positioning leads to decreasing system

diversity, as institutions tend to act within the boundary conditions providing


123

legitimacy. Even in case of change brought about by institutional entrepreneurs,

over time, organizations tend (again) to become similar. This means that, even if

embedded agency hypothetically allows for increasing diversity, this would be only

temporary, until isomorphic forces pressure organizations to conform again.

The organizational identity perspective contends that organizations construct

their identity by self-reflection and confronting and interacting with others in the

environment (Hatch and Schultz 2002). As such, this approach grants higher agency

to higher education institutions that are able, to some extent, to use their identity

strategically (Gioia and Thomas 1996), while at the same time they enact their

environments in order to cope with these (Gioia et al. 2000). In case of institutional

pluralism and multiple (competing) logics at play, universities can respond in a

differentiated way according to which part of the environment they are dealing with

(Frølich et al. 2013; Greenwood et al. 2010). The higher education institution

establishes itself as unique within wider legitimacy boundary conditions (Pedersen

and Dobbin 2006). According to the identity perspective, members of the

organizational field belong to broader categories (e.g. business schools) and possess

narrower dimensions (e.g. e-learning): institutional positioning should thus lead to

decreasing diversity in coarse-grained categories - where universities legitimate

themselves, to increasing diversity in more fine-grained categories - where

institutions differentiate themselves (Gioia and Thomas 1996).

The resource dependence perspective considers universities as managing their

interdependencies with the environment according to the rationales of power and

control (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). Accordingly, it attributes higher levels of

organizational agency than the previous approaches, as management is able to

intervene in the environment through coalition-formation, negotiating and bargain-

ing. Thus positioning is a trade-off between autonomy and survival through which

resources can be gathered. Along this line of reasoning, positioning increases or

decreases diversity depending on the actions taken by the higher education

institution in order to ensure its resources. For instance, some universities start to

network with each other in order to share critical resources. If such coalitions did

not exist before, the level of diversity of the higher education system increases.

Conversely, if a wave of restructuring transform all institutions in multidivisional

structures, the level of diversity decreases.

In the ecological perspective the environment selects the fittest population, while

single organizations do not have or have negligible strategic intent. As such,

positioning is not the result of university agency, but the outcome of environmental

distribution of resources (Hannan and Freeman 1989). Ecological theory focuses on

a population level of analysis and largely denies single institutions agency or

adaptation. This theoretical perspective has been used to explain diversity in higher

education (Birnbaum 1983; Huisman 1997; van Vught 1996).

A strategic choice perspective conversely attributes much strategic capability to

the organization to pursue goals rationally and manipulate the environment

accordingly. In this framework distinctiveness is sought, as competitive advantage

is achieved by a unique profile, non-reproducible by competitors (Porter 1985;

Rumelt 1991). Resources can be tangible and intangible and their distinctive

combination sustains competitive positioning (Peteraf 1993). In principle,


123

positioning increases diversity, as every organization would profile itself in a

distinctive way.

These theoretical perspectives provide useful elements in order to build an

analytical framework, conceptualize institutional positioning in higher education

and its relation with system diversity. To do so, in the next section we elaborate

institutional positioning in a way that accommodates the specificities of higher

education institutions as organizations (Musselin 2006; Whitley 2008) and the

particularities of their core activities, education and research (Marginson 2007).

Institutional Positioning and Resource Niches

Institutional positioning in higher education is the process through which higher

education institutions locate themselves in specific niches within the higher

education system (Fumasoli and Lepori 2011). This concept differs from traditional

positioning in for-profit sectors (Porter 1985; Day 1994; Jaworski and Kohli 1993),

since most higher education institutions are not-for-profit and the environment is

highly institutionalized. Hence, legitimacy constitutes a key strategic asset, while

status and prestige may provide universities with better access to the material

resources they need (Marginson 2006; Kogan 1997). Accordingly, institutional

positioning is strategic for it implies deciding on employing university capabilities

to attract resources that are relevant for its functioning and survival (Marginson

2007; Carroll 1985; Hannan 1986). Institutional positioning can be conceptualized

along two dimensions. First, it can be portrayed as a balance between deliberateness

and emergence. On the one hand, managerial purposiveness defines objectives,

allocates resources and takes consistent action (Ansoff 1965). On the other hand,

environmental influences – many of these unforeseeable – affect organizational

actions and undermine intentionality (Mintzberg and Waters 1985). Empirical work

has illustrated how these strategic processes are the result of sophisticated balances

between intentions and constraints, highlighting the dynamic interplay between

complex environments and strategic agency (e.g. Grant 2003; Eisenhardt and Brown

1999; Burgelman 1996). Second, positioning entails a trade-off between differen-

tiation and compliance, as higher education institutions strive to abide by the rules

in their search for legitimacy (Suchman 1995; Deephouse and Suchman 2008) and

to make themselves different to elude competition (Deephouse 1999).

The outcome of positioning processes is that a university locates itself in a

specific position in the higher education system. This position, the so-called niche,

entails a set of relations (Popielarz and Neal 2007) through which the university

profits from opportunities and is limited by constraints (Podolny et al. 1996). The

definition highlights two important aspects. First, it reflects the dimensions in which

the university is able to prosper, by attracting the relevant resources. Second, within

a niche, different relations are activated: horizontal relations of competition and

cooperation with other higher education institutions as well as vertical relations with

public authorities, agencies and other stakeholders, which provide (or withdraw)

resources (Aldrich and Ruef 2006, p. 247; Scott 2003, p. 130).


123

The relation with the environment entails strategic agency for highly institu-

tionalized higher education institutions. The environment consists of complex,

heterogeneous, multi-layered and dynamic spaces (Hoffman and Ventresca 2002;

Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997) and communities of universities whose members

interact regularly with one another (Scott 2003). On the one hand, higher education

institutions may not be flexible enough to respond quickly to a changing context, as

expectations from stakeholders, shared norms and values, internal features and path

dependency factors limit their strategic options. That is, changes are generally slow

and possibly mainly driven by one of the two forces: the state (Ferlie et al. 2008)

and the market (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). On the other hand, higher education

institutions may show their ability to change their trajectories and reposition

themselves in their environment. Therefore, strategic agency can be conceived of as

embedded agency, for actions are determined by institutional contexts, but actors

can also enact changes to these institutionalized contexts (Seo and Creed 2002).

Under conditions of decreasing embeddedness and increasing motivation to change,

powerful central actors can become institutional entrepreneurs (Greenwood and

Suddaby 2006). But also peripheral – less powerful – actors can profit from

unexplored potentialities or contradictory logics at system level, and can reconfigure

(parts of) their environments (Frølich et al. 2013; DiMaggio and Powell 1991).

Dimensions of the Niche

The niche consists of different dimensions (Popielarz and Neal 2007). In the context of

higher education, these dimensions relate to core activities, such as education, research

and services to society (third mission activities like knowledge transfer), it concerns

resources such as students and academic staff. Against this backdrop, two central

functions – personnel policies and financial management – characterize further

dimensions, as they support core activities by supplying (and managing) key resources.

Through the niche, portrayed as a complex multilevel and multidimensional space,

higher education institutions are depicted as deeply embedded in their environment with

which they maintain multiple linkages. While the context frames the possibilities of

action of the organization, the latter is able to modify its position and to alter its network

of relations. As such, individual higher education institutions may affect relations by

interacting with other individual actors or groups within the system. More specifically,

universities may compete on one dimension, e.g. undergraduate education, while they

cooperate in another dimension, e.g. research, sharing existing laboratories and

facilities. As for vertical relations, higher education institutions may be able to modify

their niche, thus collecting additional means, by, for instance, renegotiating their legal

frameworks with public authorities. Although this is usually considered a policy change

originating from the state, empirical analyses demonstrate that not only universities

(their management and boards) participate actively in the provision of new regulations,

but also that the initiative can stem from other levels (bottom-up) of the higher education

institution (Fumasoli 2011).

In sum, higher education institutions respond to demands, opportunities and

threats offered by the environment by displaying different degrees of agency: from


123

reacting and adapting to intervening dynamically to modify the context in which

they are embedded. Organizational positioning is the result of both organizational

action and environmental determination. Positioning is partly avoiding competition

by carving out a sustainable niche in which it offers a mix of services, and partly

competing on selected activities in different markets (for students, for staff, for

funds) with a subset of institutions in the higher education system.

Resources

Drawing from the tension between strategic capability and institutional embeddedness,

resources play a crucial role in institutional positioning. Resources are a set of elements

related to the production of research, education and service to society, and include

available financial resources. In general, these resources are under the control of the state

and its intermediary agencies. But highly qualified teachers and researchers are also

resources needed by higher education institutions to develop educational programmes

and research activities (Mintzberg 1979, p. 348) and produce educational and research

output. And students should also be considered resources, in that they bring – directly or

indirectly – financial means to the higher education institutions through fees and

governmental funding (teaching grants allocated to higher education institutions).

Whereas financial resources may be largely under governmental jurisdiction, higher

education institutions have considerable control – again, this may be different from

system to system – over the acquisition of staff and students.

From Resource Niches to Understanding Diversity

Universities select a number of activities (research, teaching, third mission) that

they strategically think are viable to pursue, partly avoiding and partly engaging in

competition with others. Here the perpetual dynamic relationship between activities

and resources shows: resources need to be employed to develop activities that

subsequently are able to attract and secure resources. However, conceptually,

resources are easily distinguishable from activities.

Processes of differentiation and convergence can be observed by focusing on

university endeavours and by detecting how organizational actions affect (change

in) diversity at the system level. It is not argued that institutional positioning is the

most important determinant of institutional diversity, but it is argued that

institutional positioning is a key mechanism through which diversity takes shape

in a system. How, in the end, institutional positioning affects diversity is – in our

view – merely an empirical question. Environmental factors may, to a large extent,

set upper or lower boundaries to system-level diversity. But, given that strategies are

both intentional and emergent for all higher education institutions in a particular

higher education system, it is difficult to predict exactly what the end result of

ongoing interactions and positioning is. Theoretically, it would be possible to

observe high levels of convergence emerging in a highly competitive system (i.e.

institutional positioning based on copying behaviour in a context that actually

invites organizations to differentiate). But if higher education institutions are


123

entrepreneurial and seek for distinctiveness, a high level of divergence may be

observable. Likewise, rather regulated higher education systems may allow for

niche-seeking behaviour (to avoid regulatory stealth) and thus support divergence,

but may also limit strategic agency and hence limit diversification or reduce

diversity.

The proposed analytical framework entails, first, the niche, as the outcome of

institutional positioning, which should be investigated according to its dimensions.

Second, institutional positioning as a process is explored in order to understand the

interplay between intentionality and external influence as well as the balance

between differentiation and compliance. In so doing, the relations activated within a

niche are investigated.

Recent research suggests that, under external pressures (decreasing funds and

number of students), universities are better off when they differentiate themselves

according to one or more dimensions of the niche (Fumasoli 2011). Indeed, it is

quite natural to look for alternative means in case of shrinking resources. More

relevant is understanding, first, in which dimensions of the niche this is more likely

to happen and under which conditions. Second, in relation to system diversity, it is

significant to examine whether the dispersion among the same type changes, and

whether there are e.g. more blending or segregating processes (Hannan and Freeman

1989) across nominal types of organizations (for example, universities versus

universities of applied sciences) taking place in higher education systems. It would

also be relevant to investigate whether new organizational forms arise. Diversity

could be analysed among systems, and/or longitudinally, depending on whether a

snapshot across countries or evolution over time better informs the specific research

question. Dispersion of higher education institutions within these dimensions is

central to understanding the role of single universities, for instance their role as

early adopters (e.g. Brint et al. 2011).

