ABSTRACT
Higher Education in the U.S. has been considered one of the most successful sectors that represents the widely adopted western model of education in the world. Scholars view it as the most important institution in the complex process of knowledge creation and distribution. Such assertions, however, directly contradict the projections made by others that university campuses will soon be relics or that the sector will collapse under its own weight within next few decades. A closer examination of these contradictions reveals that the perspectives driving such projections often adopt an economic outlook, mostly focusing on higher education’s rising cost, and compare the sector with commercial industries such as manufacturing or services that were disrupted with emergence of online technologies. While such an outlook explains some recent transformations, it doesn’t acknowledge the sector’s challenges beyond economic sustainability, and, therefore, fails to guide future policy for its broader role in our society. Several scholarly reflections reinforce this outlook by arguing that higher education is losing its academic and social priorities and gravitating toward the dictates of the marketplace.
In this research, I argue that the higher education sector needs a broader range of perspectives to capture its dynamics comprehensively and, therefore, I engage the theory of institutional logics to view higher education as a complex system of multiple institutional logics. I then use the theory of mediatization to shift the focus from its cost to its content ,which offers an alternate view. It allows for the drawing of parallels with other cultural institutions, such as the performing arts of music and theater, that underwent mediatization when their content was mediated by recording technologies. The traditional models of content exchange in these cultural institutions (in face-to-face settings) were disrupted when their content was captured, recorded, and disseminated virtually. Scholarly accounts of these events in cultural and media studies reveal many parallels and suggest that higher education is also a cultural institution, primarily because it engages in the creation and distribution of symbolic content.
To explore this perspective, I conducted a multi-level, multi-case qualitative field study. The
setting for the research included higher education organizations across three categories: public non-profit, private non-profit, and private for-profit, with two organizations in each category representing resident and online education as the dominant mode of teaching. A specific program was chosen from each organization as the unit of analysis. To capture the field-level phenomenon, I conducted an archival analysis of documents published by field agencies.
The results reveal six prevailing institutional logics that influence the teaching practice – Academic, Social, Community, State, Corporation, and Market. Increasing online adoption reveals the emergence of a seventh logic that I term the Cyber-Cultural logic. It focuses on student engagement and leverages cyber technologies to digitize, distribute, personalize, track, and adapt the instructional content. Increasing production of videos with experts from disciplines such as entertainment and media to create engaging instructional content reflects the cultural element. The use of virtual interactivity, learning analytics, and predictive algorithms reflects the cyber element. Further, each of these seven institutional logics is explicated and analyzed in terms of how it co-exists, conflicts, and evolves with others. The lens of mediatization reveals how online education has led to the emergence of an alternate world of higher education, comprising instructional content providers and credit-recommendation agencies. While on one hand it is trying to disrupt the traditional educational models, on the other it is leveraging academic strength to gain legitimacy.
In this way, this research makes several theoretical, as well as practical, contributions. It broadens our perspective by identifying multiple institutional logics prevailing in the higher education sector. It offers their in-depth explication and an integration between the theories of institutional logics and mediatization in the context of higher education. The findings reveal the complexity of contemporary transformations that call for engaging multiple perspectives to bring sustainable change. They also bring to light why projections solely based on narrow economic outlooks fail to be realized and how they can potentially misguide the discourses that shape future policy. This comprehensive view can guide our efforts to transform higher education without compromising the foundational values that have made it one of the most enduring and esteemed sectors in the world.
1. INTRODUCTION
PROBLEM
The evolution of the higher education sector in the U.S. that started with the schools of reformation and colonial colleges in the 17th century reached its golden era of academic revolution in the mid-20th century (Geiger, 2011; Rudolph, 1962). Its transformations since the latter half of the 20th century have been viewed as shifting from a “civilizing agency” that serves the society (Clark & Trow, 1966, p. 19) to an industry competing in a marketplace (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2011). The challenge of balancing the social versus industrial identity has led researchers to offer higher education critical assessments (Gumport, 2000), normative prescriptions (Hendrickson, Lane, Harris, & Dorman, 2013; Zemsky, Wegner, & Massy, 2005), and analytical explanations (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). The recent projections about higher education’s changing DNA to its complete annihilation (Christensen & Eyring, 2011; “Creative Destruction,” 2014) have taken an economic outlook and compared the higher education sector with other sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and the service industry. These accounts have largely focused on the increasing cost of higher education, making economic sustainability its central challenge, and applying the principles of markets to address it.
