Higher Education 48: 483–510, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Globalization and higher education organizational change: A framework for analysis∗ MASSIMILIANO VAIRA Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Universita’ degli Studi, Torino, Italy (E-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. The aim of this article is to outline a theoretical framework to address Higher Education organizational change in a globalized and globalizing age. The paper will start with a brief description of trends characterizing the global landscape and their relationships with Higher Education policies and institutions. Although these trends are well known, their impact on HE institutions is to some large extent ambiguous and open to different and even diverging interpretations. In particular, is possible to identify two main and opposed interpretations concerning globalization outcomes: (1) the convergence thesis, that emphasizes the homogenization processes (2) the divergence thesis that, on the contrary, emphasizes different, pluralistic and localized responses to globalization processes. In terms of organizational change the debate focuses on isomorphic change vs. idiosyncratic strategic responses, translation processes and heterogeneity. Both grasp a part of the truth, but they tend to offer mutually exclusive explanations of responses to wider institutional processes and pressures. The article argues that these perspectives could be integrated in one different, offering an interpretation of change dynamics, based on the concept of organizational allomorphism. This concept is derived from linguistics and it used to point out a morphological variant of a same morpheme depending on the context of use. A morphological variant is meant not to be something different or idiosyncratic, but something recognizable as a declension of one definite pattern or form. In organizational terms, this concept point out that, although organizations adapt or translate institutional patterns in the face of their formal structure and arrangements, as well as of their social context, it is possible to identify a common set of institutionalized patterns, or institutional archetypes, which structure the organizational arrangements and behaviors.

1. Introduction: The problem of higher education organizational change in a globalized age It is a common claim that the contemporary world has entered a globalized age. Almost, if not all, social life facets are affected by the globalization process: culture, politics, economy and social relations are all deemed to be transformed by this process.1 Bradley et al. (2000) consider globalization a meta-myth that brings together a constellation of others myths associated with it. This socially constructed meta-myth2 is used at political, economic, cultural and even

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every-day-life level to make sense of the occurring social transformation and to undertake actions in accordance with it.3 Hence, we can broadly define globalization as an institutionalized cultural account which describes reality, makes sense about how the world works and structures the way institutions and actors operate (Meyer et al. 1987). To this respects, “globalization”works as a definitory concept underpinning a new round of the world rationalization process. Yet, the concept and the idea of globalization is a multifaceted and contentious one. There is no univocal and neat definition of its fundamental features, contents and, above all, outcomes. Some shared views emerged, but its fluidity persists in the debate. In particular, this debate is structured around two main streams of thought: the convergence and the divergence thesis. The first emphasizes the progressive and sometime ineluctable trend toward homogenization (cultural, political and economic). It is founded on a linear, top-down and sometimes deterministic causal explanation. The latter emphasizes the heterogeneity of globalization’s effects and outcomes on the local level (national, regional and even organizational). That entails a greater prominence accorded to bottomup processes of manipulation, localization, interpretation, mediation, resistance and so on. Thus the kind of explanation is non-linear, non-deterministic, conflictual and, sometimes, voluntaristic. Nevertheless, there are also diverse attempts to reconcile this two opposed versions, blending the global tendencies and the local responses to them introducing new concepts like glocal (Robertson 1995; Kellner 2000), glonacal agency (global+national+local agency of collective actors (Marginson and Rhoades 2002)), vernacular globalization (a conceptual device to grasp the contemporary presence of globalization’s contradictory processes, effects and outcomes (Appadurai 1996)). The aim here is trying to achieve a more complex and multifaceted view of the globalization’s features and outcomes, and to overcome the dualities characterizing the debate, conceiving them as mutually implicative and constitutive of the phenomenon (Kellner 2000; Lingard 2000; Luke and Luke 2000; Robertson 1995). These three theoretical streams, notwithstanding the differences, recognize globalization is the main structural feature of the contemporary world. Given this, it is not a surprise that globalization discourse has affected higher education too, in its every aspects: policy-making, governance, organization and academic work and identity. But, if it is possible, the concern about the relationships between globalization and higher education seem to be acuter, perplexing and open to multiple and divergent accounts. This is quite obvious, given the centrality of higher education institutions in the globalized world, their historically rooted

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cultural features which are challenged by globalization and their relationships with national polity, culture and economy, which in turn are challenged too by the same process. Centrality is related to the new tasks and social, political and economic demands that higher education institutions are called to take upon in the age of globalization. These, in turn, have a row of consequences on their legitimacy, governance structures, organizational arrangements and academics’ life, culture and work (Clark 1998; Delanty 2001; Dill and Sporn 1995; Gibbons 1994; Gibbons et al. 1984; Gumport 2000; Slaughter and Lesly 1997). Moreover, the higher education institutions as such are deeply infused with values derived from their historical pattern of foundation4 which has been reproduced almost intact in their core features up to recent years. These values and features are now challenged by globalization process which tend to redefine them on whole new basis and which are clashing (or may be clashing) with the traditional institutionalized values (Gumport 2000; Kerr 1987). Finally, one must not forget that notwithstanding the similar historical structural and cultural features of higher education institutions, they are also embedded in a national political, regulative and governance system which shapes their structural and organizational features. This system too is challenged by globalization’s new imperatives, entailing the reshaping of its role, relationships, policy-making, priorities and structure of governance related to higher education sector. In sum, higher education is witnessing a process of deep institutional change that involves the deinstitutionalization of its rooted policy and values frameworks and the parallel institutionalization of new ones. These processes entail a more or less strong resistances, conflicts, tensions but also efforts to conciliate, adapt, translate, assemble the new with the old, the national features of higher education system with the new globalizing pressures, the single institutions structural and cultural features with the new imperatives and demands. This paper will focus on higher education institutions organizational change, triggered by globalizing pressures and conditions. It is a theoretical attempt to outline a framework of analysis to account both homogenization and heterogeneity based on the concept of organizational allomorphism. This concept is deemed to be able to synthesize and blend the isomorphic pressures produced by globalization processes and the local responses to them, blunting the mutual exclusivity of both. This framework is inspired mainly by three theoretical sources: 1. Though it maintains its roots in a new institutionalist approach, it also takes in consideration Powell’s critical revision of it (1991) to attain an expanded, or “weak”, institutionalist perspective. At its base there is the