Discussion

This paper considers institutional positioning as one of the determinants of levels of

diversity in higher education systems. An analytical framework has been presented

based on a conceptualization of strategy and positioning. In so doing, we aim at

contributing to the current debate on diversity in higher education by positing

institutional positioning as the linking pin between universities’ actions and system-

level dynamics. The resource niche is a central concept of this framework and

features the position, within the environment, in which universities locate

themselves, by selecting the activities, and the relevant resources, according to

which they can operate.

By conceptualizing institutional positioning as the mechanism connecting higher

education institutions’ strategic behaviour to system diversity we are able to open

the black box of the different possible articulations of such linkage, both

conceptually and by exemplification. In a similar vein, Wedlin (2006) argues, on

the one hand, that changes at the actors’ level can at least partly drive changes at the

field level (p. 34). On the other hand, it is contended that not only do external jolts


123

produce change, but also incremental processes that can be both deliberate and

emergent (p. 178). In doing so, we have made a contribution to the discussion on

forces altering system diversity in higher education. Positioning is discussed as a

balance between higher education institutions’ capability to intervene in their

environment and the latter influence in terms of public policies and market

mechanisms (Mintzberg and Waters 1985). In that way, university agency is

examined as embedded agency (Seo and Creed 2002), for higher education systems

are generally highly institutionalized settings (Meyer et al. 2007). The relation

between intentionality and environmental influence is conceptualized through the

notion of institutional positioning, characterized as a process through which

universities try to locate themselves in specific niches within the higher education

system. While higher education institutions display different degrees of agency to

construct their niche, they are also affected by external dynamics at population and

organizational field levels. Moreover, as the result of the balance between deliberate

and emergent strategies, institutional positioning addresses the reciprocal relation-

ship between universities and higher education systems.

Considering strategy as the trade-off between the search for legitimacy and the

need to differentiate allows us, on the one hand, to understand rationales of strategic

choice, which do not necessarily comply with institutional theory (Kraatz and Zajac

1996). On the other hand, individual university action is linked, whether in the

aggregate or according to first moves by innovators, to convergence and divergence

forces in the higher education system. Indeed, while contending that university

actions are relevant in shaping their environment and affecting the level of diversity,

environments are inherently maps both of and for strategic action (Baum and

Haveman 1997). Hence, the proposed model could be extended further on this

mutual relation.

Further, the notion of institutional positioning is developed. Conceptually, by

introducing the resource niche, dynamics of university endeavour as well as forces

at work in higher education systems – public policies and market dynamics – are

highlighted by a framework which considers also how higher education institu-

tion(s) and environment feed back into each other.

In order to implement our framework and carry out empirical research, the next

step would be to build an operational model. Positioning indicators could be

constructed to look at the dimensions of the niche and, accordingly, at the resources

addressed and at the strategic activities selected. As such, the model would tackle

three different levels of analysis, which are ultimately connected to the resource

niche: the level of the single higher education institution, the level of the different

institutional types in which institutions are grouped (depending on the structure of

the system) and the level of the entire higher education system (i.e. all institutions).

Moreover, deliberate and emergent actions leading to the specific position should be

investigated qualitatively through e.g. in-depth interviews with decision-makers and

document analysis.

More generally, we have tried to contribute to a critical debate. Some

management scholars posit managerial agency and adaptation as the main driver

for organizational change, whereas others argue that environmental pressures

determine organization behaviour and survival (Greenwood and Hinings 1996;


123

Astley and van de Ven 1983). We highlight university agency, while, at the same

time, we frame our argument by recognizing that agency takes place in highly

institutionalized settings.

Our argument is based on specific conceptual choices: institutional positioning

and diversity have been considered here according to a feature-based view of

universities, which are analysed according to their structural attributes. Neverthe-

less, a cognitive-driven approach is also promising in order to understand strategic

intent, environmental determination and system diversity (Hannan et al. 2007).

Particularly, less top-down and state-centred views of universities as social actors

may offer further knowledge on differentiation and convergence processes, e.g. on

the antecedents and implications of illegitimate change (Kraatz and Zajac 1996).

Along the same line, niches can be inquired as institutional spaces whose meaning is

dynamically constructed by social actors through collective processes (Mohr and

Lee 2000; Rawlings and Bourgeois 2004).

Finally, by highlighting institutional positioning as locating in a niche, we may

have downplayed the role of actors in such a process. Indeed, in order to depict the

relation between university and higher education system from another angle, it is

relevant to examine how internal and external actors converge on a shared course of

action, leading to institutional positioning. Another query would then be to explore

the internal processes of higher education institutions in relation with different types

of positioning (Paradeise and Thoenig 2011).

Implications for Policymaking

Introducing institutional positioning as a mechanism impacting on system diversity

has several implications for policymaking. To begin with, additional complexity is

added as universities are considered strategic actors. Hence, policymakers should

take into account the real scope of their policies as well as their unintended

outcomes with respect to multiple actors and dynamics at work. Similarly, the

interplay between bottom-up processes and public policies deserves attention in

order to understand how to enhance or maintain specific levels of diversity. On the

one hand, top-down interventions by governments provide the framework where

universities are given room for manoeuvring. On the other hand, within this

framework and under specific conditions (e.g. internal governance, Fumasoli 2011),

universities are able to act strategically and position themselves competing or

coordinating in a multidimensional space – the niche. It is thus relevant to ask to

what extent organizational endeavour adds to or hampers governmental policies and

how this can be addressed by public policies.

Since the role of the state is strong in many national higher education systems,

the mutual relation between university and policymakers should be addressed. To

what extent can governments influence institutional positioning and what are the

consequences for diversity? The present analytical framework offers the opportunity

to observe how universities (and not only academics and their associations)

influence public authorities, by co-constructing their niche, for instance by

broadening their financial endowments.


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In conclusion, to understand diversity, the role of higher education institutions

should not be neglected and the scope for strategic actions has to be incorporated in

the analysis. If diversity is necessary for evolutionary processes to take place

(Birnbaum 1983, p. 21–22), universities are strategic organizations shaping their

environments and research on organizational and system change and dynamics

should acknowledge this (King et al. 2010).

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TITLE : SOURCE

Student Organizations and InstitutionalDiversity Efforts : A Typology Proquest

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL DIVERSITY EFFORTS: A TYPOLOGYKuk, Linda;Banning, JamesCollege Student Journal; Jun 2010; 44, 2; ProQuest Centralpg. 354

TITLE : SOURCE

Student Recruitment Strategies in Higher Education : Promoting Excellence and Diversity?

Emerald

Student recruitment strategies inhigher education: promotingexcellence and diversity?

Nicoline Frølich and Bjørn StensakerNorwegian Institute for Studies in Innovation,

Research and Education (NIFU STEP), Oslo, Norway

Abstract

Purpose – This paper seeks to analyse how excellence and diversity are addressed in studentrecruitment strategies, and how these strategies are developed in eight Norwegian higher educationinstitutions.

Design/methodology/approach – The study utilises a theoretical perspective that asserts thatstrategy is developed through practice. The authors have combined document analysis withqualitative interviews to investigate the development of institutional student recruitment strategies,their characteristics and their links to the individual institution’s profile and ambitions.

Findings – The study reveals that student recruitment strategies are often grounded in inherentinstitutional identities, while at the same time responding to external ideas about excellence anddiversity. The study also finds that higher education institutions show significant creativity in tryingto adapt to these ideas and general trends, while at the same time maintaining their owncharacteristics and traditions. Findings suggest that student recruitment strategies are also used foraccountability purposes. Given the importance of student recruitment, many higher educationinstitutions attach surprisingly little importance to this issue.

Research limitations/implications – The study encompasses only a small number of institutionsin a single country, limiting the possibility of generalising aspects of the profile and content of thestudent recruitment strategies. Nevertheless, the analysis indicates that the processes associated withthe development of student recruitment strategies are quite similar, with more emphasis on specificquantitative analytical schemes and less emphasis on other ways of organising strategy development.

Originality/value – The paper reveals the importance of placing greater focus on the ways in whichstrategic processes are organised and identifying the potential for improving the creative organisationof the strategising process.

Keywords Students, Higher education, Universities, Recruitment, Norway

Paper type Research paper

1. IntroductionHigher education institutions (HEIs) throughout the world are facing multipleexpectations as to how they should respond to a rapidly changing environment.Deregulation and increased competition within the public sector and between publicand private providers are creating a more market-like environment, which influenceshow universities and colleges profile themselves and compete for students (Gibbs,2008). For HEIs in this situation, excellence and diversity are key issues forconsideration when developing their institutional profile.

The promotion of excellence is currently framed as a central strategy that will helpHEIs to prosper in an increasingly open and competitive environment, primarily due toadvantages HEIs will gain through knowledge transfer, high enrolment and prestigewithin the scientific community and among the public at large. The striving for

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DOI 10.1108/09513541011045281

excellence may, however, have unintended consequences. For example, there is the issueof whether and how the emphasis on excellence will affect diversity. Excellence anddiversity may be mutually supportive, but they may have a more problematicrelationship. In a market-like environment, HEIs may choose to identify their niche andhighlight their difference and uniqueness, thereby avoiding competition (Barney, 1991).

HEIs compete with one another in a number of areas, including funding, reputation,research grants and research output. They may also compete for students, especiallytalented ones. Student recruitment is essential to boosting excellence and enhancingdiversity. Students represent potential future researchers. Graduates are not onlyholders of society’s diversified body of knowledge, they are ambassadors of their almamater as well, playing a crucial role in shaping an HEI’s reputation. It is thereforebecoming increasingly important to analyse the strategic processes associated withstudent recruitment. There is greater interest in strategy formulation within HEIs,which is leading to changes in the traditional governance and management structuresof HEIs; there is also increasing focus on how research, teaching and learning areperformed (Allen, 2003).

There are few studies that focus on how HEIs develop their student recruitmentstrategies, particularly in a European context. Studies on student recruitment tend tofocus on student behaviour and thinking: students’ choice of university (Ho and Hung,2008); the information sources they use when making their choice (Bonnema and vander Waldt, 2008); and their loyalty to and degree of satisfaction with the institutionwhere they are studying (Helgesen and Nesset, 2007). In one of the few studies on thestrategy development process, Greenbank (2006) analyses the ways HEIs in the UKhave tried to respond to national policy initiatives designed to widening broadenparticipation in higher education. In general, the term “strategy” appears to be usedprimarily in the contexts of research (Hazelkorn, 2005; Kyvik, 2008) and teaching andlearning (Checkoway, 2001; Gibbs et al., 2000; Heikkila and Lonka, 2006; Ho et al., 2001;Kaldeway and Korthagen, 1995; Leathwood and Phillips, 2000; Loyens et al., 2007).

This article explores how the recruitment strategies at a number of NorwegianHEIs[1] address issues of excellence and diversity. In Europe, implementation of theBologna process and the Lisbon agenda has given rise to questions about howharmonisation, diversity and excellence may be tied together. Within national systems,excellence may be pursued by enhancing stratification at the national level or bypromoting internal differentiation at the level of the HEI. Norway has, in accordancewith the Bologna declaration, put into place a new degree structure (three-yearBachelor’s degree and two-year Master’s degree). This new structure is a component ofa higher education reform implemented in Norway (the Quality Reform), which hasincreased institutional autonomy, strengthened HEIs’ strategic capacity andintroduced performance-based funding that rewards HEIs for the number of creditsand graduates produced.