The turn of 21st century introduced a new dimension to this debate as information and communication technologies started altering the mechanisms adopted by higher education to achieve its mission (Bowen, 2013; Šlaus et al., 2013). While online technologies have contributed to the commoditization and commercialization of higher education, they have also expanded access to education across geographies and demographics, thereby contributing to social purpose. A manifestation of internet technologies serving higher education’s social mission is the MOOC phenomenon, which reflects some of the non-profit social welfare goals central to the field’s social identity (Šlaus et al., 2013). Another example is the University of People, where professors volunteer and education is offered almost free through online delivery (“Not Classy Enough,” 2015). At the same time, the emergence of the private for-profit sector, riding largely on internetbased education models, reflects how technology equally serves the capitalist agenda, allowing it to gain a foothold in the higher education field (Morey, 2004). Such divergent roles being played by online technologies suggests that taking a predominantly economic view to analyze contemporary transformations may be presenting an incomplete picture and possibly exacerbating the challenges facing higher education. Cost is just one of the three corners of the iron-triangle problem that the sector is trying to resolve; the other two being access and quality (Immerwahr, Johnson, & Gasbarra, 2008).
This research argues that we need to expand our perspective to better comprehend the dynamics governing higher education. It takes the diversity of reasons for online adoption as an indicator that there may be other, unexplored aspects that may offer useful insights. It shifts the focus from the cost of education to its digitization as the phenomenon of interest. It also adopts a theoretical lens to surface “institutional logics” beyond social or economic, as identified in the extant literature. An institutional logic is defined as “the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008, p. 101). In simpler words, institutional logics offer the rationale behind day-to-day activities conducted by individuals, organizations, fields, and societies.
Shifting our focus to content in this way further suggests that higher education may also be viewed as a cultural institution, as has been previously characterized (Thompson, 1995; Williams, 1981), but not yet empirically explored. Cultural institutions engage in the “activity of producing, transmitting and receiving meaningful symbolic forms” (Thompson, 1995, p. 16).
They “involve some form of creativity in their production […] are concerned with the generation and communication of symbolic meaning, and […] their output embodies, at least potentially, some form of intellectual property” (Throsby, 2001, p. 4). However, the creativity underlying this symbolic content, especially in teaching, has remained hidden within the walls of a classroom, loosely coupled with rest of the organization (Weick, 1976). With technology now capturing and mediating the function of teaching, this symbolic content has now been exposed to the outside world, much like any other cultural good, thereby forcing higher education’s cultural characteristics to the fore.
Viewing higher education as a cultural institution is based on two foundational premises. The first is that higher education creates and disseminates knowledge as symbolic content, putting it in the category of cultural institutions (Thompson, 1995; Williams, 1981). Second, a historical comparison of other cultural institutions, especially performing arts, with transformations currently unfolding in higher education reveals many parallels, indicating how higher education is forging a path similar to the one traced by institutions of music and theater when technology mediated the creation and distribution of their art. They, too, had the traditional model of delivery in a face-to-face setting disrupted with the emergence of recording technologies. The content could be captured in media, separated from the creator, transformed in many ways, and distributed widely for consumption (Chanan, 1995; Katz, 2010). This research argues that any intellectual or creative content, once captured, affords similar opportunities. Therefore, the central thesis of this research is that higher education as a field is witnessing the emergence of a new institutional logic that is parallel to those of cultural institutions, especially performing arts. The cultural institution of literature has not been considered for the following reason. The phenomenon of interest in this research study is the transformation due to online adoption in teaching practice. This transformation is the change from having teachers-students in close proximity (live setting) to having them removed in space-time spectrum (remote setting). Such two settings exist in music and theater where they are either performed live or recorded. Both settings are required to capture the transformation. But these two states are not applicable in case of literature as there is no transition from live-setting to compare it with, unless one considers ‘speech’ as the substitute for live setting which is not comparable in terms of scale and as a sector. And therefore literature as a cultural institution was not considered for this analysis.
The examples of prevailing institutional logics within higher education reflect a tension between the contradicting missions of the field, such as social institution vs. industry (Gumport, 2000); liberal arts vs. practical arts and vocational training; prestige vs. profits; and quality vs. access vs. efficiency (Scott, 2010). Along this dimension, small liberal arts colleges have been traditionally associated with the mission of citizen building (Clark & Trow, 1966), therefore representing social institution more closely. However, large private and public universities have been portrayed as closer to the capitalistic institutions following industry logic (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), especially private ones (Altbach, 1999). When the focus is shifted from mission to mechanism of delivering education, the majority of the higher education field represented by the public or private-nonprofit sector offers predominantly resident education. On the other hand, the for-profit sector is smaller in enrollment but offers predominantly online education (Figure 1.1).