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critical argument that early new institutionalist formulations were characterized by a tendential institutional determinism which blurs both organizational contexts and actors’ action within them. This means that (a) it is necessary to overcome the vision of organizations as institutionally determined entities, and (b) that it is necessary to account not only the pressures toward isomorphism, but also those which produce some degree and kind of organizational heterogeneity. This kind of arguments meet also Scott’s claims (1995) to attain and pursue studies that account the relations between institutional and organizational processes in order to address, develop and verify variation-finding (variation of a same phenomenon) propositions. 2. For what concerns the relationships between higher education changing process and globalization, I draw some suggestions from Marginson and Rohades’ Glonacal Agency Heuristic (2002). In particular, three aspect of it are relevant for my purpose: (a) the recognition that global dimension and forces affecting higher education change are under-analyzed and under-theorized in current debate. Little is known about what and how global forces promote new patterns and change. Glonacal framework suggests not to take the global for granted, but to problematize it and to explore polity and/or polities, above both the nation-state and individual institutions levels and the way they work; (b) although it acknowledges the growing salience of global agencies and agency as institutional carriers of coercive, normative and mimetic processes and pressures, it also accounts the relevance of national and local-organizational agencies and agency in articulating, adapting, specifying global pressures and imperatives into national reforming policies and institutions’ organizational restructuring. In other words, it acknowledges the co-presence of the three levels of embeddedness in which higher education change takes place and occurs (global, national, local-organizational); (c) its effort to outline an interactive and dialogical framework of analysis to address higher education change occurring at global, national and local-organizational levels. 3. Finally and more generally, it is an attempt to outline a middle range theory, in the mertonian sense, to produce some propositions from which to draw specific hypothesis and to address empirical researches. I will start sketching out the main structural feature of globalization. Then I will consider the impact it has, or it is expected to have, on higher education. Here, I will also highlight the analytic differences between, on the one hand, convergence thesis and isomorphic change, and on the other the divergence

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thesis, strategic approach and translation theory. Finally, I will try to show how the concept of organizational allomorphism could syntehesize those opposed approach and could be applied to account how organizational change occurs in higher education institutions.

2. Structural components of globalization and their relationships with higher education Starting form the general theme of globalization’s structural components, I will just pick out its widely recognized main features and processes and, above all, those that seem to have the major role in the reshaping of higher education sector. The literature have highlighted the relation between globalization and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not only a political rhetoric, or ideology but a wide project to change the institutional structure of societies at a global level. This shift in the institutional structure is also commonly acknowledge as from fordism to post-fordism regime. Here, institutional structure means, according to Meyer et al. (1987, pp. 12–13), the complex of “cultural theories, ideologies and prescriptions about how society works or should work to attain collective purposes, especially the comprehensive and evolving goals of justice and progress [. . .] giving collective meaning and value to particular entities and activities, integrating them into a larger scheme”. The institutional structure at the global level can be conceptualized as world polity (Thomas et al. 1987) that shapes, influence and orient the changes occurring currently. This restructuring efforts are apparent in the political discourse on institutional reforms: the main parties are captured by this discourse and share quite similar recipes to put it in action, despite of their ideological collocation. Both Left and Right present themselves to each national electorate as reformists. Their reform packages are very similar in contents, means, orientations and goals, although there are differences in the degree of radicalism and gradualism in their respective reform aims. Anyway, these reform packages remain to a large extent similar and embedded in the context of the world polity cultural frame. The globalization’s meta-myth could be conceived as a collection of rationalized myths characterizing the world polity (Thomas et al. 1987; Meyer and Rowan 1977). These myths’ core features and contents could be sinthetized in the following three points: 1. minimalist state: This feature embodies and emphasizes a reduction of central state regulative and intervening roles in favor of a mediating one. This is articulated in a process of increasing decentralization and

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deburocratization, welfare retrenchment, shrinking of public expenditures and funding, reduction of the regulative role and a trend toward control on and evaluation of performance and outcomes, steering at distance and a wider confidence in market (or market-like) regulative and allocative capabilities; 2. entrepreneurialization/managerialization: Tightly coupled with the minimalist state is the trend toward a more entrepreneurial and managerialist pattern of organizational change. This is associated to the shifts toward post-fordist regime; commodification – expressing in client/ supplier relations and exchanges, and business “ethos” in almost all kind of organizations –; high flexibility, innovation and quality in production, products and work to match clients demands; precarization of work linked to costs reduction and flexibility; 3. knowledge society: This last feature is linked on the one hand to the last thirty years grand technological development that has been and is reshaping social relations and interactions; on the other is coupled to the new rhetoric of competitive advantage and post-fordist society. The centrality of technology and technological development, entails a greater emphasis on: knowledge production and information processing for competitive purposes; the wider and faster flow of communications; the shift in the occupational structures from manual workers to highly educated and flexible knowledge workers; and, consequently, on the role of educational institutions to form the human capital fitted to these developments. All this has a fallout on higher education institutions’ organizational arrangements and social legitimacy, as it will be outlined in the next section. But this does not occur as a mechanical process, rather it is a product of some supra-national agencies that define, translate and disseminate these myths worldwide, acting as institutional carriers (Scott 1995) at a supranational level. Thus, they contribute to construct, present, represent and objectify these rationalized myths and the new related challenges, ends and means as a “objective reality”. These institutional carriers are politically and socially highly legitimated agency like UNESCO, World Bank, IMF, OECD and EU.5 Their agency is twofold: (1) by incorporating, translating, legitimating and disseminating the wider rationalized myths they develop a general and common framework defining the new context, imperatives, ends and means in which higher education institutions have to operate nowadays. In other world, they define the appropriate (effective and efficient) and legitimate form for higher education in the global age; (2) by acting as elaboration and dissemination agencies on a global scale, they contribute to construct and structure a de-localized and