The concepts of strategy and excellence in student recruitment may be considerednovel, even radical, in the context of Norwegian higher education. Traditionally,strategic planning has been met with resistance and scepticism within the sector(Frølich, 2005). In student recruitment, primary emphasis has been placed on universalaccess rather than excellence and attracting talented students (Aamodt and Kyvik,2005). In light of the implementation of the Quality Reform, this situation may change,or, at least, there may be more opinions voiced concerning the need to promote both

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strategy and excellence. Diversity has been given higher priority in Norwegian highereducation, particularly gender diversity (Aamodt and Kyvik, 2005).

The objective of this article is to analyse the following questions:

(1) What characterises the student recruitment strategies of Norwegian HEIs? Towhat extent are excellence and diversity emphasised in the strategiesdeveloped?

(2) What factors and processes have influenced the strategic process?

(3) To what extent are strategies aimed at changing the organisational identity ofan institution?

2. Theoretical perspectives on strategising2.1 Developments in theories on strategyThe field of organisational strategy is multifaceted, consisting of a variety ofapproaches, models and concepts. To simplify matters, the field may be divided intotwo basic perspectives (see also Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2000). According to the firstperspective, strategy is contextually driven: the environment determines the strategicoptions of a given organisation. Several authors have contributed here, includingPorter (1979), who has advanced theories on competitive advantage and the ways anorganisation may best position itself in a market. According to the second perspective,strategy is dependent on the intrinsic characteristics of a given organisation. Authorsthat have contributed here include Barney (1991), who has articulated resource-basedtheories on organisation, and Prahalad and Hamel (1990), who have offered thoughtson core competencies of an organisation.

Recent developments within the field of strategy have focused primarily on thechallenges that arise when markets become hypercompetitive, more complex orundergo rapid change, e.g. in more knowledge-intensive industries. Creating long-termstrategies in these types of situations may imply high risk. Consequently, according toAutio et al. (2000), strategy should be made more indirect, for example, by givinggreater priority to developing the learning capacity of an organisation. Along the samelines, chaos theory and ecosystem theory have generated suggestions for addressingthe uncertainty, risks and ad-hoc developments facing organisations, by, for example,improving the capabilities for local self-organisation and adjustment in sub-units,departments and divisions (Levinthal and Warglien, 1999). Another stream of researchemphasises the gap between strategy as plans, objectives and targets, and the mannerin which these are implemented or linked to the daily life of an organisation(Whittington, 2003; Jarzabkowski, 2005; Johnson et al., 2007). These authors viewstrategy as a process or practice. Their main argument is that formal strategies willand must change apace with changes in the environment and the organisation, andthat strategy is a consequence of the strategising process.

2.2 Strategising as sensemakingThis stream of research is highly relevant in the higher education setting, which hastraditionally been characterised by piecemeal and fragmented organisational change,weak decision-making structures and complex social and power structures (Clark,1983), rather than by strategic processes emphasising hierarchy, rationality and formalstructure. Weick (1995) coined the concept of sensemaking, which blurs the classical

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distinction between strategy as externally driven and strategy as internally driven. Insensemaking, the boundaries between the outside world and the realities of theorganisation blend together in a seamless fashion.

The sensemaking perspective addresses the social psychological level of HEIs (Scottand Davis, 2007) and emphasises characteristics specific to these organisations, such ascomplexity and embedded practice. Employing this perspective to analyse strategyformulation entails a close examination of two dimensions of the strategy process.Sensemaking assumes that all strategy processes are influenced by history andtraditions, exhibiting a form of historical path-dependency. According to Weick, sense isnot something that may be extracted solely from external events. Sensemaking andidentity are strongly related and historically shaped. Identity is constructed on the basisof historical patterns and events that shape who we think we are and our role in a givensocial context. Sensemaking is also a retrospective process in which actors make sense ofwhat has been accomplished once the result of an action is clear (Weick, 1995, p. 30). Inother words, meaning is not attached to one experience that has been singled out; ratherit arises from the attention directed toward the experience (Weick, 1995, p. 26).

Enactment is also central to the sensemaking perspective. Enactment refers to theprocess by which members of the organisation interact to construct a picture of theorganisational environment in which a strategy is to be implemented. Weick (1995, p.28) asserts that actors do not need more information when they are overwhelmed byequivocality; rather, they need values, priorities and clarity about preferences to helpthem to determine what matters. Sensemaking may be said to be enactive of sensibleenvironments. Enactment means that individuals construct all or parts of a givenenvironment (Weick, 1995, p. 30).

It is through the combination of these two dimensions that the sensemaking processtakes place. In this process, the actors not only develop a common understanding, theyalso agree on a response selected among several alternatives. Path-dependency lendsthe sensemaking process an element of stability and continuity, while enactment is amore dynamic element, which the environment or important input factors arechanging.

The sensemaking perspective is best treated as a set of heuristics rather than as analgorithm. It is essential to look at how the actors construct what they construct (i.e.sensible events), why they do so and to what effect. Reality is seen as an ongoingaccomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of thesituations in which they find themselves and their creations.

Sensemaking is interactive: individuals make sense of things by imposing whatthey believe on the world that they see. Sense is not exact. Sensemaking is aboutaccounts that are socially acceptable and credible (Weick, 1995, p. 61). Weick definesseven characteristics of sensemaking. According to him, sensemaking is grounded inidentity construction, is retrospective, is enactive of sensible environments, is social, isan ongoing process, is focused on and by extracted cues, and is driven by plausibilityrather than accuracy (Weick, 1995, p. 17).

2.3 The promise and limitations of a strategy-as-practice perspectiveA strategy-as-practice perspective may be difficult to differentiate from otherprocesses within a given organisation ( Johnson et al., 2007), particularly due to the factthat it links the macro- and micro-levels in organisations. In this article, we have

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restricted ourselves to studying the “product” (i.e. student recruitment strategy)resulting from this process, as well as the key events and characteristics of the process.The dependent variable here is not organisational change as such, but the intentionsand ambitions related to change. In this respect we are employing a more traditionalperspective on strategy, which is defined as the determination of an organisation’sbasic long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and theallocation of resources necessary for achieving these goals (Chandler, 1962, p. 13). Weexplore how goals and objectives are determined. Ideally, strategy describes thechoices an organisation makes about which markets or clients to serve, the distinctway it seeks to provide its outputs, the tactics it employs and the output goals it sets foritself (Scott and Davis, 2007, p. 21). We look at the institutions’ decision-makingprocesses regarding which markets and clients (students) to serve, and examine theseprocesses in relation to organisational identity and path-dependency.

We are fully aware of the limitations of our study. We do not claim that it willprovide a complete picture of all the sensemaking processes involved in strategyformulation. Rather, we apply the sensemaking framework as an analytical tool to gaina deeper understanding of the strategy formulation process, studying in particular howstrategies have been developed in relation to the (constructed) environments and theorganisation’s identity, and identifying the knowledge base on which the recruitmentstrategies are founded. Our research does not involve clear-cut definitions andmeasures of whether and how excellence and diversity are treated in the formulation ofstrategy. Our research design is inductive, and we explore how the HEIs’ strategiesaddress excellence and diversity.

3. MethodologyThe empirical basis of this paper consists of case studies of eight Norwegian HEIs: fouruniversities and four university colleges[2]. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, 25 in-depthinterviews were conducted with the management and senior officers in charge ofstudent recruitment[3]. The interviews were semi-structured, with a duration of 30-60minutes. They were recorded and transcribed. Strategy documents were compiled andanalysed according to the topics of the interview guide.

Given our assumption that the history, location and environment of an HEI areimportant to the identity of that institution and to determining the strategic choicesavailable, we selected a broad range of universities. The University of Oslo is an oldand diverse institution with a national profile, while the universities of Bergen andTromsø are city-based institutions that play an important role in their respectiveregions. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has aspecialised, national profile in science and technology. Among the university colleges,we selected three mid-size university colleges located in different regions (Vestfold,Hedmark and Lillehammer), as well as the country’s largest city-based college (Oslo).All the university colleges have a vocational and professional profile, offeringprogrammes in teacher training, social work, nursing, engineering, etc.

4. Empirical findings4.1 Characteristics of student recruitment strategiesIn general, the scope and target groups of the student recruitment strategies of theuniversities and university colleges vary considerably. All the strategies place

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significant emphasis on excellence and diversity, although these are defined insubstantially different ways.

A comparison of the recruitment strategies with the organisational identity andprofile of these institutions reveals a relatively high degree of congruence. Therecruitment strategy of the University of Oslo addresses the issue of excellence throughits ambitions of recruiting the best students. According to informants, there is ageneral belief that the (elite) position of the university in the Norwegian highereducation landscape should be reflected in its profiling, and that it is more important to“remind” students about the university than to try to convince them to apply. This isexemplified, according to one respondent, in the (understated) slogan, “We offerknowledge!” The recruitment strategy emphasises the academic quality of theeducational offerings and the academic profile of the university. The University ofOslo’s national profile, status and selectiveness are underlined by the assumption thatpotential students ought to acknowledge the academic quality of the university andadjust themselves to the university’s standards rather than the other way around.

The University of Bergen has long had ambitions of being a highly internationalinstitution, and excellence is defined accordingly. Its recruitment strategy is heavilyinfluenced by the belief that international student recruitment promotes excellence.NTNU is the leading national technical university, and its student recruitment strategyis relatively similar to the University of Oslo’s. Its aim is to attract the most talentedstudents from all over the country – a reflection of the existing national and historicalprofile of the institution. Unlike the University of Bergen, NTNU does not attach greatimportance to attracting international students (although these students do find theirway to the university). The University of Tromsø, located in Northern Norway, is thesmallest of the four universities. Its recruitment strategy emphasises excellence as well,but here it is associated with being “small, different, and exotic”. Excellence isunderstood as a characteristic inherent to the location of the university, as well as acharacteristic arising from a high teacher-student ratio (which also partly reflects therelative size of the university). The assumption is that a relatively high number ofteachers per student promotes very favourable learning conditions. The main aim ofthe university’s recruitment strategy, however, is to increase the total number ofstudents, including international students. It appears that drawing a larger number ofstudents is more important than maintaining a good teacher-student ratio.

A rather different picture emerges with regard to the university colleges. In general,excellence is not a key component of their recruitment strategies, with the exception ofOslo University College, which underlines its profile as the leading national institutionfor professional studies:

To us an excellent upper secondary school certificate is not enough; the students have to bemotivated.

The rest of the university colleges place much greater weight on attracting morestudents. When excellence is addressed, it is mainly in conjunction with a descriptionof the institution as the best in its region.

The student recruitment strategies of the universities and university colleges arevery similar with regard to diversity, as they all address two aspects of diversity.Ensuring adequate gender diversity is a priority, and several institutions havelaunched special initiatives to recruit female students to studies in science and

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technology, e.g. NTNU’s “Girls and computers” initiative. The institutions aim toimprove ethnic diversity as well. Attracting students from a variety of ethnicbackgrounds is a prominent component of some recruitment strategies. None of thestrategies address the socio-economic aspect (i.e. students’ socio-economicbackground). The recruitment strategies of the University of Oslo and NTNUemphasise the importance of the geographical distribution of students, but this isprimarily related to excellence not diversity.

4.2 Important factors, elements and processes in the strategic processAs the discussion above reveals, the history and organisational identity of theinstitution play a very important role in framing the institution’s student recruitmentstrategies. Institutions with a national profile mainly adopt strategies aimed atsupporting and maintaining their position. Institutions with other organisationalidentities find ways to link their profile to excellence and quality, by, for example,highlighting their distinctiveness or international ambitions.

