The Future of the University

Abstract

Understanding higher education reforms through contrasting functionalist and neoinstitutional perspectives is what motivated the intellectual endeavor that came to life in this book. The main strategy was to view university reforms in two countries and at different levels and sectors. Although, at the beginning, I expected to find that the identity of politicians and academics moved toward a globalized model of the entrepreneurial university—either because it could prove the benefits of their practice or because it represented a cultural model with social legitimacy—the studied context leads me to follow a mild version of the world society, neoinstitutional perspective. The actors involved in higher education reform, I explain during the book, are embedded in larger environments beyond the boundaries traced by nation-states, as latest world society theorists suggest (Krücken, 2003; Meyer, Ramirez, John Frank, and Schofer, 2006; Ramirez F. O., 2012; Ramirez and Christensen, 2012; Meyer and Ramirez, 2013), but local, regional models also operate at a transnational level. The result is, using David Kamen’s (2012) metaphor, one of a society inspired by new models of nationhood and the university that resemble “mosaics” rather than “melting pots.” The higher education landscape is being formed by traditional, globalized, and hybrid forms of organization that reflect a cognitive orientation toward local and global identities.