Regional partnerships and resource asymmetries: comparing universities’ interorganizational alignment strategies

Abstract

Regional partnerships are of increasing interest to local and national stakeholders pursuing competitive advantages in global higher education. Integrative strategies provide jurisdictions and their knowledge producers with access to new resources, networks and investment opportunities. However, territorial collaborations run into difficulties as inter-organizational linkages flounder when faced with isolating mechanisms that institutions embed through traditions, cultures, stakeholder commitments, or inbuilt resource asymmetries. Multilateral organizational alignments are often essential to creating synergies across the divides in order to enable more dynamic mobility of intellectual and material resources. This paper compares university alignment strategies in the two distinctive and complicated regions: Central Asia and the Middle East, and discusses challenges in reconciling resource configurations and cultural predispositions in collaborating institutions.