It has become more important to look at the ways in which institutions perceivetheir environments in relation to competition, market and internationalisation. All theinstitutions studied report that they find themselves in an increasingly competitivestudent market since the implementation of the quality reform. In their recruitmentstrategies, the international student market is identified as a main target group,although this is not highly evident in the ways the strategies are employed. Theuniversities generally have consistent practices and focus in their recruitmentactivities, using, for example, standardised routines for identifying key studentcharacteristics, mapping the geographical areas where students come from andanalysing students’ motives. Oslo University College is engaged in one of the mostcomprehensive strategy efforts, which is based on a thorough annual analysis ofreports on study progress, drop-out, and the like. The college even asserts that thedevelopment of its recruitment strategy is research-based. Although not all theinstitutions are involved in such a broad-based effort, interviewees reveal that analysesof new students provide important information for formulating student recruitmentstrategy, and may lend stability to the strategising process. Mapping of existingstudents highlights more incremental and long-term developments rather than morecomprehensive and dramatic changes due to the fact that the student body’s keycharacteristics remain relatively stable from one year to the next. Traditional ways ofidentifying the knowledge used to inform the strategic process still dominate thestrategising process, and “internationalisation”, “market” and “competition” are tosome extent simply trendy catchwords. There seems to be a gap between policyambitions and external expectations, on the one hand, and the rather technical processof developing strategies in practice, on the other.

The institutions located in more remote areas view internationalisation as essentialto recruiting a sufficient number of students. The recruitment strategy of theUniversity of Tromsø has become progressively more market-oriented since theimplementation of the quality reform. The reform emphasises the importance ofcompetition among institutions, and the new performance-based funding system hasforced the university to recruit students who have a good chance of graduating on time.Decreasing birth rates in Northern Norway and increasing birth rates in the south alsoinfluence the university’s recruitment strategy, as it has traditionally experienced

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problems in recruiting students from other parts of the country (see Dahl andStensaker, 1999). It is therefore natural for the university to focus on the internationaldimension. The university is also developing study programmes that are unique inNorway. It recently launched a new programme in aviation, and there are plans toestablish the first business school within a university setting in Norway. In the effort torespond to the new environment it is facing, the university recently signed a mergeragreement with Tromsø University College. Improving student recruitment andcreating larger, more cost-effective study programmes are among the centralarguments for the merger.

Finnmark University College, located in the same part of the country, finds itself inan almost identical situation as the University of Tromsø with regard to studentrecruitment. Located in a sparsely populated region, the college was forced to establisha group dedicated to student recruitment a decade ago. Members of the group includerepresentatives from the academic staff with competence in marketing and branding.As a result, the profile strongly corresponds to educational demand, especially inrelation to regional businesses. The college quickly drops educational programmeswith few or a decreasing number of applicants, and, like the University of Tromsø, it isin the process of developing programmes for international students.

Other university colleges that experience problems attracting a sufficient number ofstudents have been attempting to avoid competition by entering into agreements withneighbouring colleges. Hedmark University College and Lillehammer UniversityCollege have been actively trying to divide the student market by deciding incooperation which courses of study to offer. This cooperation may be regarded as aform of “constructed diversity” in which two similar vocational and professionalcolleges negotiate with one another to create distinct institutional profiles.

The research activities and research profile of many institutions, both universitiesand university colleges alike, play a much more important role in framing studentrecruitment strategy than the institutions themselves seem to acknowledge. AtVestfold University College, for example, research priorities are important for resourcedistribution, and the potential for developing Master’s and doctoral studies is a keycriterion when prioritising specific research areas. At the University of Bergen andNTNU, high-level research is also seen as an essential component of studentrecruitment. This may be due in part to Norway’s funding system for higher education,in which the long-term success of comprehensive research initiatives is dependent onresources from educational funding.

4.3 Strategies for change or continuity?Historically, in Norway, student choices and preferences have heavily influenced thedevelopment of HEIs’ educational profiles (Aamodt and Kyvik, 2005). As mentionedabove, all the HEIs studied analyse developments in the number of applicants,examining which programmes are popular and which students apply to the specificinstitutions. As a consequence of the Quality Reform, which has given universitycolleges the opportunity to upgrade to university status, we are seeing considerabletendencies of institutional drift in the Norwegian higher education system (Michelsenand Aamodt, 2007). A number of new Master’s and doctoral programmes have beendeveloped with the aim of raising an institution’s research profile, but these have hadlimited success in terms of student recruitment (Michelsen and Aamodt, 2007).

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After the initial wave of creating new study programmes, the institutions westudied are now in the process of reviewing their education profile, particularly thenumber of programmes offered but also the programmes’ degree of academicspecialisation. There are general trends toward reducing specialisation at theundergraduate level while increasing it at the Master’s level and toward cutting thenumber of programmes offered. Although this may be interpreted as a process leadingto change within the institutions and in their profiles, it may also represent a stepbackward in relation to the quality reform. As part of the implementation of the reform,a number of inter- and multidisciplinary programmes were developed (Michelsen andAamodt, 2007). Although we only have evidence from the institutions we studied, thereare indications that reductions in the number of programmes and the degree ofspecialisation represent a return to a more disciplinary-oriented programme portfolio –especially at the universities.

With regard to the importance of the existing organisational identity for studentrecruitment strategies at the universities and university colleges, it is apparent thatthese strategies are intended to strengthen the existing institutional profile rather thanchange it. The only exceptions here are the institutions located in more remote areas,which have been forced to implement more drastic measures to address the problem ofinadequate student recruitment.

5. ConclusionsAll the Norwegian HEIs we studied address the issues of excellence and diversity intheir student recruitment strategies. There is, however, no consensus on how to defineexcellence. Nevertheless, all the institutions appear to be attempting to establish a linkbetween excellence and their organisational identity. They assert alternatively thatexcellence is a consequence of their research profile and academic quality, or ofinternationalisation; or that excellence is promoted by their unique history andlocation, or quantitative measures, such as a favourable teacher/student ratio. There isgreater consensus on how to define diversity, which usually only refers to gender andmulticultural diversity. Very few institutions attempt to couple excellence anddiversity. If they do, the argument is that diversity triggers excellence.

In general, student recruitment strategies are seldom abstract or visionary. They aremostly rooted in the organisational identity of the institution, or heavily influenced bygeographical location (Frølich et al., 2008). This is supported by studies in the UK onhow HEIs have responded to government initiatives on widening participation ineducation (Greenbank, 2006). Moreover, student recruitment strategies are often basedon rather technical and quantitative analyses of existing or newly recruited studentsand their characteristics. From a strategy-as-practice perspective, this makes sense, asit appears that practice influences strategy, and not the other way around. It isinteresting to note that few of the institutions studied have investigated why studentsdid not choose their institution, thereby missing out on important information frompotentially attractive student groups.

One may, however, interpret the strong link between the research ambitions of anumber of the institutions and their study programme portfolio as an attempt to breakthis pattern. These institutions have only enjoyed moderate success with this strategy,which is perhaps a sign that changing an educational profile is a challenging,long-term task.

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We believe that strategy as sensemaking is a promising theoretical perspective, as itoffers explanations of both stability and change. Our findings reveal that theenactment, selection and retainment parts of strategy formulation are more prominentthan the definition of unambiguous goals and the design of efficient measures andactions to fulfil them. This perspective is well suited to application in the highereducation setting, as it directs attention toward the micro foundation of HEIs’ strategyprocesses, i.e. strategising as an interaction between institutional identity and thespecific institutional environments. Our findings show that stability is keycharacteristic of the institutions’ organisational identities and their conceptions ofhow their students should be. It appears that in most normal situations the knowledgebase for strategic thinking regarding student recruitment is fairly limited. Manyinstitutions respond to concepts such as “competition” or “market” by increasingmarketing and advertising activities. Raising the institutional profile is ofteninterpreted as being synonymous with spreading information about the institution,rather than developing a more unique or distinct educational profile. Based on our data,it seems that only when institutions face more dramatic situations does the enactmentprocess change, focusing on other factors than those usually associated with thestrategic process.

Although excellence and diversity clearly have a place on the student recruitmentagenda in Norway, our study indicates that Norwegian HEIs place relatively littleemphasis on student recruitment as means of promoting excellence and diversity.Excellence is defined in a variety of ways, and we find a considerable gap between thenumerous ambitious measures in the strategies we have analysed and the manner inwhich they are put into practice. The term has meaning for certain institutions in oursample, but is a minor concern for institutions facing pressing challenges. Given thissituation, there is a risk that “excellence” may become yet another buzzword in highereducation.

Notes

1. In higher education, different terms are often used to describe student recruitment strategies.In some countries, the term “enrolment” is used, while in others “admission policies” is thepreferred term. In this paper, “student recruitment” covers both these terms.

2. University of Oslo, University of Bergen, The Norwegian University of Science andTechnology (NTNU), University of Tromsø, Vestfold University College, HedmarkUniversity College, Finnmark University College and Oslo University College.

3. Elisabeth Hovdhaugen conducted the interviews at the University of Oslo, University ofBergen and NTNU. Synnøve Brandt conducted the interviews at Oslo University College andFinnmark University College; see also Frølich et al. (2008).

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Barney, J. (1991), “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage”, Journal ofManagement, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 99-120.

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Chandler, A.D.J. (1962), Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the AmericanIndustrial Enterprise, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Clark, B. (1983), The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in a Cross-nationalPerspective, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Dahl, J. and Stensaker, B. (1999), Fra modernitet til tradisjon? Styring og organisering avvirksomheten ved Universitetet i Tromsø, Report 4/99, NIFU, Oslo.

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Frølich, N., Brandt, S., Hovdhaugen, E. and Aamodt, P.O. (2008), “Marketing to whom? Highereducation institutions’ student recruitment strategies”, paper presented at the 30th AnnualEAIR Forum, Copenhagen, 24-27 August.

Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, T. and Yorke, M. (2000), “Institutional learning and teaching strategies inEnglish higher education”, Higher Education, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 351-72.

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Greenbank, P. (2006), “Institutional admission policies in higher education: a wideningparticipation perspective”, International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 20 No. 4,pp. 249-60.

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Helgesen, Ø. and Nesset, E. (2007), “What accounts for students’ loyalty? Some field studyevidence”, International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 126-43.

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Jarzabkowski, P. (2005), Strategy as Practice: An Activity Based Approach, Sage, London.

Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2007), Strategy as Practice: ResearchDirections and Resources, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Kaldeway, J. and Korthagen, F.A.J. (1995), “Training in studying in higher-education objectivesand effects”, Higher Education, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 81-98.

Kyvik, S. (2008), FoU-strategi ved statlige høyskoler, report 12/2008, NIFU STEP, Oslo.

Leathwood, C. and Phillips, D. (2000), “Developing curriculum evaluation research in highereducation: process, politics and practicalities”, Higher Education, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 313-30.

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Levinthal, D.A. and Warglien, M. (1999), “Landscape design: designing for local action incomplex worlds”, Organization Science, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 342-57.

Loyens, S.M.M., Rikers, R. and Schmidt, H.G. (2007), “The impact of students’ conceptions ofconstructivist assumptions on academic achievement and drop-out”, Studies in HigherEducation, Vol. 32 No. 5, pp. 581-602.

Michelsen, S. and Aamodt, P.O. (2007), Evalueringen av kvalitetsreformen. Sluttrapport, report,Research Council of Norway, Oslo.

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Prahalad, C.K. and Hamel, G. (1990), “The core competencies of the organization”, HarvardBusiness Review, Vol. 68 No. 1, pp. 79-91.