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global organizational field (DiMaggio and Powell 1991) that both national higher education policies and institutions have to face and in which they operate. As belonging to these global institutional carriers, we must also consider the role of international political agreements dealing with harmonization of higher education system at supranational level. These kinds of agreements are well represented by Sorbonne-Bologna-Prague process. Although they are limited to European region, these process involves about thirty countries and, above all, is based on a share view of globalization’s new challenges for higher education and of the way it is called to respond to them. Institutional carriers’ agency, hence, construct a world polity that affects the nation-states polity, policies and organized societal sectors. World polity is an “overarching ontological and symbolic normative cathedral” constructed at supra-national level (Boli 1987, p. 90) that “creates an agenda, or an account, of legitimated actions” (Thomas and Meyer 1987, p. 95) in the context of globalization. In few words, world polity is a constitutive institutional structure that contains the institutional recipes and archetypes largely objectified and takenfor-granted, regarding the types of organizational actors, their legitimated goals and the way they can be structured to achieve them. Each national context is deemed, or is expected, to experience increasing pressures to adapt to this new institutional order. But what are the effects and consequences of these processes on higher education institutions? In these regards, the contentious character of globalization effects reemerges, perhaps more acutely than for other kind of organizations.

3. The world polity and its impact on higher education. Convergence or heterogeneity? It has been largely acknowledged that globalization is affecting deeply higher education worldwide. As Torres and Morrow claim (2000, p. 44), “perhaps no place has been more subject to these processes of internationalization and globalization than university”. Higher education institutions’ task environment changed dramatically in the last twenty years. The changes in the world polity toward the neoliberalist and post-fordist paradigms had momentous effects on higher education sector worldwide. The institutional carriers agency discussed above, had and has a major role in defining and promulgating particular strategies, recipes, archetypes for higher education policy, organization and curricular structures.

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For the more developed countries this has meant since the ’80s a deep process of institutional and organizational change of national higher education sector and organizations. The main features of these changes have been largely debated and described. Thus I just recall them briefly: 1. reduction of the State endowment to higher education institutions, due to the balancing policies and scale-down of welfare system, which universities have been represented as an extension of. This entailed for higher education institutions (but also for other public sector organizations and institutions) “to do more with less”; 2. asserting a higher education structure of governance based on steering at distance and assessment. This, in turn is linked to let higher education institutions have more institutional, organizational, curricolar and financial autonomy. It is worth of noting that this changes in the structure of governance entailed that the more centralized systems (e.g.: Italy, France, Germany) has got more decentralized and the more decentralized (e.g.: U.K and Anglo-Saxon ones) has got more centralized; 3. growing requirement to pursue, warrant and improve quality, effectiveness, efficiency and responsivness in all the strategic higher education activities (didactic, research, curricula innovation, staff and budgeting); 4. need to link up more systematically higher education formative and educational supply to economy and labor market dynamics and requirements as well as to the new social demand for higher education (permanent and recurring education, managerial formation). This mean that higher education institutions are socially, politically and economically responsible and accountable of their “products” and processes. In addition, there is a trend from students’ and their families’ side to be more and more interested in degrees market value and spendability than to strictly cultural one, on the wave of the asserting of specialist ideologies in the higher level of education, pushing higher education supply to match this demand. In this scenario, entrepreneurial model becomes the basic and legitimated organizational principle, or archetype, deemed to be able to let higher education institutions to cope with the challenges in their new task environment and constitute the pathway to pursue restructuring processes. The most recent debate recognize unanimously these feature and trend in higher education sector. For example, Aronowitz (2000) uses (critically) the notion of knowledge factory, Clark (1998) speaks of entrepreneurial university, Slaughter and Lesly (1997) introduce the concept of academic capitalism, Gumport (2000) uses the concept of higher education industry, Turk (2000) edited a book entitling it The Corporate Campus.

