Studies in Higher Education

Alajoutsijärvi, Kimmo; Kettunen, Kerttu; Pinheiro, Rómulo

2024 Studies in Higher Education

doi: 10.1080/03075079.2024.2397048

This conceptual study explores the dominant ideologies influencing the economic governance of higher education (HE) and shaping competition within the sector and among universities. It delineates and contrasts four key ideological positions – neoliberalism, managerialism, shareholderism, and stakeholderism – and outlines four corresponding types of university competition: signaling, intraorganizational, interorganizational, and priority competition. The paper contributes to the discourse on university competition as a macro trend in HE by examining its ideological underpinnings. Notably, it observes that real-life outcomes often diverge from the idealized visions these ideologies promote. The study concludes by illustrating how these four types of competition coexist in HE and discussing how shifts in coordination or decision-making mechanisms can influence which ideology gains prominence in shaping competition.

Mitterle, Alexander; Bloch, Roland

2024 Studies in Higher Education

doi: 10.1080/03075079.2024.2399724

Competition today has become a central policy imperative in higher education. Connected to resource efficiency and scarcity, it remains closely attached to the idea of the market but reaches beyond when related to positional or status orders. In the higher education literature such varieties of competition – as distinct social processes – are still under-investigated. In drawing on common references to competition in the literature and empirical examples the paper identifies and outlines two separable forms: market and field competition. The distinction shows that there are fundamental differences in the way competition in higher education plays out which should not be viewed merely as variations of market settings. To outline the differences among the two forms the paper follows a two-step iterative process. The paper first highlights a time-bound analytical problem in common market-references. Drawing on empirical work by Michel Callon it specifies market competition as the construction, singularisation and detachment of a good. As empirical examples from the German higher education case show, such singularisation and detachment are rarely complete, competition rather operates through the attachment of universities to status-consecrating intermediaries, as analysed in the status competition literature. In a second step, the paper outlines the main premises of status competition but also its lack of a comprehensive frame that could qualify it as a distinct form of competition. The ‘field’ fills this void by providing a selective relational space on which universities can act and observe themselves competing, reinforced by multiple intermediaries.