Scott, W.R. and Davis, G.F. (2007), Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and OpenSystem Perspectives, Pearsons, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

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Further reading

Weick, K.E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

About the authorsNicoline Frølich is a Senior Researcher at NIFU STEP. She holds a Master’s degree in Economicsand Business Administration from the Norwegian School of Economics and BusinessAdministration and a Master’s degree in Social Sciences (Comparative Politics) from theUniversity of Bergen. She earned her doctoral degree in Social Sciences (Comparative Politics) atthe University of Bergen. She is currently head of a strategic institute programme oninstitutional strategies and individual choices. She has published in leading journals such asHigher Education, European Journal of Education, Science and Public Policy, and Innovation.Nicoline Frølich is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:[email protected]

Bjørn Stensaker is Head of Research in Higher Education Studies at NIFU STEP. He is apolitical scientist from the University of Oslo, with a doctoral degree from the School ofManagement and Governance at the University of Twente in The Netherlands. His researchinterests include governance and leadership, organisational change, and quality assurance inhigher education. He has published widely on these issues in a variety of international journals.He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Tertiary Education andManagement (TEAM) published byRoutledge.

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TITLE : SOURCE

Racial Diversity Matters : The Impact ofDiversity-Related Student Engagementand Institutional Context

Proquest


Racial Diversity Matters: The Impact of Diversity-Related Student Engagement and Institutional Co...Denson, Nida;Chang, Mitchell JAmerican Educational Research Journal; Jun 2009; 46, 2; ProQuest Centralpg. 322

TITLE : SOURCE

Mission Diversity and Reputation inHigher Education Proquest

Mission Diversity and Reputation in Higher

Education

Frans van VughtCenter for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS), University of Twente, Postbus 217,

Enschede 75000, The Netherlands.

E-mail: [email protected]

In this contribution both the literature and the present-day policies regardingdiversity in higher education systems will be discussed. The first part presents anoverview of the theoretical and empirical studies on differentiation and diversity.Based on this, a conceptual framework is presented, which intends to explain theprocesses of differentiation and dedifferentiation in higher education systems. Twocrucial variables are identified, and both have a crucial impact on the behaviour ofhigher education institutions: the level of uniformity in the environment of highereducation institutions and the level of influence of academic norms and values inthese institutions. The second part of this contribution focuses on current highereducation policies. Hoping to create better and stronger contributions by highereducation institutions to the ‘knowledge society’, many governments nowadaysdevelop policies of less state control and more autonomy. It will be argued thatthese policies do not automatically lead to more diversity in higher educationsystems. The reason for this is simply that markets work imperfectly in highereducation systems and that the behaviour of higher education institutions istriggered by competition for reputation, a process producing several unintendedconsequences. In this latter context the recent rankings and typologies in highereducation are also discussed.Higher Education Policy (2008) 21, 151–174. doi:10.1057/hep.2008.5

Keywords: diversity; differentiation; autonomy; market; reputation race

Introduction

This contribution addresses the concepts of diversity and differentiation inhigher education systems. I intend to explore the literature regarding theseconcepts and to address a number of related higher education policy issues.I will also offer a conceptual framework that seeks to explain why processes ofdifferentiation and dedifferentiation take place in systems of higher education.Differentiation will be defined as a process in which new entities emerge in a

system (in our case: a system of higher education). This definition is partlyin line with Smelser (1959), who describes differentiation as a processwhereby a social unit changes into two or more other units. According to

Higher Education Policy, 2008, 21, (151–174)r 2008 International Association of Universities 0952-8733/08 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/hep

Smelser, the ‘new social units are structurally distinct from each other, buttaken together they are functionally equivalent to the original unit’ (Smelser,1959, 2). However, unlike Smelser, I would like to include the emergence ofcompletely new entities in the definition. Whereas Smelser limits his definitionto the splitting up of existing units into new ones, I, like Rhoades, accept thecoming into existence of completely new units as part of the definition(Rhoades, 1983, 285).

Differentiation as a concept should be distinguished from the concept ofdiversity. Diversity is a term indicating the variety of entities within asystem. While differentiation denotes a dynamic process, diversity refersto a static situation. Differentiation is the process in which new entities in asystem emerge; diversity refers to the variety of the entities at a specificpoint in time (Huisman, 1995, 51). The framework to be presented will bedirected to differentiation and diversity of higher education systems.This implies that the focus will be at the level of higher education systemsrather than of higher education institutions or of sets of programmes(of teaching and research) organized by these institutions. In terms ofBirnbaum’s (1983) typology of forms of diversity, the focus is on externaldiversity (a concept that refers to differences between higher educationinstitutions), rather than on internal diversity (differences within highereducation institutions).

When discussing external diversity and processes of system differentiation,I will analyse the behaviour of the various ‘actors’ in the system. These actorsto a large extent are the higher education organizations that are part of ahigher education system. I will interpret these organizations as ‘corporateactors’ (Coleman, 1990, 531), and will assume that the explanation of socialphenomena like differentiation and diversity is possible by means of analysingthe behaviour and/or opinions of these corporate actors who need notnecessarily be natural persons (although the activities of corporate actors are ofcourse carried out by people).

In the higher education literature several forms of diversity are mentioned.In a survey of the literature, Birnbaum (1983) identifies seven categories thatare largely related to external diversity (Huisman, 1995):

� systemic diversity refers to differences in institutional type, size and controlfound within a higher education system;

� structural diversity refers to institutional differences resulting from historicaland legal foundations, or differences in the internal division of authorityamong institutions;

� programmatic diversity relates to the degree level, degree area, comprehen-siveness, mission and emphasis of programmes and services provided byinstitutions;

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� procedural diversity describes differences in the ways that teaching, researchand/or services are provided by institutions;

� reputational diversity communicates the perceived differences in institutionsbased on status and prestige;

� constituential diversity alludes to differences in students served and otherconstituents in the institutions (faculty, administration);

� values and climate diversity is associated with differences in socialenvironment and culture.

For our purposes, the distinction between external and internal diversity is thecrucial one. We will focus on the differences between institutions rather than ondifferences within institutions.

Classical and Recent Perspectives

Diversity and differentiation have been studied in-depth in the past centuries.Crucial studies that come to mind include the seminal works of Darwin (Originof Species, 1859), Durkheim (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893) and, morerecently, Parsons (Societies: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives, 1966)and Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1968).

The explanatory framework to be presented here draws heavily on threecontemporary theoretical perspectives from organizational theory: the popu-lation ecology perspective, the resource dependency perspective and theinstitutional isomorphism perspective. Although these three perspectives havemuch in common, there are also some specific differences. As an introduction,let me briefly characterize each of the three perspectives.

The population ecology approach is based on the Darwinian evolutionarypoint of view. According to Hannan and Freeman, two of the most importantauthors in this field, the population ecology approach concentrates ‘on thesources of variability and homogeneity of organisational formsy In doing so,it pays considerable attention to population dynamics, especially the processesof competition among diverse organizations for limited resources such asmembership, capital and legitimacy’ (1989, 13).

The resource dependency perspective stresses the mutual processes ofinteraction between organizations and their environments. According to thisapproach, organizations on the one hand are dependent on their environments(which primarily consist of other organizations) but on the other theseorganizations are also able to influence their environments. ‘Rather thantaking the environment as a given to which the organization then adapts, it isconsiderably more realistic to consider the environment as an outcome of aprocess that involves both adaptation to the environment and attempts tochange that environment’ (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978, 222).


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The institutional isomorphism approach stresses that in order to survive,organizations have to adapt to the existence of and pressures by otherorganizations in their environment. These adaptation processes tend to lead tohomogenization, as organizations react more or less similarly to uniformenvironmental conditions. Isomorphism is a constraining process that forcesorganizations to resemble other organizations that face the same set ofenvironmental conditions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).

Further on I will use the theoretical notions of these three perspectives todevelop a conceptual framework that intends to explain the processes ofdifferentiation and dedifferentiation in higher education systems. Before doingso, let us first focus on the various arguments in favour of diversity anddifferentiation in higher education systems, and let us address the most relevantstudies on these concepts in the literature.

Arguments in Favour of Diversity

Diversity has been identified in the higher education literature as one of themajor factors associated with the positive performance of higher educationsystems. Birnbaum (1983) presents an overview of the various arguments foundin the literature in favour of external diversity (which I have adaptedsomewhat). Many of these arguments appear to be highly relevant in thecontext of higher education policy making.

First, it is often argued that increase in diversity of a higher education system isan important strategy to meet student needs. A more diversified system is assumedto be better able to offer access to higher education to students with differenteducational backgrounds and with a variety of histories of academic achievements.The argument is that in a diversified system, in which the performance of highereducation institutions varies, each student is offered an opportunity to work andcompete with students of similar background. Each student has the opportunity tofind an educational environment in which chances for success are realistic.

A second and related argument is that diversity provides for social mobility.By offering different modes of entry into higher education and by providingmultiple forms of transfer, a diversified system stimulates upward mobility aswell as honourable downward mobility. A diversified system allows forcorrections of errors of choice; it provides extra opportunities for success; itrectifies poor motivation; and it broadens educational horizons.

Third, diversity is supposed to meet the needs of the labour market. Thepoint of view here is that in modern society an increasing variety ofspecializations on the labour market is necessary to allow further economicand social development. A homogeneous higher education system is thought tobe less able to respond to the diverse needs of the labour market than indiversified system.


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A fourth argument is that diversity serves the political needs of interestgroups. The idea is that a diverse system ensures the needs of different groupsin society to have their own identity and their own political legitimation. In lessdiversified higher education systems the needs of specific groups may remainunaddressed, which may cause internal debates in a higher education systemand various kinds of disruptions.

A fifth, and well-known argument is that diversity permits the crucialcombination of elite and mass higher education. Generally speaking, masssystems tend to be more diversified than elite systems, as mass systems absorb amore heterogeneous clientele and attempt to respond to a wider range ofdemands from the labour market. In his famous analysis of mass and elitesystems, Trow (1979) has indicated that the survival of elite higher educationdepends on the existence of a comprehensive system of non-elite institutions.Essentially, Trow argues that only if a majority of the students are offered theknowledge and skills that are relevant to find a position in the labour market,will a few elite institutions be able to survive.

A sixth reason why diversity is an important objective for higher educationsystems is that diversity is assumed to increase the level of effectiveness ofhigher education institutions. This argument is made for instance by theCarnegie Commission (1973) that has suggested that institutional specializa-tion allows higher education institutions to focus their attention and energy,which helps them in producing higher levels of effectiveness.

Finally, diversity is assumed to offer opportunities for experimenting withinnovation. In diversified higher education systems, institutions have theoption to assess the viability of innovations created by other institutions,without necessarily having to implement these innovations themselves.Diversity offers the possibility to explore the effects of innovative behaviourwithout the need to implement the innovation for all institutions at the sametime. Diversity permits low-risk experimentation.

These various arguments in favour of external diversity show that diversity isusually assumed to be a worthwhile objective for higher education systems.Diversified higher education systems are supposed to produce higher levels ofclient orientation (both regarding the needs of students and of the labourmarket), social mobility, effectiveness, flexibility, innovativeness and stability.More diversified systems, generally speaking, are thought to be ‘better’ thanless diversified systems. And many governments have designed and imple-mented policies to increase the level of diversity of higher education systems.

Unfortunately, it is not always clear how an increase of a higher educationsystem’s diversity should be realized. The many governmental policies thathave been developed and implemented do not always lead to the desiredresults. It appears that, although these concepts have a long tradition in thesocial sciences, diversity and differentiation are still only partly understood.


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Studies on Differentiation and Diversity in Higher Education

The concepts of diversity and differentiation have been widely discussed in thehigher education literature. In this section, I present a brief categorization ofthe most influential studies (for a more elaborate overview see Huisman, 1995).

It appears that many studies on diversity and differentiation in highereducation can be distinguished according to the question whether differentia-tion or dedifferentiation processes are assumed to take place in highereducation systems. On the one hand, there are studies that claim that highereducation systems show an immanent drive towards differentiation andincreasing levels of diversity. On the other hand, there are studies that arguethat higher education systems are characterized by dedifferentiation anddecreasing levels of diversity.

