Academic capitalization : a case study of two universities in Guangzhou, China

Abstract

This dissertation inquires into policy adoption and adaptation in the context of Chinese higher education development. Three primary research interests inform the dissertation – how global patterns have been adopted into national higher education (HE) policy, how HE institutions organize their governance structures in a globalized context, and whether individual academics can influence the adoption and adaptation of global HE patterns.

Due to its open-ended and exploratory nature, the study employs a qualitative research design. Embedded cases and grounded theory are used to generate theories. Four faculties at two public universities in Guangzhou (one research university and one teaching university) are employed to answer specific research questions. Theoretical sampling was employed in choosing the research sites, according to maximizing and minimizing strategies. Semi-structured interviews, document analysis, content analysis and textual analysis were all used to explore all aspects of organizational governance in the case universities.

The national level of policy transfer in Chinese HE provides room for agents to exert their capacity on initial policy contents. Policy transfer mainly focuses on policy goals, while specific policy contents and implementation tools are always decided by grassroots HE institutions on a case-by-case basis. At the organizational level, the researcher found dissipative structure in the process of academic capitalization, explaining the changing equilibrium of the transformation of HE governance in the case HE organizations. At the individual level, though academics believe they have little opportunity to participate in formal decision-making processes, they constantly influence the rules and policies of their organizations, exercising their agency to change the direction of policy through phyletic gradualism.

This study contributes to the existing literature in four ways. First, by employing dissipative structure, it sheds light on internal and external resource exchanges in HE organizations, thus widening the power of resource dependence theory to explain dynamic change. Second, this study provides a research illumination beyond the methodological confines of separating the individual from the organizational level of research when discuss changes to HE governance. Third, it reveals the features of policy adoption at the national level by systematically tracing policy adoption trajectories in different aspects of HE governance in China. Finally, this study unfolds the capacity of agents in HE organizations and shows that agents in a HE organization can transform or reproduce the initial structural policy and institutional context in which they work and live.