Organizing institutional environment : a sociological inquiry into university responses to global imperatives

Universities are often thought of as unique among institutions and organizations. Certainly, their role in the global institutionalization of education, science, professions and the ever-expanding list of individual rights and freedoms has been pivotal. These developments have, in turn, transformed the environment in which universities operate into one which is ever more challenging to navigate. University leaders and academics nowadays frequently report increasing pressures to follow international standards, to be accountable to various stakeholders and to compete for funds or status, effectively reifying the image of the university as a “victim” of the said broader social changes. This dissertation challenges this imaginary and suggests that, if we look into the ways universities interact with other organizations, and especially into how this interaction has changed over the past century and how it materializes in local contexts, a somewhat different picture emerges. By focusing on competition, cooperation and contestation, the dissertation argues that it is through interaction that universities enact and shape their organizational identities and in doing so act as co-constructors of their institutional environment. Forms of inter-organizational interaction and changes thereof are, thus, important to consider when looking at institutional emergence, reproduction and disruption