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Informed by multiple disciplines, theories, and methods, higher education scholars have developed a robust and diverse literature in many countries. Yet, some important (organizational) sociological perspectives, both more established and more recent, are insufficiently linked. In particular, we identify two theoretical strands – institutional and relational – that, when joined, help to explain contemporary developments in global higher education and yield new organizational insights. We review relevant literature from each perspective, both in their general formulations and with specific reference to contemporary higher education research. Within the broad institutional strand, we highlight strategic action fields, organizational actorhood, and associational memberships. Within the relational strand, we focus on ties and relationships that are especially crucial as science has entered an age of (inter)national research collaboration. Across these theories, we discuss linkages between concepts, objects, and levels of analysis. We explore the methodological approach of social network analysis as it offers great potential to connect these strands and, thus, to advance contemporary higher education research in a collaborative era.

Walter R. Allen is Allan Murray Cartter Professor in Higher Education, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also distinguished professor of sociology and director of CHOICES, a longitudinal study of college attendance among African Americans and Latinos in California. Allen's research interests include higher education, race and ethnicity, family patterns, and social inequality. He has been a consultant to courts, communities, business, and government. Allen's more than 100 publications include: Towards a Brighter Tomorrow: College Barriers, Hopes and Plans of Black, Latino/a and Asian American Students in California (2009); Till Victory is Won: The African American Struggle for Higher Education in California (2009); Everyday Discrimination in a National Sample of Incoming Law Students (2008); Higher Education in a Global Society: Achieving Diversity, Equity and Excellence (2006); Enacting Diverse Learning Environments: Improving the Climate for Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education (1999); College in Black and White: African American Students in Predominantly White and Historically Black Public Universities (1991); and The Colorline and the Quality of Life in America (1989).

How do racial meanings structure the institution of higher education and the organizations and networks it encompasses? This chapter develops a theory of racial activation to usefully link conceptualizations of race and organizations. This theory examines how racial meanings shape organizational fields, forms or types of organizations, and the strategic use of racial meanings by actors in organizations to create a more robust understanding of the processes by which organizations are themselves made racialized. Predominant scholarship on race can largely be characterized as theorizing the mechanisms by which race is constructed or uncovering the patterns and consequences of inequality along racial lines. Much existing research hovers above at a macro level where national, state, and global powers are understood to impose racial categories, symbols, meanings, and rules onto daily life while higher education has largely been studied as a site where we see the effects of broader social disparities play out. This chapter draws on insights from inhabited institutionalism to develop a theory of racial activation that usefully links conceptualizations of race and organizations to provide an intersectional and interactional approach to the study of fields.

Universities in both North America and Europe are under substantial pressure. We draw on the papers in this volume to describe those pressures and explore their consequences from an organizational standpoint. Building on the institutional logics perspective, field theories, world society theory, resource dependence, and organizational design scholarship, these papers show how the changing relationship between the state and higher education, cultural shifts, and broad trends toward globalization have led to financial pressures on universities and intensified competition among them. Universities have responded to these pressures by cutting costs, becoming more entrepreneurial, increasing administrative control, and expanding the use of rationalized tools for management. Collectively, these reactions are reshaping the field(s) of higher education and increasing stratification within and across institutions. While universities have thus far proven remarkably adaptive to these pressures, they may be reaching the limits of how much they can adapt without seriously compromising their underlying missions.

In the light of recent debates on the possible issues in curriculum studies, formulated particularly in the field of sociology of education, this chapter discusses the role and the importance of curriculum theories in higher education. Focusing on the historical and the conceptual roots of curriculum theory approaches, the argument is that the dispute and the separation between normative and critical roles of curriculum theories are important to overcome in today’s competency-based and outcome-focused context of higher education. Basil Bernstein’s ideas on the vital role of knowledge are discussed in relation to the origins of the so-called crisis in curriculum theories. It is suggested that in the debate between normative and critical curriculum approaches, a danger is that the focus on the educational importance of curricula may be neglected and silenced in the midst of the pressure to renew curricula in higher education.

This contribution introduces sequence analysis to higher education research, an explorative technique aiming at detecting patterns, regularities and resemblance in time-ordered data. Thereby, it enables a holistic perspective on over-time developments and processes such as educational pathways or academic careers. In this contribution, the foundations and general logic of sequence analysis will be described. As an example, referring to the life course as a framing paradigm, sequence analysis is applied to reconstruct the study trajectories of a cohort of bachelor students in Germany. The potential of sequence analysis in three specific higher education research areas is outlined, that is, to study post-secondary education trajectories, academic careers and the development trajectories of higher education organizations. The conclusion discusses advantages and disadvantages, challenges and practicalities.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

Hugh Africa returned to South Africa in July 1994 after an absence of 30 years. His deep involvement at all levels of education – from basic to university – covers almost four decades. After obtaining the B.A. and B.A. (Hons) degrees from the University of Natal, he completed the M.A. degree at the University of Leeds and received his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Natal Teacher's Diploma.

The chapter attempts to articulate a possibility for integrating a number of perspectives in studying higher education as a scholarly subject in current social science. We begin with the reasons for such an undertaking and its relevance. We then develop several basic definitions in order to establish a common conceptual basis for discussion. The final section presents new institutionalism as one of the ways to integrate several approaches in understanding higher education.

This chapter is rather theoretical and methodological in its outlook. We develop the basic approach that, in many respects, is still a work in progress. We take in this approach a set of arguments that open up new research agenda rather than settled a perception to be accepted uncritically.