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This process of entrepreneurialization is, in turn, enforced by knowledge society discourse, which supplies higher education institutions with a new legitimating criterion of their roles, tasks and institutional identity. Higher education is represented as the fulcrum of innovative knowledge production, whose task is to contribute actively to the “national good” of economic competitiveness and development instead of the “universal good” of knowledge for its own sake (Delanty 2001; Drucker 1993; Gibbons 1994; Gibbons et al. 1984; Gumport 2000; Porter 1990; Sutz 1997; Turner 1997). All this is expressing in a re-stratification of academic subjects, knowledge and disciplines upon the increased use-value and exchange-value of particular knowledge in the wider society, but also in the emergence of academic consumerism that is reconstructing the relationships between higher education institutions and their clients and stakeholders (governments, industries, students and their family (see: Etzkowitz and Leysdorff 1997; Gumport 2000; Rhoades and Slaughter 1997)). 3.1. The convergence thesis arguments Higher education institutions, thus are facing growing institutional pressures from their field to incorporate the new legitimated and legitimating criterions. The push toward their incorporation is expressing in growing normative and mimetic institutional pressures (DiMaggio and Powell 1991) produced by the agency of institutional carriers, particularly OECD and EU, that are evident in higher education policy change and restructuring. All this trend can be conceived as a process of policy borrowing occurring across the nations (Halpin and Troyna 1995). If the more developed countries has experienced a push toward this model mainly by normative and, to some extent mimetic pressures, the less developed or the emergent countries have not been immune from this process. But they have experienced mainly coercive and mimetic pressure enacted by international institutions like World Bank and IMF. Those institutions bind their financial loans to the conformity to their requirements regarding the nation-state’s institutional and organizational structure and these requirements reflect evidently the globalization’s rationalized myths. Sometimes those requirements are literally imposed if a state wants to become one of the modern and civilized countries and to be politically recognized as such. Thus, the main way to get international loans is to incorporate those requirements by compliance to the demands of international institutions (coercive pressures), and/or by imitating the institutional structure of the most developed countries (Meyer 1987).

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Today, these requirements are not only limited to government form, citizens rights and economic and trade structure, but also concern educational structures, in particular their higher segment. Beside these institutional processes we must consider the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). These technologies are nowadays infused with value as the most modern and efficient means to move in a globalized environment and to carry on the organizational activities. Higher education institutions are not immune to this fascination about ICTs. More and more often they incorporate these technologies for didactic purposes both internally and, more important, to construct a distance education and learning system. Noble (1998) has named this phenomenon “virtual university” as a new form (albeit not devoid of contradictions and perverse effects) as well as a new business for universities and informatics sector firms. To some extent, this phenomenon is analogous to the Aldrich and Fiol’s “fools rushing in” analysis of the creation of a new industry (1994). Virtual universities constitute a relevant challenge for the traditional universities in term of competitions for students on a global level, because they constitute a new set of organizations (or, at least, known organizations acting differently) entering the higher education organizational field. A student of a given country could and actually can (if he has a personal computer) enter another country’s university without moving from his own home, at the expense of his national universities. This means that traditional and national universities could and sometimes can experience increasing competitive pressures to enact virtual courses beside the traditional ones, to avoid a fall in their students enrolments and, consequently, in the financial resources they bring. Moreover, given the socially attached high value in ICTs, universities are pushed to incorporate them in their didactic structure to make their courses socially appealing and modern. Finally, the increasing introduction and use of distance education programs reflects both the myth of knowledge society (with its emphasis on information technologies) and commodification process which enforce the transformation of knowledge in a economically valuable and exchangeable product (Noble 1998). Both, as we know, are part of the new world polity package, affecting higher education. All these global trends (institutional and competitive) seem to corroborate the new institutionalist thesis of the increasing isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Thomas et al. 1987) and hence the convergence thesis about globalization’s processes and outcomes in the higher education sector. Higher education governance, institutional, organiza-

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tional and curricular arrangements thus are deemed to converge toward a common pattern spreading increasingly worldwide, because of the effects of institutional and competitive pressures. The divergence thesis aruguments Although new institutionalist approach and its core-concept of institutional isomorphism have gained more and more analytic strength and applications, they have been recently questioned and challenged by other social change theories and perspectives. At the same time, the convergence thesis about globalization has been put under scrutiny and criticized. Starting from the latter, the debate pointed out that globalization outcomes are far from exerting homogenization effects on national political, economic and cultural structures. The deterministic flaw of convergence theory has been highlighted, given its emphasis on top-down and macro-processes explanations – the so called “globalization from above perspective” –, neglecting or underestimate the local responses to these macro-processes. In this perspective, national and local politics, economic and culture metabolize, translate and reshape the global trend in the face of their cultures, histories, needs, practices and institutional structures (see, for example: Bradley et al. 2000; Burbules and Torres 2000b; Hall 1991; Hirst and Thompson 1996; Stromquist and Monkman 2000b; Waters 1995). Hence, on the one hand the local has regained relevance and explanatory centrality to account how globalization processes actually occur. On the other, this entailed that globalization processes and outcomes are ambiguous, open to manipulation and to some extent unpredictable. As Spybey (1996) pointed out, once created the global culture it is by definition there for all and, therefore, it is subjected to particularistic processes of translation enacted by human agency. Thus, global culture get out of control of its global creators. The first necessary conclusion is that local responses drive to divergence, heterogeneity within and across the nations. The second necessary conclusion is that the localization processes are at work even for higher education sectors and institutions. This last conclusion is deemed to occur because of twofold consideration. The first is that the role of national politics and policy are seen as still playing a relevant role in organizing and shaping the higher education sector according to national culture, economic and social needs. These, in aggregate constitute a complex of features differing from one nation to another, which analys must consider. Thus, rather than an increasing international convergence in the way higher education sector is politically regulated, managed and structured, it is likely that differences overtake the similarities.