When these two dimensions – mission vs. mechanism – are juxtaposed, the field’s institutional pluralism is revealed (Figure 1.2). The mission dimension shows different organizational archetypes (Scott, 2010) spanning the spectrum between social and industrial logic, whereas the mechanism dimension reflects different adoption levels of online education. At the heart of their intersection is the mediation of communication between teachers and their students, a phenomenon extensively studied in the research on pedagogy (Anderson, 2008; Garrison, 2011). Such mediation of social communication processes leads to long-term structural changes in social and cultural institutions, a phenomenon termed as mediatization (Friesen &
Hug, 2009; Hjarvard, 2013). The theory of mediatization explains meso-level changes in social and cultural institutions and has been applied to analyze institutions such as politics (Strömbäck, 2011), religion (Hjarvard, 2008), and performing arts (Auslander, 2008).
Articulating institutional pluralism in the field of higher education using the metatheoretical institutional logics perspective (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012) and analyzing the transformation through the theoretical lens of mediatization (Hjarvard, 2013) are the two core objectives of this research endeavor. The goal is to apply the theory of mediatization to the context of higher education, focusing on the practice of teaching. This is achieved by identifying its prevailing logics and how the mediation of teaching is leading to the emergence of a new logic, thereby mediatizing the field of higher education.
MOTIVATION
The function central to higher education is teaching, traditionally viewed as a black box enclosed within the four walls of a classroom, and loosely coupled with rest of the organization (Lounsbury & Pollack, 2001; Weick, 1976). However, with the adoption of information and communication technologies to aid this function, the process of knowledge exchange has been exposed to the outside world. This transition has been enabled by capturing knowledge in some form of instructional media and disseminating it virtually to students beyond space and time restrictions in the form of distance education.
Online education emerged as a viable model in the late 20th century to serve the central mission of offering distance education to those who cannot, or are not willing to, attend school physically (Moore & Kearsley, 2012; Wedemeyer, 1981). This makes online education a somewhat familiar phenomenon to the field of higher education. However, there are two ways in which the contemporary online education differs significantly from the previous generations of correspondence-based studies, radio and television broadcasts, open universities, and teleconferencing. First is the extent of mediated interaction that has been enabled by technology and the resulting emergence of pedagogical paradigms (Guri-Rozenblit, 1990; Swail & Kampits, 2001). And second is the scale and pace of its adoption (Allen & Seaman, 2013). These differences indicate that online education has proven itself to be a sustainable model that will continue to disrupt the traditional ways in which higher education fulfills the goals it sets out to achieve.
Perhaps because of the dominance of market logic that pervades the contemporary higher education field (Gumport, 2000), most of the literature trying to comprehend the transformations in higher education in general, and possibilities enabled by online education in particular, has taken an economic perspective and compared it with commercial sectors such as manufacturing or the service industry (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1: Higher Education comparisons
Aspect of Comparison | Compared with | Reference |
Education as an intangible good, student’s involvement in production as well as consumption, and student experience as a series of moments | Service industry | Ljoså (1993) |
Distance education compared with industrial production in terms of rationalization, division of labor, mechanization, assembly line, etc. | Manufacturing industry | Peters (1967; 1994) |
Healthcare and higher education were predominantly noncompetitive enterprises conducted largely in the public sector. Rise in healthcare costs exceeded CPI, and competition led to emergence of health maintenance organizations, large insurance companies, and largely privatized health sector. This points towards higher education’s potential future. | Healthcare sector | Anson (2007) |
Three different institutional logics that emerged over time and favored education quality, access, or cost, varying with the role of institutional actors | Healthcare sector | Scott (2010) |
Education as well as healthcare depend on third-party payers but differ remarkably in technology innovation where healthcare has advanced much ahead in terms of innovations | Healthcare sector | Martin (2011) |
To explain ‘cost-disease’ due to which prices in higher Performing Archibald and education, like in performing arts, rise more rapidly than arts Feldman prices in general while labor productivity is much more (2011);
DIFFICULT TO INCREASE. BOWEN (2013)
The drawback of adopting the dominant institutional logic to elaborate and analyze a phenomenon is that “these elaborations subsequently become factors in the reproduction of these institutions and thus contribute to their hegemony, whether through socialization of institutional personnel or formulation of public policy” (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 260). While adopting industry logic provides useful insights, it perceives individuals imparting education with little or no creative agency. It ignores the value of teaching as a creative act and converts it into an industrial process to be efficiently delivered as per prescribed instructions. However, research shows that teaching as a profession is taken up by highly creative intellectuals who cannot be viewed as automatons (Bramwell, Reilly, Lilly, Kronish, & Chennabathni, 2011; Horng, Hong, ChanLin, Chang, & Chu, 2005; Sawyer, 2004). Therefore, the analogy of manufacturing or service industry fails to view teachers and students engaged in the intellectual and creative act of knowledge exchange.
