Abstract
Previous research has highlighted the occurrence of isomorphic tendencies—convergences in terms of formal organizational structure—in higher education systems in times of uncertainty and under external pressure to change. It has been repeatedly claimed that the Australian university system largely followed a logic of isomorphic change in the aftermath of radical national policy reform of the late 1980s. Yet to date, there is a lack of comprehensive empirical studies testing this thesis. Addressing this lacuna, and drawing on a range of university and government data, this paper tracks and analyses: (a) changes in the formal academic organizational structures existing at all public Australian universities and (b) changes in the numbers of academic staff and students in different academic organizational groupings over the period of 1987–1991. Despite some limitations in the available data, our system-level analysis finds that there was clear and significant convergence in terms of formal organizational structures and student and staff numbers in the majority of academic fields that were taught and researched at Australian universities at that time. We also draw attention to some conceptual limitations of existing accounts of isomorphic change in Australia and outline trajectories for future research supplementing the system-level analysis presented here.
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Notes
This study includes in its analysis all those higher education institutions that had the formal status of universities at some stage throughout this period.
AOU as defined by the government was a classification that clustered disciplines which were deemed to have likeness in terms of the subject matter of units of study into 11 broader groupings. One limitation of the governmental AOU classification is that it combines several disciplines—law, business and economics, for example—which are often grouped differently in other contexts.
The formula for CV is as follows:
$${\text{CV}} = \left( {\frac{s}{{\bar{x}}}} \right) \times 100$$where s is the stand deviation and \(\bar{x}\) is the mean. A uniform population will indicate a low ratio where the standard deviation is significantly less than the mean. In contrast, where the ratio is high and the standard deviation is much greater than the mean, the population is less uniform and more diverse (Hanneman et al. 2010).
ANU was a borderline case due to the complex research school structure existing alongside the faculties.
The annual reports’ data about specific departments existing at Australian universities in 1987, 1989 and 1991 turned out to be too patchy to use departments as a unit of analysis for systematically tracking change across the entire system—but were still useful for identifying trends concerning particular fields of study.
For this analysis, we counted both the ANU’s faculties and research schools as comprehensive AOUs.
The data were unclear with regard to two further post-1987 universities.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council with Grant DP140102874 to undertake this research and wish to thank the members of the research team for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. The authors for this paper are listed alphabetically.
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Croucher, G., Woelert, P. Institutional isomorphism and the creation of the unified national system of higher education in Australia: an empirical analysis. High Educ 71, 439–453 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9914-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9914-6