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This kind of argument is referable to more general theoretical frameworks like “National Business System” (Whitley 1991; Orrù et al. 1991), “neo-contingency framework” (Sorge 1991), “societal effects” (Maurice et al. 1980), “institutional specificity culture” (Best 1990; Hofstede 1983, 1991). All these emphasize the role of national institutional arrangements and features that influence and shape organizational structures and behavior in a systematic way. In their light, if there are isomorphic pressures at work, they are referred to national institutional specificity, rather than to a global scale, where differences, heterogeneity and polymorphism dwell. In the higher education analysis these approaches are evident in most comparative and national analysis of higher education systems and institutions (e.g.: Crane and Corneilse 2000; Currie and Subotzky 2000; Hickling-Hudson 2000; Kempner and Jurema 2002; Marginson 2002; Mollis and Marginson 2002) The second consideration highlights the fact higher education institutions are not only shaped by national institutional and cultural structures, but they are also characterized by specific cultural features inherited from the past, which shape the way they respond to the current changes and challenges. This kind of explanation of the relationships between globalization and local (organizational) response is well exemplified by micro-level, ethnographic and case-studies analysis that underlines the particular way changes occur in individual institutions (see for example: Stensaker and Norgård 2001; Taylor 1999; Trowler 1998, 2002), but it is also manifest in a convergence thesis-inspired study like Clark’s one (1998): each university he studied shows a particular way by which the entrepreneurial model has been pursued and achieved. Regarding the isomorphic organizational change approach, it has been challenged mainly by two perspectives in organizational analysis, namely strategic approach and translation theory. Both are inscribable in divergence thesis approach and both criticize the concept of isomorphism as deterministic. Strategic approach, points out that the notion isomorphic change overshadows and under-estimates the degrees of freedom and the strategic manoeuvring that organization enjoy in the face of institutional constrains (Beckert 1999; Child 1972, 1997; Kondra and Hinings 1998; Oliver 1991). This approach emphasizes the centrality of agency and hence the different responses and outcomes it produce in organizational behavior, structure and pathways to change. Thus, even if organizations share and face the same institutional environment and pressures, they respond to them in different ways, of which isomorphic response is only one of the possibilities. Moreover,

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strategies and agency are seen as concepts that cannot be set aside to explain organizational competitive dynamics, so central even in the globalization and post-fordism rhetoric. If organization were isomorphic each other, how could competition occur among them? How can we explain the success of one and the low performance or the failure of another? How can they attract clients? How can they differentiate their products and services? Strategy, agency and organizational diversity are deemed of paramount importance to address and answer questions like these and, consequently, the isomorphic dynamics are greatly reduced, if not cancelled. The way an organization is, behaves and performs depends on the way it strategically responds to environment pressures and conditions. The second perspective, translation theory, come to the same conclusion, although moving from a different theoretical framework. Here, are not agency and strategies that make the differences count, but the human sensemaking and interpretation activity (Cooper and Law 1995; Czarniawska and Joerges 1995; Czarniawska and Sevón 1996; Latour 1987; Weick 1969). Firstly, in translation theory organizational change can or do occur under condition of isomorphic pressures but those pressures, their content, reach, pervasiveness are heavily conditioned by the way organizations and organizational actors receive, select, make sense of, interpret, combine, re-construct, use, in a word, translate them in the face of their organizational cultural and knowledge context of action and purposes. Secondly this kind of process entail a refuse of the epidemiological and substantially linear model of diffusion of institutionalized constructs implicit in the notion of isomorphism. The diffusion, or better the translation of these constructs, is in the actors’ hands who can change, manipulate, select, implement or discards parts of them and combine them with other cultural repertoires available in their context of action. Hence, even if organizations refer to and draw from a certain institutionalized template to model and structure their action, they do so in an active and creative way. Then we cannot speak of institutional incorporation, but of institutional enactment, selection, and translation. The result of this institutional enactment and translation is that we must expect much more organizational diversity than homogeneity. The way organizations translate the institutional patterns gives rise to unique combinations related to those patterns in a very loosely way.

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4. The forest, the trees, or both? The concept of organizational allomorphism The review made so far highlight one fact: in addressing the problem of higher education institutions organizational change in the globalized context, we cannot afford to neglect neither the macro-institutional processes and pressures, nor the local responses to them. The problem here is to balance the two process. In fact, global-local debate is nothing but another dichotomy reflecting the century-old epistemological and methodological opposition between generalization and individualization, structure and action, macro and micro and so on. The new institutional perspective has the virtue to account and explain convincingly the macro-structural forces and processes influencing the pathways and the contents of occurring changes worldwide. Its central concern is the objectified constitutive features and the institutional diffusion mechanisms and actors of the world polity contents. The constitutiveness facet of world polity define the space and the condition of possibility, that is, what is possible, socially appropriate and legitimate and what is not, what are the appropriate resources, actors, structures, actions. All this supplies the actors with a framework to make sense of what is going on, to orient their action and to adopt certain kinds of organizational arrangements, in accordance with those definitions and framework. In few words, it offer some highly legitimated institutional archetypes by which to structure organizational arrangements, means, ends and actions. The problem with such an approach is that it overshadows human agency and sensemaking, as well as the fact that organizations are institutional environments too, with their settled histories, culture, structure and so on. The risk is to come to a functionalist, determinist and objectivist explanation that reduce organizations to mere puppets or, paraphrasing Wrong, to institutionally dope organizations. On the other hand, strategic and translation approaches address their attention to the way the individual organizations and actors actively, purposively and creatively relate themselves with the institutional environment and pressures. This allow to lessen greatly the deterministic flaw of new institutionalist perspective and to account the particular ways undertaken by organizations to respond to institutional demands and pressures. But it has also its theoretical costs. First of all, this kind of approaches are not suited to account how a wider institutional structures emerge, persist, change, operate and are structured (Meyer et al. 1987). For them this is not a problem: they take the institutional structure substantially as given. Second and consequently, they concerned with a narrower focus on individual organizations, blurring the wider organizational environment and dynamics. Third,