Examples of the category of studies claiming an immanent drive towardsincreasing levels of diversity are Parsons and Platt (1973) and Clark (1978).

In their well-known study on the US higher education system, Parsons andPlatt discuss, in addition to several other themes, the processes of differentia-tion within higher education systems. Their main argument appears to be thatprocesses of differentiation occur when new functions emerge in a system. Anexample is the development of the graduate schools, which have come to bedifferentiated from undergraduate colleges. However, differentiation appar-ently does not necessarily imply the coming into existence of a new type oforganization, as the authors also argue that new functions can be integrated inexisting organizations.

Clark’s argument regarding diversity and differentiation is based on hisconviction that the growing complexity of bodies of knowledge brings along anever-increasing fragmentation within and among higher education organiza-tions. According to Clark (1983), the increasing complexity of higher educationsystems (and of the functions this system must fulfil) is an outcome ofthree related forces: the increasing variety of the student population, thegrowth of the labour market for academic graduates and the emergence andgrowth of new disciplines. The effects are ongoing differentiation processesand increasing levels of diversity. Emphasizing that differentiation often is inthe interest of groups and individuals, Clark underlines the immanent drivetowards differentiation in higher education: ‘Once created and made valuableto a group, often to an alliance of groups, academic forms persist. Out ofsuccessive historical periods come additional forms, with birth rate greatlyexceeding death rate. Differentiation is then an accumulation of historicaldeposits’ (Clark, 1983, 221).

Next to the studies that claim that higher education systems show a moreor less permanent drive towards differentiation stand the studies thatargue that dedifferentiation is the name of the higher education game.


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Examples of this category of studies are Riesman (1956), Birnbaum (1983) andRhoades (1990).

In his classical study Constraint and Variety in American Education (1956),Riesman compares the US higher education system with a kind of reptilianprocession during which certain higher education institutions will move to thepositions where other institutions were before. According to Riesman, thisprocession is the result of the typical behaviour of higher educationinstitutions, which basically consists of lower status institutions trying to gainstatus by imitating higher status institutions (especially the prestigious researchuniversities). This imitating behaviour, also indicated as ‘academic drift’(Neave, 1979), creates a tendency towards uniformity and decreasing levels ofdiversity.

Birnbaum (1983) not only presents an elaborate classification on forms ofdiversity (in which seven forms of diversity are identified), he also tries toempirically assess the changes in external diversity in the US higher educationsystem between 1960 and 1980. His findings show that during this period thenumber of institutional types had not increased and thus that differentiationhad not occurred. Birnbaum hypothesizes that especially centralized state-levelplanning and the application of rigid criteria for the approval of newinstitutions and programmes hamper differentiation processes. Governmentalpolicies, says Birnbaum, may be a major factor in producing processes ofdedifferentiation and decreasing levels of diversity.

Rhoades’ (1990) argument is that processes of dedifferentiation are the resultof political competition between academic professionals and (external) laygroups, and governmental policies that structure these processes of competi-tion. Rhoades indicates that as an effect of governmental policies andadministrative systems in higher education, the power of the academicprofessionals is often quite large. The power balance between academics andlay groups to a large extent determines whether differentiation actually occurs.Comparing the developments in the higher education systems of the UK,France, Sweden and the US, Rhoades concludes that academics have beensuccessful in defending their own norms and values and hence have preventeddifferentiation processes from taking place.

The various studies just presented show that external diversity anddifferentiation have been regularly addressed by higher education scholars.However, these studies also show that rather different points of view appear toexist regarding the direction of differentiation or dedifferentiation processes inhigher education systems. Are these systems showing an immanent drivetowards differentiation because of the emergence of new functions (Parsonsand Platt) or because of the growing complexities of the bodies of knowledgeand the variety of the student body and the labour market (Clark)? Or aresystems of higher education to be characterized by immanent processes of


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dedifferentiation because of the imitating behaviour by lower status institu-tions (Riesman), centralized and uniform governmental policies (Birnbaum) oracademic conservatism (Rhoades)?

In my own approach, I will combine some of these factors into a conceptualframework that seeks to explain external diversity in higher education systems.

A Theoretical Framework for Explaining Differentiationand Diversity in Higher Education Systems

In this paragraph, I will try to sketch the framework for a theory ofdifferentiation and diversity in higher education systems. My point of depar-ture will be the well-known ‘open systems approach’ in the social sciences.Using this approach, I interpret higher education as a system consisting ofindividual higher education organizations (being the components — orsubsystems — of the higher education system) embedded in an environmentthat includes the social, political and economic conditions within which thehigher education organizations need to operate. Being an open system, thehigher education system is open to its environment, which implies that itscomponents are both able to receive inputs (in the form of students, faculty,finances and other resources) and to deliver outputs (in the form of graduates,research, results and advice). This leads me to a first assumption for mytheoretical framework:

Assumption 1: Organizations for higher education receive inputs from, andproduce outputs for, their environments.

To the still rather general open systems approach, I add the three (mutuallyrelated) theoretical perspectives from organizational theory that were brieflyintroduced earlier: the population ecology perspective, the resource depen-dency perspective and the institutional isomorphism perspective.

The population ecology perspective has been sketched by Morgan (1986, 66)in the following terms: ‘Organisations, like organisms in nature, depend forsurvival on their ability to acquire an adequate supply of resources necessary tosustain existence. In this effort they have to face competition with otherorganizations, and since there is usually a resource scarcity, only the fittestsurvive. The nature, number and distribution of organizations at any giventime is dependent on resource availability and on competition within andbetween different species of organizations’.

In the population ecology model, the environment is the critical factor.The environment determines which organizations succeed and which fail. Theenvironment acts as the critical selector. This point of view is clearly based onthe Darwinian evolutionary perspective of variation, selection and retention.


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Variation may take place by means of various sources (planning, but alsoerror, chance, luck and conflict; see Aldrich, 1979, 28). Selection is the processby which the organizations that fit particular environmental conditions arepositively selected. Retention is the process in which the selected variations arepreserved (Aldrich, 1979, 28–31).

There are a few theoretical notions of the population ecology perspectivethat need our special attention. One is that the theoretical model is directed tounderstanding the dynamics of whole populations of organizations, rather thanof individual organizations. In the work by Aldrich, Hannan and Freeman,and others, the population ecology perspective refers to the aggregate study oforganizations, that is, the organization that fall within a certain ‘population’.The emphasis of the theoretical model is on the rise and decline of differentspecies of organizations, as well as on their shared characteristics.

This focus on populations of organizations is less relevant for our purposes.Given the wish to develop a theoretical framework for the explanation ofdifferentiation and diversity in higher education systems, a focus on the riseand decline of species of organizations (and hence on a very large time frame)appears to be less fruitful. Rather, the theoretical framework should addressthe ways by which processes of differentiation take place in higher educationsystems, as well as the resulting levels of diversity.

Another crucial insight of the population ecology model (as alreadyindicated) is the idea that it is the ability of organizations to acquire relevantenvironmental resources (i.e., to obtain a resource niche) that is mostimportant for success and survival. Organizations need an input of resourcesfrom their environment to be able to sustain existence. When resources arescarce, those organizations that are better able to secure a more or lesspermanent input have a better chance of survival.

Related to this notion is the important emphasis on competition. In thepopulation ecologists’ view, the process of competition for scarce resources willshow which organizations are able to outperform their competitors and hencehave a better chance to find a successful resource niche.

From the population ecology perspective I take two further assumptions fora theory of differentiation and diversity in higher education systems:

Assumption 2: In order to survive, higher education organizations need to secure acontinuous and sufficient supply of resources from their environments.

Assumption 3: When scarcity of resources exists, higher education organizationscompete with each other to secure a continuous and sufficient supply of resources.

This brings us to the important concept of structural isomorphism. In thepopulation ecology perspective, the competition between organizations


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produces a certain correspondence between, on the one, the environmentalconditions (resources and constraints) and, on the other hand, the structuralcharacteristics of organizations. According to Hannan and Freeman, thediversity of organizational forms is proportional to the diversity of resourcesand constraints in their environments (Hannan and Freeman, 1989, 62). Theseauthors also claim that the competition for scare resources causes competingorganizations to become similar. The conditions of competition lead to similarorganizational responses and, moreover, to the elimination of the (dissimilar)weaker organizations. The result is an increase of homogeneity (structuralisomorphism) (Hannan and Freeman, 1977, 939).

However, the population ecology perspective has been criticized for exactlythis notion of decreasing diversity under conditions of competition for scarceresources. Hawley (1986), for instance, contests Hannan and Freeman’sassumption that competition for scarce resources causes structural isomorph-ism: ‘As a type of relation, competition is readily observable; as a producer ofparticular outcomes it is obscure. At most it helps account for the eliminationof some contestants from a share of the limited resource’ (Hawley, 1986, 127).Apparently the relationships between environmental conditions, competitionand diversity need further exploration.

At this point I turn to the two other (and related) perspectives fromorganizational theory: the resource dependency perspective and the institu-tional isomorphism perspective.

Although closely related to the population ecology perspective, theresource dependency perspective also shows an important distinction. Whilethe population ecology model tends to emphasize the unidirectional organiza-tional dependency on environmental conditions, the resource dependencymodel underlines the idea of mutual influencing. The environmentcertainly is perceived as having a major impact on organizational behaviourbut, at the same time, organizations are also assumed to have certaineffects on their environment. Pfeffer and Salancik (1978, 222) state this point ofview as follows: ‘The view that organisations are constrained by theirpolitical, legal and social environment is only partially correct y organisationsare not only constrained by their environments but y in fact, law, legitimacyand political outcomes somewhat reflect the actions taken by organisationsto modify their environments for their interests in survival, growth andcertainty’.

I like to follow this line of argument and I assume that organizations (also inhigher education) are affected by their environmental conditions, but are alsoable to affect these conditions.

Assumption 4: Higher education organizations both influence and are influencedby their environmental conditions.


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Returning to the relationships between environmental conditions, competitionand diversity, we are now not only able to formulate the expectation thatcompetition for scarce resources forces organizations to more or less similarresponses, but also that, when confronted with scarcity of resources,organizations may want to try to influence their environmental conditions inorder to secure better conditions. To the notion of the population ecologyperspective of structural isomorphism as a result of competition for scarceresources, we now add the insight from the resource dependency perspectivethat, confronted with scarcity, organizations can act to influence theirenvironment. The remaining question of course is how organizations tend toact when their supply of resources is threatened. To find an answer to thisquestion, let us look at the perspective of institutional isomorphism.

The basic view of this perspective is that the survival and success oforganizations depends upon taking account of other organizations in theenvironment. According to DiMaggio and Powell (1983), this leads to threeforms of institutional isomorphism, all leading to an increasing similarity inorganizational behaviour and producing a decrease of systems diversity.Coercive isomorphism results from the pressures applied by other organiza-tions (in the environment) on which the organization is dependent (e.g.,governmental policies and laws). Mimetic isomorphism stems from uncertaintycaused by poorly understood technologies, ambiguous goals and the symbolicenvironment, which induces organizations to imitate the behaviour ofperceived successful organizations. Normative isomorphism stems fromprofessionalization. Professionalism leads to homogeneity both becauseformal professional training produces a certain similarity in professional back-ground and because membership of professional networks further encouragessuch a similarity.

It may be clear from these three forms of institutional isomorphism that,according to DiMaggio and Powell, both certain environmental conditions(e.g., governmental policies) and specific organizational characteristics (e.g.,the perceived uncertainty of the environment and the degree of professiona-lization of the organization) may produce dedifferentiation processes. Theargument appears to be that, confronted with scarcity of resources,organizations may either be forced to react in such a way that dedifferentiationprocesses occur, or they may themselves show a behaviour that contributes to adecrease in the external diversity of the overall system.

