Higher Education and Institutional-Autonomy Policy in Thailand: the Perspective of Agency Theory

The purpose of this thesis is to examine higher education and institutional-autonomy policy in Thailand through three perspectives of agency theory. These three perspectives are comprised of economics agency theory, political science agency theory and socio-cultural agency theory. The application of agency theory in this study is one of the fruitful theoretical frameworks for those who have an interest in governance arrangements in higher education. The key contributions of the theory are the revelation of underlying motivation, behavior and response of universities towards governmental policy and intervention. This study investigates relationships between public universities in Thailand, which are quite heavily subsidized by the government in terms of funding, and the government from the perspective of agency theory. Higher education in Thailand is an interesting case due to the country’s non-colonial experience. It has a great deal of independence in choosing educational models from the West, and applies them within Thai context. On the other hand, the cultural embeddedness of favoritism (social-cultural agency theory) has a significant impact on the governance arrangements of funding (economic agency theory) and monitoring (political science agency theory). The scope of the analytical framework aims to grasp the current style of governance (behavior-based governance) and the decentralization initiatives from autonomous-university policy (performance-based governance). Moreover, types of monitoring and information systems (police-patrol and fire-alarm governance), and favoritism (social agency relationship) are also included in the framework of investigation. Key words: government-university relationship, agency theory, opportunism, information asymmetries, control, cultural embeddedness, favoritism, institutional-autonomy polic