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they are built upon a voluntaristic, intentionalistic and sometimes instrumentalistic theoretical framework. This means that the existence of actors themselves (collective and individual) and their capability to act is taken-forgranted, it is an a priori and non-problematic assumption based on some kind of substantive theory of the psyche (rationality and cognitivism). Question like: “how can we account where strategies come from?”, or “how actors selects, combine, translate the institutional material?”, “what are the social criterions to choose a strategic pathway or an institutional enactment and selection is undertaken?”, “what is the social framework within strategies and translation processes are conceivable and pursuable?”, remain sociologically unanswered if those aspects are detached from the social ground in which they are embedded and constituted. The risk, here, is to underestimate the social constitutiveness of actors, action and mind, hence to come to an undersocialized view of them. So far, the best we can say about these opposite analytical strands is that they are suited for two different level of analysis: new institutionalist approach and its concept of isomorphic change can be fruitfully apply to the study of macro-structural dynamics; strategic and translation approaches are well-suited to analyze the micro-level dynamics and actions. Using a wellknown metaphor, the first make us see the forest, the latter the trees. But it is still difficult to make these two levels communicate each other, to see both the forest and the trees. I think that a possible way to achieve this goal, is offered by the concept of organizational allomorphism. To my knowledge, the concept of allomorphism has been introduced in organizational debate by two Italian scholars, drawing it out of the work of Leblebici and colleagues (1991). The first who introduced the concept of allomorphism has been Lanzalaco (1995). The author uses it to highlight that organizations operate in different organizational fields, hence they reflect the institutional structure of each field. Thus allomorphism is primarily related to organizational fields and consequently to the sets of organizations belonging to each of them. The problem with such an use is that it accounts field allomorphism not organizational one. The organizations within a field are isomorphic with the field’s structure. This kind of argument resembles, on a reduced scale, that of organizational isomorphism in national context. By it we can see the wood (a portion of the forest) but neither the forest nor the trees. The second author who deals with allomorphism is Lippi (2000), concerned about the way managerialization reform of the ’90s has affected Italian local governments institutions. He builts its theoretical proposal upon translation theory and emphasizes the etymological meaning of allomorphism which means differentiation, diversity, otherness. Allomorphism thus entails

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that something is transformed in something different from a certain pattern or template. Hence, diversification occurs according to the institutional (e.g.: type of administration) and contingent context (i.e. organizations, geographical locales, needs, purposes, practices, etc.) in which action takes place. It is evident that Lippi’s notion of allomorphism suffers the same problem of translation theory, namely overemphasizing differences to the detriment of similarities. It makes us see the trees, but the forest is blurred. To overcome these problems I propose a definition of allomorphism as it is used in linguistics. An allomorph is a morphological variant of the same morpheme depending on the context of use. This definition could appear very close to the Lippi’s one, but it is not the case. Linguistics provide us with a clear example: the indefinite articles “a” and “an”. This variant is used whether the next word begins with a consonant or a vocal (context of use), but both “a” and “an” are still recognizable as indefinite article (the grammatical archetype) and they follow the same grammatical rule of use (indeterminacy of the indicated object). They are not something different, like articles “the” and “a”. Generally speaking, an allomorph is definable as a declension of a same pattern. Other examples outside the field of linguistics can be draw from arts. A first can be derived from classical music. There are so many symphonies that one could say immediately that each of them are different compositions. But this is a superficial conclusion: to be a symphony, a music composition must be structured, organized and played according to a definite pattern. Certain compositive articulations (e.g.: overture, allegro, adagio, finale), a certain kind of organization (orchestra, soloists, conductor) certain instruments (strings, woodwind and brass, percussions), must be present to recognize that composition as a symphony. Thus Beethoven’s, Mozart’s or Brahms’ symphonies are “different” to our hearing (because of the different way the single notes are contextually assembled to make a harmony) but they are actually allomorphic given the fact that the particular harmony is embedded in archetypical composition and execution structures. Conversely they are different from opera or chamber music, each of them follows different composition and execution patterns. Another example from arts is the comedy of ambiguities. Its pattern and basic plotting are remained structurally the same since Plauto’s times. What change are the contexts (ancient Rome, contemporary New York), the characters (ancient romans, modern New Yorkers), the way actors perform their roles, the kind of linguistic expression used and sometimes the kind of ambiguities. All this in its complex make us see comedies as “different”. But, if a scriptwriter or a screenwriter wants to write such a kind of comedy must use

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that pattern if he/she wants his/her work to be recognizable as such and not as a tragedy or a screwball comedy. Leaving the arts realm and approaching our more sociological concerns, a good example of allomorphism is presented, although implicitly, in the studies of Asiatic capitalism (Whitley 1991; Orrù et al. 1991). The authors analysis are aimed at highlighting the differences among these newly industrialized and capitalistic countries and among them and the Western ones (in turn Western capitalism is deemed to vary nationally too), according to their national institutional structures. Their conclusion is that there is a plurality of forms of capitalism. But, is really there a polymorphism or rather an allomorphism among them? Certainly the institutional structures are different and these differences to some extent matter. But all the capitalistic countries share a common economic pattern to be recognizable as such: market exchanges, entrepreneurial freedom, profit achieving, wageworkers, consumerism, financial institutions, bureaucratic infrastructure and state legal framework regulating all these facets. Hence, Asian and Western capitalism(s) are allomorphic declensions of a same form – i.e. capitalistic economy – not strictly different forms of it. In the light of the given definition and examples of allomorphism, now I turn to account its role for organizational change, providing some propositions and hypothesis. Proposition 1: Organizational change is to be understood within the constitutive framework of wider institutional structure and dynamics. The institutional structure defines and provides the institutional imperatives and archetypes to which organizations refers themselves to undertake a process of change. It structures the space and the conditions of possibility for appropriate, rational, modern and legitimate course of organizational restructuring, work and action. This means to acknowledge the competitive and institutional pressures at the global level and the way they operate. Competitive pressures are exerted by the world economy competitive structure, while institutional pressures are exerted by the world polity constitutive structure. This, in turn, leads to the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: The more organizations enter in a globalized, or de-localized organizational field, the more they must contend with wider competitive and institutional pressures, the more they depend on definitions of organizational work elaborated at world economy and world polity structures. Proposition 2: Contents of institutional and competitive imperatives, archetypes and pressures are subject to a process of articulation,