Using the insights from the three perspectives of organizational theory wemay, I argue, formulate some general relationships between, on the one hand,environmental conditions and (de)differentiation, and, on the other hand,organizational behaviour and (de)differentiation. Keeping the factors sug-gested in the higher education literature in mind, a first proposition could bethat the level of uniformity/variety of the environment of the organization is


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related (by means of the organization’s adaptive behaviour) to the level ofdiversity of the higher education system. This proposition follows the notion ofthe population ecology model of competition under conditions of scarceresources, it underscores the argument of coercive isomorphism and it acceptsthe idea that it is the organization itself that shows the relevant adaptivebehaviour.

Proposition 1: The larger the uniformity of the environmental conditions of highereducation organizations, the lower the level of diversity of the higher educationsystem.

Relevant factors from the higher education literature that could be used to testthis proposition are the level of uniformity of governmental policies(Birnbaum) and the level of variety in the student body and in the needs ofthe labour market (Clark).

A second proposition can be formulated when we focus on the generalrelationship between organizational behaviour and (de)differentiation. Againreferring to some of the factors mentioned in the higher education literature(see above), the proposition could be that the level of influence of academicnorms and values in a higher education organization is related (by means ofeither academic professionalism or imitating behaviour) to the level of diversityof the higher education system. Also this proposition follows the notion ofcompetition under conditions of scarce resources, it emphasizes the argumentsof mimetic and normative isomorphism and it accepts the ability of theorganization to choose its own behaviour.

Proposition 2: The larger the influence of academic norms and values in a highereducation organization, the lower the level of diversity of the higher educationsystem.

Relevant factors from the higher education literature to test this propositionare the ability of academic professionals to define and defend the (academic)norms and values as relevant for higher education organizations (Rhoades)and the extent to which academic norms and values guide the imitatingbehaviour by lower status institutions (academic drift) (Riesman).

The two propositions offer a combination of structural isomorphism causedby competition (from the population ecology model) and institutionalisomorphism caused by coercive, mimetic and normative pressures (from theinstitutional isomorphism model). In addition, the propositions show thatthe actual occurrence of processes of differentiation and dedifferentiation hasto be explained by the combination of (external) environmental conditions and(internal) organizational characteristics. Either the tension between or the


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joining of these forces can offer a coherent explanation for processes ofdifferentiation or dedifferentiation and thus for lower or higher levels ofexternal diversity in a higher education system.

Higher Education Research Outcomes

Let us now return to the higher education literature and try to find someempirical indications that may be related to the conceptual framework. Arethere outcomes of empirical higher education research that are relevant fortesting our theoretical notions?

There appear to be remarkably few studies that produce empirical outcomeson diversity and differentiation in higher education. A few relevant studies canbe mentioned. Huisman et al. (2007) recently undertook a cross-national andlongitudinal analysis of 10 higher education systems. They found that,generally speaking, system size (the number of higher education institutionsin a system) does not necessarily imply a high level of diversity. In addition, itappeared that governmental regulation may help to preserve a formallyexisting level of diversity in a higher education system, but that governmentinitiated merger operations bring about more homogeneity rather than anincrease of diversity. The explanation offered by the authors is in line with ourconceptual framework. They suggest that legally mandated boundaries inhigher education systems (as for instance in legally regulated binary systems)are preserving the existing level of diversity, but that governmental policies thatoffer more autonomy to higher education institutions encourage theseinstitutions to emulate the most prestigious ones.

The already mentioned studies by both Birnbaum (1983) and Rhoades(1990) also appear to offer empirical support for the theoretical frameworkpresented. Birnbaum found that during the period 1960–1980, the externaldiversity of the US higher education system had not increased although thesystem had grown enormously. ‘It appears that the higher education systemhas used the vast increase in resources primarily to replicate existing forms(such as the community college) rather than to create new ones’ (Birnbaum,1983, 144). In a recent study, Morphew has repeated Birnbaum’s study for theperiod 1972–2002. His findings reveal that, although the study period exhibitedgreat change in the US higher education system, there is zero (or negative)growth in the general diversity of US higher education (Morphew, 2006).

Rhoades (1990) compared the developments in the higher education systemsof the UK, France, Sweden and the USA between 1960 and 1980. His generalfinding appears to be that, although these systems show a certain amount ofchange, the processes of dedifferentiation were predominant. Rhoadesexpected that, because of a decrease in the financial resources for higher


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education during this period, the competition between the higher educationinstitutions would increase, which would produce an increase in diversity.While discussing his empirical findings, he on the one hand suggests thatseveral of the governments of the four countries have taken initiatives tointroduce new types of institutions, but on the other hand he concludes thatthese governments (as well as accreditation boards) have contributed todedifferentiation. In addition, Rhoades argues, it appears that in the fourcountries the influence of especially academic professionals has beensubstantial. Academics appear to be able to define and monopolize the natureof their professional activities, and, by doing so, preserve the existing statusquo. Academic professionals appear to be successful in resisting initiatives tochange the system and in inhibiting processes of differentiation.

Several other empirical studies on differentiation in higher education systemsappear to point in the same direction. In an analysis of differentiation processesin the Canadian higher education system, Skolnik (1986) comes to conclusionsthat are rather similar to the ones formulated by Birnbaum and Rhoades.According to Skolnik, the Canadian higher education system is faced withpressures towards homogenization because of both the restricting provincialsteering approaches and the strong dominance of the values and norms ofacademic professionals.

In a study of the changes in the Dutch higher education system, Maassenand Potman (1990) analysed the university ‘development plans’. Theirobjective was to find out whether the universities had been able to use theirenlarged autonomy (the result of new governmental policy) to create morediversity in the system. Their conclusion is negative: ‘y innovations all seem togo into the same direction of homogenization. As far as the development plansare concerned, the institutions have not succeeded in establishing meaningfuland discriminating profiles. On the contrary, it seems likely that varioushomogenizing developments will emerge’ (Maassen and Potman, 1990, 403).According to the authors, the combination of governmental regulations andthe power of the academic professionals (especially in the quality controlsystem) explain the trend towards decreasing diversity.

Meek (1991) has analysed the structural changes in the Australian highereducation system. An increase of institutional autonomy, the demise of thebinary system and a large-scale merger operation were assumed to allow formore diversity in the system. According to Meek, the strong academic valuesand norms, as well as the processes of academic drift tend to inhibit theincrease of diversity. Dedifferentiation rather than differentiation appears to bethe case in the Australian system.

The various empirical studies appear to underline the notions of thetheoretical framework presented earlier. According to the authors of thesestudies, environmental pressures (especially governmental regulation) as well as


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the dominance of academic norms and values are the crucial factors thatinfluence the processes of differentiation and dedifferentiation in highereducation systems. In all cases, the empirical observations point in thedirection of dedifferentiation and decreasing levels of diversity. The overallimpression is that, in empirical reality, the combination of strict and uniformgovernmental policies and the predominance of academic norms and valuesleads to homogenization.

However, it should be kept in mind that the theoretical framework alsosuggests other possible outcomes. When the environmental conditions arevaried and when the influence of academic norms and values in a highereducation institution is limited, the level of systems diversity may be expectedto increase. Also, according to the theoretical framework, the combinations ofuniform environmental conditions and limited influence of academic normsand values on the one hand, and of varied environmental conditions and largeinfluence of academic norms and values on the other, might be related to eitherincreasing or decreasing levels of diversity.

In addition, it may be pointed out that the pressures from governmentalregulation do not necessarily have to be seen as mechanisms for homogeniza-tion. As has been indicated by Huisman et al. and Rhoades, governmentalpolicies may also play an important role in maintaining existing and formallyregulated levels of diversity, if necessary, by containing academic conservatismand/or imitating behaviour by lower status institutions. From this point ofview, the regulatory policy regarding the complex tripartite structure of thepublic sector higher education system of California appears to be interesting.Although tensions exist within this system, it appears that the CaliforniaMaster Plan has succeeded in preventing homogenization processes fromoccurring. A conscious legislative decision to maintain a certain level ofdiversity in the public system apparently has been able to restrain academicdrift (Fox, 1993).

A recent and interesting approach to maintaining and even increasing thediversity of a higher education system is the process followed by the UniversityGrants Committee (UGC) of Hong Kong. The UGC entered into an opendiscussion with each of the (eight) universities of the Hong Kong highereducation system and stimulated them to formulate their specific missions androles in the context of the broader system. Subsequently, these missionsand roles were formalized in agreements between the individual institutionsand the UGC. During this process, the UGC kept an eye on its objective toincrease the diversity at the level of the system. Finally, after a few years,the UGC developed a ‘Performance and Role-related Funding Scheme’, inwhich it explored, together with the individual institutions, whether they hadbeen able to remain within the parameters of their mission and role statements.The result was a clear increase of the diversity of the Hong Kong higher


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education system and even a growing enthusiasm with the institutions to stickto their roles.

Higher Education System Diversity and the ‘Knowledge Society’

It is a familiar argument by now: the Western world has entered the phase ofthe ‘knowledge society’; our future prosperity and welfare will to a large extentdepend on our ability to create and apply knowledge; our economic growth isdependent upon the ways we are able to work with useful knowledge. Nationstates and whole continents underline their ambitions to become globalcompetitors in terms of the knowledge economy. The European Union has, forinstance, indicated that it intends to become the world’s most dynamic andcompetitive knowledge economy by the year 2010.

The ‘knowledge economy’ is at the heart of many governmental policiesthese days. Governments design policies that intend to stimulate the creationand application of knowledge in economic activities; they try to stimulate‘academic entrepreneurialism’, the use of IPR, the setting up of venture capitalfunds and the intensity of cooperation between universities and businessand industry.

Given these ambitions, political leaders increasingly address highereducation institutions. They craft higher education policies that intend toinfluence the behaviour of these institutions and of the faculty working withinthem. Generally speaking these policies regard the trade-off between autonomyand accountability; between less state control and more self-managementon the one hand (van Vught, 1992) and more efficiency and especiallyresponsiveness to societal needs on the other (Meek, 2003).

A crucial aspect of these policies regards the wish of governments to createhigher levels of diversity in national higher education systems. More diversity isassumed to better serve the needs of the labour market, to offer more andbetter access to a larger student body and to allow institutional specializationby which the effectiveness of the overall higher education system increases.Particularly the latter argument is regularly presented in the context ofdeveloping the ‘knowledge society’. In order to make them more responsive tosocietal needs, higher education institutions should be stimulated to developtheir specific missions and profiles, jointly creating a diversified highereducation system in which different types of institutions co-exist.

The policy argument that governments use is rather straightforward andgoes as follows. Higher education institutions need to become more responsiveto the needs of the knowledge society. They need to increase their capacity andwillingness to become engaged in the production of useful knowledge. Andthey need to develop their own specialized missions and profiles. In order to


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stimulate these institutions to do so, the mechanism of market coordinationcan be used. Reinforcing the demand side of the market (by increasingconsumer sovereignty) will increase the sensitiveness to consumers’ wishes, thelevel of institutional specialization and the level of competition betweenuniversities. The result will be higher-quality outputs, a more diversified systemand an increasing responsiveness to societal needs.

It seems to me that the validity of this policy argument can be questioned.First, the outputs of higher education institutions are usually heavilysubsidized, both by public funding and by private gifts. Supply and demanddo not set a market-clearing price for the outputs of higher educationinstitutions (Geiger, 2004, 17). The subsidization processes also create marketdistortions, especially because of the uneven distribution of the public andprivate resources that are poured into higher education (Newman et al., 2004,90). In higher education systems the price mechanism works imperfectly.

