Global city as a unit of analysis in research on the internationalization of higher education

Abstract

The focus of this study is on the area of the internationalization of higher education in the context of global cities. Previous research in the higher education field explained how global flows made universities strategize and commercialize their external relations, and how competition enabled changes but disrupted the continuity of traditional forms of production and livability. The internationalization of research is often perceived in the literature as dependent on funding decisions of governments and organizational strategies of universities. The decline of centralized subsidies and the growth of market instruments however increasingly devolve investment strategies to individual researchers and make them more conscious of their locales and resource-controlling stakeholders. Collaborative initiatives engaging external stakeholders have become important but also more complex. The interdependencies between the contextualization of funding patterns and institutional collaborative behaviors in the internationalization of research are however scantly covered. The role of stakeholder contexts in the internationalization of research remains largely unexplored. This paper defines a framework of a global city as an accumulation of local, national and global flows of resources that create competitive advantages that some universities utilize for their benefit. The proposed research identifies key variables in relations between universities and cities by correlating ranking indexes of world-class universities and global cities and comparing university funding patterns in Toronto, New York, Hong Kong and Beijing.