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sectorialization, specification and adaptation, in relation to different organizational fields. This process is produced and triggered by institutional carriers, re-defining, legitimizing, and diffusing those contents at the field level. To some extent, and in a more loosely fashion, we can speak of a first process of translation. Nonetheless the core features of institutional archetypes are maintained, reproduced, objectified and legitimated. This bring to a second hypothesis: Hypothesis 2: Institutional carriers’ agency while incorporates and re-defines the institutional imperatives and archetypes, also constructs a broad allomorphic institutional structure congruent both to world polity and world economy institutional structure and to organizational field one. Proposition 3: The institutional carriers and competitive global dynamics exert pressures at the national level to make the individual nation-state incorporate the institutional and competitive imperatives and archetypes in their sectorial policy and governance structures. Under these pressures, nation-states tend to model their policy and their governance structures after the institutional definitions provided by institutional carriers. But they also, and to some degree, combine them with the national and field institutionalized policy and governance arrangements. This entail another process of articulation, specification, sectorialization and adaptation of the broad allomorphic structure. Nonetheless, the basic contents of institutional archetypes are manifest. In turn, they institutionalize those definitions at the organizational field level through coercive pressures via policy-making and governance agency. From this we can draw the following two hypothesis: Hypothesis 3a: The combination of broad institutional archetypes with the institutionalized national-sectorial patterns of policy-making and governance structure give rise to a national allomorphic institutional structure. Hypothesis 3b: Organizations operating in a given field are pressed for adapting their structures and actions to the institutionalized archetypes. This occurs under coercive pressures exerted by nationstate via policy-making, but also through institutional and competitive pressures exerted by the institutional carriers and by similar organizations populating the field.

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Proposition 4: Institutional and competitive pressures at work in a given organizational field are themselves subject to a process of articulation specification and adaptation through their incorporation in the individual organizational structures. These processes and pressures do not impact on a neutral organizational context. Organizations have their histories, structures, cultures inherited from the more or less distant past. Organizational actors have their cognitive schemata, practices and way of behaving embedded in those structural components. Therefore, some strategic choice and/or interpretation processes do actually occur within individual organizations, but they occur also within the constitutive framework of the institutional archetypes, that is, under the institutionally defined possibilities, not outside, or in spite of them. Again, the archetypes core feature will be also manifest. This leads to the next hypothesis: Hypothesis 4: Organizations facing institutional and competitive pressures towards change in accordance with the new definitions of organizational work, decline archetypes according both to them and to their organizational features and repertoires, becoming morphological variants of the same institutionalized patterns, i.e. allomorphs. Proposition 5: Organizational allomorphism lets enough room for the social processes of definition and selection of the low and high performing organizations. Each organizational morphological variant on the one hand could be more or less successful in combining and adapting the new archetypes with the settled organizational repertoires, hence its performance and outcomes could be more or less effective. On the other, there is also a social “judgment” (provided, for example, by mass-media, market, rating organizations, evaluative institutions and so on) that defines each organizational variant as successful, failing or low performing organization, sometimes in spite of whether its internal adaptation process was or was not organizationally successful. However the successful variants have emerged, they could become templates that similar organization could imitate and model after. Moreover, this social judgement is embedded in the institutional structure’s myths, from wich it derives the definition of organizational effectiveness efficiency and success, contributing in this way and at the same time to reproduct, legitimize, objectify those institutional myths. The last hypothesis drawn from this proposition is:

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Hypothesis 5: The kind of performance of each morphological variant depend on the way the declension of archetypes is internally (organizationally) successful and, above all, externally (socially) evaluated and represented as such, on the basis of institutionalized definitions of organizational effectiveness, efficiency and success.

5. Readdressing higher education organizational change in the global age Now let us turn back our attention to higher education institutions change in the light of the concept of organizational allomorphism. As aforementioned, higher education institutions are experiencing a deep institutional change in their task environment triggered by globalization process. This process has given and is giving rise to a world economy and world polity structures that redefine institutional as well as organizational arrangements, ends and means, deemed rational and appropriate to operate in the global environment. The fundamental institutional archetype elaborated at the world economy and polity levels is the entrepreneurial model, deemed the most appropriate, effective and efficient to cope with the globalization’s challenges. This is true also for higher education sector and institutions. Given their politically, economically and socially attached centrality, they have been hit by the same redefining process. This process and their contents are in turn enhanced by the action of the institutional carriers which define and legitimize and diffuse at global level the new institutional imperatives and archetypes. Highly legitimated carriers as IMF, World Bank, EU, OECD sectorialize those institutional imperatives and archetypes for the higher education sector, pressing the individual nation-state for incorporate them in their national and sectorial policy. Beside that, individual institutions are urged to incorporate the new archetypes by the normative and mimetic pressures exerted on them via comparativeevaluative studies carried on, for example, OECD, and by coercive and mimetic pressures produced by IMF or World Bank requirements. All this gives rise to a broad allomorphic structure for the higher education sector. These pressures are mainly institutional, but also competitive linked to the frame of international knowledge-based competition and internationalization of higher educations institutions. Nation-states, because of institutional and competitive pressures, incorporate and translate in their higher education policies the global institutional imperatives and archetypes, exerting their coercive pressures on higher education sector and institutions. This, in turn, entails a more articulated and specified allomorphic structure at the local-nation level. It finds its