Secondly, the introduction of more consumer sovereignty in highereducation systems does not necessarily trigger the behaviour of highereducation institutions that governments are trying to accomplish. Given thespecific nature of their ‘products and services’, higher education institutionsoften are able to use their autonomy to resist the pressures of the increase ofconsumer power.

There is simple explanation for this. The products and services that highereducation institutions offer are ‘experience goods’ (Dill, 2003): the clients ofuniversities are only able to judge the relevance and the quality of the outputsof higher education, when they are able to experience them. Students can onlyreally judge the quality of a course when they take it; and research clients canonly really judge the quality of a research project when they are offered theresults. When confronted with the question to take a decision in favour of acertain product or service of an institution for higher education, clients(including potential students) are hampered with the well-known marketfailure of imperfect information. Higher education institutions, on their part,are enticed by these conditions to represent themselves in the best possibleways. They underline their self-acclaimed qualities hoping that by emphasizingthese, they will be able to convince the clients of their attractiveness.

As a result of this, the consumer market works imperfectly in highereducation (Massy, 2003, 42). In the words of Joseph Stiglitz: ‘Recent advancesin economic theory have shown that whenever information is imperfect andmarkets incomplete, y then the invisible hand works imperfectly’ (quoted inFriedman, 2002, 50). Increasing consumer sovereignty therefore does notautomatically lead to an increase of responsiveness to societal needs by highereducation institutions and to more diversity in a higher education system.Rather the behaviour of these institutions is triggered by the conditions ofanother market, that of competition for institutional reputation.


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The Higher Education ‘Reputation Race’

In his classic The Higher Education System, Clark explores three major types ofmarkets that are relevant in higher education systems: consumer markets, ‘wherepeople normally exchange money for desired goods or services’, labour markets,‘in which people offer their capabilities and energy for money’ and institutionalmarkets, ‘where enterprises interact with one another, instead of with consumersor employees’ (Clark, 1983, 162–165). It is the first market (consumer markets)that appears to be the object of many governmental policies that try to increasethe coordinative capabilities of market forces in higher education. By increasingthe capacity of the consumers of higher education outputs (students, clients) tochoose among the various products of higher education institutions, thesepolicies intend to strengthen the consumer market. However, exactly because ofanother higher education market mentioned by Clark, these policies are usuallyonly marginally effective. Let me explain this.

The actions of universities and other higher education institutions appear tobe particularly driven by the wish to maximize their (academic) prestige and touphold their reputations (Garvin, 1980; Brewer et al., 2002). Universities seekto hire the best possible faculty (on the higher education labour market) andthey try to recruit the most qualified students (on the higher educationconsumer market). They do so because they are ‘intensely concerned withreputation and prestige’ (Geiger, 2004, 15).

Given this drive, higher education institutions are first and foremost eachother’s competitors (on the institutional market). They compete amongthemselves for the best students, the best faculty, the largest research contracts,the highest endowments, etc. They compete for all the resources that may havean impact on their institutional reputation.

Geiger (2004) argues that this competition for reputation is played out in twoprincipal arenas, one comprising faculty scholarship and the other reflectingthe recruitment of students. In the first arena, universities try to recruit andemploy the best scientists, that is, those scholars with the highest recognitionand rewards, the highest citation impact scores and the largest numbers ofpublications. In order to be able to do so, they continuously feel the need toincrease their staff expenditures, especially in research (since it is this contextthat scholars are attracted to), creating a continuous need for extra resources.The second arena regards the recruitment of students. Given their wish toincrease their reputation, universities try to attract the most talented students.They use selection procedures to find them, but they also offer grants and otherfacilities in order to be able to recruit them, again leading to a permanent needfor extra resources.

The concept of ‘reputation in higher education’ needs some furtherexploration. The reputation of a higher education institution can be defined


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as the image (of quality, influence, trustworthiness) it has in the eyes of others.Reputation is the subjective reflection of the various actions an institutionundertake to create an external image. The reputation of an institution and itsquality may be related, but they need not be identical. Higher educationinstitutions try to influence their external images in many ways, and not onlyby maximizing their quality.

The dynamics of higher education are first and foremost a result of thecompetition for reputation. Higher education systems are characterized by a‘reputation race’. In this race, higher education institutions are constantlytrying to create the best possible images of themselves as highly regardeduniversities. And this race is expensive. Higher education institutions will spendall the resources they can find to try to capture an attractive position in therace. In this sense, Bowen’s famous law of higher education still holds: ‘y inquest of excellence, prestige and influencey each institution raises all themoney it can y [and] spends all it raises’ (Bowen, 1980, 20).

Unintended Consequences

As indicated before, in many countries across the world, a shift is taking placein public policy regarding higher education. Even in countries where stateregulation used to be the dominant factor with respect to the dynamics ofhigher education systems, now new policies are emerging designed to createmarkets in higher education, to strengthen the ties with industry and tostimulate higher levels of external diversity.

Newman et al. (2004) see two main causes for this international developmentin public policy. One is the previously mentioned wish of political leaders to usethe assumed positive forces of increased competition and consumer sovereigntyto make higher education institutions more responsive to the needs of society,especially with respect to the knowledge economy. I argued before that thisargument fails to appreciate the strength of another market in highereducation, that of institutional reputation.

The other cause for the international shift of public policy towards markets,and an increase of competition, is the behaviour of universities themselves.When confronted with the temptations of more autonomy and self-manage-ment, university leaders are most willing also to accept the increasedcompetition that is often used as an argument for even more autonomy: ‘Weneed greater autonomy in order to compete’ (Newman et al., 2004, 34).

However, the introduction through public policy of increased competitionmay lead to a number of unintended consequences in the dynamics of highereducation systems that do not necessarily contribute to a better responsivenessto societal needs.


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First, the total cost of higher education appears to be growing immensely.The reputation race implies that universities are in constant need of moreresources. They need these resources to recruit better staff, to offer more studygrants, to upgrade their facilities, to improve their PR, etc. ‘Universities presstheir pricing up to the limits that markets, regulators, and public opinion willallow. They justify their actions in terms of the rising cost of excellence andother factors beyond their control, but that is only part of the story. Theimpetus for price hikes stems from the university’s own choicesy’ (Massy,2003, 39). It stems from its drive to engage in the academic reputation race.

The effect is an impressive increase of the spending levels of higher educationinstitution. Geiger (2004), for instance, shows that the per student spendingbetween 1980 and 2000 in the US rose by 62% at public universities and morethan double at private institutions (Geiger, 2004, 32, 262). In the US, highereducation has become far more expensive during recent decades. And althoughparticipation rates have grown and students have certainly benefited fromthese increases of spending levels, it may also be pointed out that, in particular,the private costs of higher education have gone up dramatically. In the US ‘thecosts of higher education borne by students nearly doubled in real termsfrom 1978 to 1996y The costs of going to collegey. grew nearly twice as fastas the economy’ (Geiger, 2004, 33). When public policies in other countriestend to follow the US example of increasing the competition in a systemwhere reputation is the major driving force, similar cost explosions shouldbe expected.

It should also be pointed out that the shift of the costs of higher educationfrom public to private sources implies that the social returns of highereducation are increasingly being overshadowed by the private benefits. In thissense, the introduction of consumer sovereignty and competition implies a‘privatization’ of higher education. Students and graduates increasinglydemand ‘value for money’ for their investments, and higher educationinstitutions may be tempted to ‘reduce the value of learning to simply theopportunity to earn more upon graduation’ (Newman et al., 2004, 44).

A second consequence of the introduction of increased competition appearsto be an increase of the wealth inequalities among institutions. In traditionalcontinental European public policies with respect to higher education,institutions were assumed to be equal and (largely) similar. The new policieshowever emphasize the importance of differences between institutions.Universities are stimulated to compete and to develop specific roles andprofiles, to relate to specific stakeholders and to respond to regional needs.This increase of competition leads to greater inequalities among institutions,because there is no ‘level playing field’. The reputation race works outdifferently given different levels of resources; the higher these levels are, themore an institution will be able to climb the ladder of reputation. Higher


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education institutions can only hire the faculty whose salaries they can afford.But they can also only charge the tuition fees that are justified by the level oftheir reputation. The reputation race is fuelled by an insatiable need forfunding. Richer institutions are more easily able to increase their reputationthan poorer institutions. And this process is self-reinforcing: as the race goeson, the wealth inequalities and the differences in reputation tend to increase.The result is the establishment and strengthening of institutional hierarchies.Increased competition thus creates hierarchical differentiation in highereducation systems.

Thirdly, the new public policies (and the creation of institutionalhierarchies) are accompanied by a greater social stratification of students.Highly reputable institutions try to enrol high-ability students. In order toaccomplish this, they apply high-tuition/high-aid strategies, trying to attractand select those students who are most talented and whose enrolmentsreflect on their prestige. The result is a social stratification based on merit.Higher education systems become more stratified by academic ability. Bothstudents and institutions act in such a way that a meritocratic stratificationis produced.

Even though student-aid policies are designed to create opportunities for theleast advantaged, increased competition leads institutions to focus either onthose students who have the financial resources themselves, or on those whohave the highest abilities (and who can be offered grants). According toNewman et al. (2004), in the US the less-advantaged students have become thevictims of this development. ‘The price war that has broken out amonginstitutions and even among states, grounded in the financial aid offered toattractive students, favours the already advantaged. They are also the onesknowledgeable enough about the system to seek out and attract competitiveoffers’ (Newman et al., 2004, 87).

Cost explosions, institutional hierarchies and the social stratificationof the student body are not necessarily the consequences that politicalactors have in mind when they design the public policies that should stimulatehigher education institutions to become more responsive to societal needs.They also are not the consequences that are foreseen when higher levels ofexternal diversity are stimulated. They are, however, possible effects of theintroduction of an increase of competition in higher education systems.Because of the dynamics of the reputation race, these effects may verywell occur. The more autonomy the higher education institutions acquire,the more they will intend to engage in this competition for reputation.Public policy makers in higher education should be aware of these dynamicsand look for more effective ways to create the contexts that can stimulatethe application of knowledge and the creation of more diversified highereducation systems.


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Rankings and Typologies

The recent popularity of world university rankings only appears to amplify thehigher education reputation race. The annual Shanghai Jiao Tong Universityranking (commenced in 2003) and the Times Higher Education Supplementranking (commenced in 2004) provide extra stimuli for both policy makersand higher education institutions to try to conquer higher positions at theglobal ladders of institutional reputation. Because they largely tend to favourtraditional academic performance, particularly in research, these rankinginstruments lead to an increase of mimicking behaviour (imitating the high-reputation institutions), and hence to more homogeneity, rather than diversity.

If we wish to maintain and even increase the diversity of higher educationsystems, we will have to develop different ranking instruments in whichdifferent forms of institutional performance can be compared. We shoulddesign multiple ranking instruments that enable us to make inter-institutionalcomparisons per category or type of institution. In order to create higher levelsof diversity in higher education systems, we therefore need to developtypologies of higher education institutions. In these typologies (or classifica-tions) the diversity of institutional missions and profiles should be madetransparent, offering the different stakeholders a better understanding of thespecific ambitions and performances of the various types of higher educationinstitutions (see Bartelse and van Vught, 2007).

The emergence of the discussions on rankings and typologies shows thatdiversity and differentiation are concepts that appear to remain relevant in thefuture contexts of both higher education policy making and institutionalmanagement. A better understanding of these concepts and more systematicand empirical investigations will be crucial in order to allow us to designeffective policies and successful institutional management strategies inhigher education.

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