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How Do Meta-organizations Affect Extra-organizational Boundaries? The Case of University Associations

Toward Permeable Boundaries of Organizations?

ISBN: 978-1-78743-829-3, eISBN: 978-1-78743-828-6

Publication date: 17 October 2018

Abstract

How do organizational associations affect extra-organizational boundaries? This chapter addresses this question by looking into the long-established practice among universities to form associations. In order to examine how associations delineate boundaries in universities’ institutional environment, the chapter draws on the scholarly work on categories and conceptualizes associations as meta-organizations. The chapter finds that category-based identities, and other organizational characteristics, enacted to demarcate members from non-members play a central role in this process. In following these lines of demarcation on a sample of 185 national and international university associations a typology emerges, accompanied by a global diffusion pattern. Three sets of institutional conditions are then identified as being conducive to this process: (1) the twentieth-century university expansion and the consolidation of national higher education fields, (2) the intensification of cross-border interaction and the advent of international institutions, and (3) the formation of a global field and the rise of competition as an ideological imperative.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewer for the helpful comments. I would also like to thank Katharina Braunsmann from Bielefeld University for cross-checking the database with the sources. All errors are my own.

Citation

Brankovic, J. (2018), "How Do Meta-organizations Affect Extra-organizational Boundaries? The Case of University Associations", Toward Permeable Boundaries of Organizations? (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 57), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 259-281. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20180000057010

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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