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visible expression in higher education reforming policy and its governance arrangements restructuring. But allomorphic change occur also at the local-organizational level, by the incorporation, adaptation and translation, in the face of their settled organizational arrangements and culture, of new policy frameworks bearing the new institutional imperatives and archetypes. The result of this chain of changes is that higher education institutions are neither becoming strictly homogeneous and isomorphic at a global level, nor are highly differentiated and polymorphic at the local-organizational level, but rather they could be conceived as local variants (not different forms) of the same institutional archetype. It is possible to illustrate and synthesizes these complex process and its feature in a synoptic scheme (Figure 1, p. 22). Obviously, as an any other scheme, it cannot but accounts the complexity of these processes in an impressionistic and simplified fashion. How does this framework of analysis work for higher education institutions organizational change? To answer this question I will use some empirical research on this subject, revising them in the light of the discussed framework’s features. A first example is provided by Burton Clark’s research on entrepreneurial universities (1998). As I mentioned above, his comparative case studies can be read in the light of either isomorphism or polymorphism perspective. But, as Clark points out in his conclusions (pp. 127–128), although the five universities followed some idiosyncratic pathway of change given their different institutional histories, unique organizational features and different embeddedment in national and social contexts, they also clearly manifest a common and recognizable pattern of organizational restructuring, that is entrepreneurial archetype, to cope with the changed institutional and task environment. The way the five universities changed can be conceived as allomorphic organizational change, where peculiarities and isomorphic facets are co-present, blended and combined. A second example is drawn from the studies on higher education quality assessment and assurance edited by Brennan and colleagues (1997). As we know, it is a constitutive part of entrepreneurial model. Moreover it is elaborated, supported and disseminated internationally by highly legitimated institutional agencies, becoming a structural feature both of states and individual institutions structure of governance. Nonetheless, the ways this new imperative has been enacted by various nation-states and higher education institutions could seem quite different. But, again, is this variance an expression of polymorphism or rather of allomorphism? Does it give rise to strictly

Figure 1. Process of allomorphic change.

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different forms of quality assurance and assessment or can we find in it common structural pattern and contents declined as variants of them? These are only two and limited example of how the concept of organizational allomorphism could be applied to address contemporary higher education organizational change dynamics and outcomes. Other examples could be drawn from international comparison on how disciplines are getting restratified and re-hierarchized on the basis of the new global demands and imperatives; how curricula restructuring follow almost the same pattern in different countries and institutions; how the academic work, carrier and identity are reshaped by global processes of change. Another research field to be explored by this framework could concern how the Bologna scheme is diffused and implemented at national policy level, as well as at individual institutions level. This could be a good testing bench for this framework, because it offers a wide range of culturally, economically and politically differentiated national settings (Western Europe and Eastern Europe) as well as different higher education structures and traditions between and within each country. In the light of proposed framework, is possible to pick out a policy and trace how it could vary between nations and whether this gives rise to different policies, or to variant of the same broad pattern (i.e. allomorphic policies); whether in different nations each higher education system structure becomes polymorphic, isomorphic or allomorphic in relation to the framework’s requirements and aims; how in a individual nation its various higher education institutions change toward multiple and differentiated patterns, or rather they show some variations maintaining the core feature of one specific archetype.

6. Conclusions The outlined theoretical framework is aimed at addressing and analyze higher education organizational change in the global age, introducing the concept of organizational allomorphism. The main goals I tried to achieve by this concept are: 1. to overcome the weaknesses and the flaws both of macro-structural approach (namely, new institutionalism and isomorphic change) and of micro-analytic approaches (like strategic choice, translation theory and polymorphic change); 2. to valorize and retain the points of strength that each approach contains and offers for analytic purposes; 3. to recombine those points of strength in a synthetic framework able to account neither deterministically, nor voluntaristically how organizational change occur in the face of macro-structural constitutiveness and

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pressures and of local (national and organizational) capabilities to adapt and adjust the global imperatives and archetypes. This is not a definitive word about these kind of processes, but a first working hypothesis that need greatly to be debated, refined, bettered and tested empirically. As pointed out in the previous section, the European region could be a viable and interesting test bench to put this framework at work and to test its potentialities and limits.

Notes ∗ This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 15th CHER Annual Conference:

Higher Education in the Global Age. Vienna, 5–7 september 2002. 1. There is a huge literature about globalization and its supposed (and contested) outcomes and effects at the societal level. See for example: Albrow (1996), Appadurai (1996), Bauman (1998), Beck (1992), Castells (1996), Giddens (1990, 2002), Gray (1998), Hirst and Thompson (1996) McGrew (1992), Lash (1998) Perraton et al. (1992), Robertson (1992), Sklair (2002), just to name some. 2. The construction of this meta-myth is got ahead by a wide array of collective actors and agency like multinational enterprises, the most developed countries through G-8, WTO, World Bank, IMF, UNESCO, EU, international political and economic agreements like GATS, EFTA, NAFTA, APEC, academic and political discourse, mass-media. 3. We must remember that ideology or myths are not only “political” devices to mask or mystify reality but they have practical consequences since actors make sense and undertake actions in accordance with the contents of them. 4. Stinchcombe (1965) define such pattern as historical imprinting of organizational species. Even the late-comer organizations that enter a long time established organizational population, share and reproduce almost the same structural features and organizational arrangements of the population. 5. To some extent and in a more indirect way, international economic agreements like NAFTA, APEC and GATS act as carriers of globalization’s myths in higher education sectors of each region (see Dale and Robertson 2002).

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