Abstract
In their book, The University and the Global Knowledge Society, David Frank and John Meyer lead us through the astonishing worldwide expansion of the university. They spell out the societal and ideological conditions that have paved the way for the expansion and show how the university in turn has shaped a global knowledge society. The authors trace and explain the millennium-long development of universities, focusing particularly on the period since 1945. This period is divided into the high-modernity era and the post-cold war, hyper-modernity, era. A question that follows from this periodization is whether we now have seen the peak of university expansion and the global knowledge society. I will come back to this question below.
This short book, only 182 pages in total, is filled with an impressive combination of data and analyses. The book builds on the extensive research by Meyer and colleagues on the worldwide expansion of universities, curricula transformations and scientization of society. In addition, new large-scale datasets are combined with qualitative comparisons of individual universities and curricula across continents and over time.
Data from many sources show a similar picture: an exponential proliferation and global expansion, low death rates, and a general tendency away from institutional differentiation. Many kinds of higher education institutions have been turned into universities. The supply of degrees, subject programmes and areas of studies have become increasingly similar. Professors and students can move and are recognized across the globe. The expansion is multidimensional with similar sweeping trends, such as enrolment expansion, new degrees, interdisciplinarity, empowered students and so on. A generalized model diffuses of what a university is and should be, to the extent that the university has become the foremost institution in contemporary society. Local universities are shaped, assessed and gain legitimacy as part of this prospering world institution.
The recent half-century of university expansion builds on and emphasizes liberal and neoliberal institutions. Students are empowered as actors who are expected to choose, take decisions and behave purposefully. University-educated people flow into all sectors of society. They bring a knowledge culture and ties to a global knowledge elite and in this way form a continuously expanding interface between society and university. The proliferating university and the emerging knowledge society are two sides of the same coin. In this way the university forms the very locus of globalization.
The success of the university has not been without tensions or criticism. Frank and Meyer find periods with lively and widespread questioning of the value of universities, and critique of over-academization and over-education. Yet, this critique is not reflected in the long-term figures on expansion. At the same time, the authors remarks, just because critique and questioning did not have much impact on the general growth before, it may not necessarily be so in the future. I find these sections about the critique, questioning and a possible slowdown or turn of the expansion especially interesting. Just as the flourishing of universities during the past half-century was spurred by a neoliberal ideology, recent societal movements with rising authoritarianism, nationalism and illiberalism may undercut the global university and its central role in society. The signs of an end to the hyper-modernity era that were emerging just as the book was published, have now gained increased momentum.
The book helps us see the patterns of and drivers behind the global explosion of universities and how this expansion propels the global rise of a knowledge society. Further, it helps us see the current threats to the university as we have known it, challenging us to think about how the authoritarian tendencies of our contemporary society impact individual universities and, ultimately, undermine the knowledge society and the university as a global institution.
With the backdrop of their rich data and analyses David Frank and John Meyer question many more or less taken-for-granted notions of contemporary research on universities. They note, for example, the widespread interest among researchers on differences between inner structures, governance and reforms of individual universities while deep similarities on a global scale are often taken for granted. It remains unclear what impact such variations have on the core content of universities in teaching and knowledge. Moreover, the expansion and standardization so clearly demonstrated in this book was not planned, but was a consequence of cultural diffusion. The model that has diffused across the world, the blueprint, is not a concrete or specific university (not Oxford, Bologna or Harvard) but an abstraction – a theorized model. And it is this theorized, global model that drives aspirations and reforms of individual universities and national and regional systems of higher education.
An obvious case where a widely diffused global model drives reform initiatives concerns rankings and models of ‘world class universities’. In 2011, the World Bank published an edited volume entitled The road to academic excellence: The making of world-class research universities (Altbach & Salmi, 2011), documenting efforts from countries around the world. More books and conferences followed suit as university leaders became increasingly concerned about the global rankings and how to build world-class universities. The first global rankings were launched in the late 1990s, spurring extensive organizing efforts in universities around the world. Since then, many universities have set up special units whose role is to interface with and manage issues related to rankings, from formulating appropriate organizational responses to collection and submission of relevant data. Some universities have set a goal of climbing the rankings, and they have developed strategies for how to do so. We have also seen structural reforms of national university systems or parts thereof, such as the formation of alliances and mergers.
Another reform during the hyper-modernity era is the Bologna process. Studies of this reform help us see sweeping cultural homogenization across university settings as the dynamics of the reform play out in individual universities and countries (e.g. Musselin, 2009). According to Frank and Meyer, the Bologna process is an example of a reform inspired by and reflecting the aspired role of universities for global society. Indeed, reforms in higher education, they argue, ‘have become more frequent and dramatic in recent decades with the rise to social centrality of the institution’ (p. 39). Further, higher education reforms often tend to focus on the organizational aspects. Therefore, I believe, organization scholars have much to learn from and contribute to research on universities.
While the general idea of the university as well as degrees, faculty and curricula are recognized across settings, organizational forms vary. David Frank and John Meyer note: ‘The academic contents of a university anywhere readily can be understood by people everywhere. Organizational forms rather reflect variations in political structures than variations in the academic core’ (p. 40). In my view this shows that comparative studies remain important, but we have to pay attention to both similarities and differences and take seriously that the university is an institutionalized world institution. This means that global as well as local contexts need to be taken into account in the analysis. This is what we seek to do in a present comparative international study on collegiality in higher education and research (Sahlin & Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2023). We find a common trend of erosions of faculty authority across the globe. When comparing these settings, similarities in academic cultures certainly stand out. However, universities are differently contextualized in relation to political structures, societies and the history of the university. This means that the erosion of faculty translates differently across settings with varied consequences for the breakdown of academic collegiality.
The University and the Global Knowledge Society is an essential reading for everyone interested in universities and knowledge society. I would also recommend it to everyone with an interest in institutional change and institutional perspectives on organizations and society. The book gives inspiration for thinking about novel ways of combining various kinds of data in order to explain processes of institutionalization. In theoretical terms we learn about the dynamics of institutional change and how these are related to – or decoupled from – the governance and inner operations of individual organizations. It provides an interesting angle and dramatic examples in the current debates in organization theory on actors and actorhood (cf. Hwang & Colyvas, 2020). A main impact of university training is a culture of actorhood as students, for example, are trained and empowered to choose and to act. Universities themselves are increasingly becoming ‘complete organizations’ (Brunsson & Sahlin-Andersson, 2000) and are constructed and viewed as actors (Krücken & Meier, 2006). At the same time, the long institutionalization of the global university is cultural rather than actor-driven.
I have already commented on the topic of organizational variation and homogenization to which this book has a lot to contribute. Much attention among scholars and policy makers alike goes to the governing and reform of individual organizations. In reaction to this Frank and Meyer state: ‘There is a strong conviction in the field that organizational variations matter, but empirical confirmation is weak’ (p. 39). Indeed, this book gave me much food for thought about such fundamental issues for organizational scholars. I would like to see this book on the reading list of PhD courses in organization studies. It can serve as a perfect reading to prepare for reflections on some of the most fundamental questions in organization theory: What role do actors play in organizational and societal change? What is an institution? How do institutions shape local developments? Does organizational variation matter?