This failure of extant research to view higher education as playing a role beyond selling products or offering services motivates this research. While remaining neutral to higher education’s role to fulfill social or economic goals, it strives to reveal an alternative view that engages the creative side of the field. It brings the creativity of teaching practice (Bramwell et al., 2011; Sawyer, 2004), which has been largely ignored in the social vs. industry debate, into the discussion. Through this repositioning, it strives to surface the underlying principles that guide teachers in their day-to-day jobs; principles that have not been considered in understanding the institutional logics governing the field of higher education.
The primary point of departure for this research is that, by virtue of having intellectual/creative content as its core unit of exchange, education in general, and higher education in particular, is similar in many respects to the cultural institutions that engage in the creation, distribution, and consumption of such content, e.g. the performing arts of theater and music. In western classical music, the music is developed by composers, such as Beethoven, whose works are delivered to audiences as conductors’ interpretations (Nash, 1955). This distinction is observed across cultural industries where the act of creation involves conception, design, and development of the content, whereas its execution involves performance and recording (Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Ryan, 1992). A similar distinction can be found in academic roles where knowledge is created through research and disseminated through teaching. However, with content dissemination becoming increasingly mediated, teaching is being transformed in many ways. Therefore, by focusing on teaching as the core practice of higher education, this study analyzes how the transition toward online models of teaching in higher education is generating seismic shifts in the process of teaching and learning.
RESEARCH SCOPE
Recognizing the failure of past analogies or theories to acknowledge the creative element in teaching, and motivated by the possibilities that articulation of higher education as a cultural institution offers, this research applies the theory of mediatization to conduct a field study that helps meet the following goals:
- Identify and elaborate the prevailing institutional logics with respect to teaching in higher education
- Explain how the emergence of online education is mediatizing these logics
- Elaborate on how the function of teaching is being impacted by the above change
The study draws guidance from two theoretical streams of research. The first guidance is from the theory of institutional logics in general (Friedland & Alford, 1991), and the metatheoretical framework of institutional logics in particular (Thornton et al., 2012), to develop its ontological and epistemological stance. It builds upon the extant research in higher education that has focused on the institutional field as the level of analysis (Gumport, 2000; Scott, 2010). To conduct such a field-level analysis, the study cuts across multiple higher education organizations engaged in creating and/or disseminating educational content. The focus is on the undergraduate education within the United States.
The rationale behind choosing field-level analysis is based on the observation that adoption of online education and consequent changes are not unique to a college or a program but cut across all higher education organizations and disciplines (Allen & Seaman, 2013; Kena et al., 2014). The scale of such a phenomenon and the magnitude of its impact make the field-level approach the most appropriate (Davis & Marquis, 2005), where a field is defined as “a set of interdependent populations of organizations participating in the same cultural and social subsystem” (Scott, 2008, p. 434). The selection of the undergraduate level is based on the rationale that it represents a larger population of higher education in the United States, with 17.7 million enrollments in undergraduate programs vs. 2.9 million in graduate programs in 2012 (Kena et al., 2014).
The second guidance is to analyze the phenomenon of interest by applying the theory of mediatization, which originates from cultural and media studies and explains long-term institutional changes brought about by communication technology interventions. It explains patterns of change across a wide range of social and cultural institutions that have been transformed by the mediation of their communication processes, such as politics (Blumler &
Kavanagh, 1999; Mazzoleni & Schulz, 1999; Strömbäck, 2008), religion (Hjarvard, 2008; Hoover, 2009), and performing arts (Auslander, 2008).
As an example, when musical and theatrical performances were captured and separated from their performers by recording technologies, the “evanescent experience” became an “economic product” (Chanan, 1995). Technology mediation created a new culture industry that redefined cost, quality, and access to art and entertainment. Although threatened, live entertainment survived; however its traditional ways were altered in response “to the oppression and economic superiority of mediatized forms” that forced it to “become as much like them as possible” (Auslander, 2008, p. 7). Mediation led to mediatization of art, which not only transformed artists’ creativity and audiences’ tastes, but also the art’s surrounding ecosystem (Chanan, 1995). This phenomenon, termed as “mediatization” and defined as long-term structural changes in institutions when their social communication processes are mediated by technologies (Hjarvard, 2013), is now unfolding in the realm of higher education institutions as their function of teaching and learning is being mediated by instructional media (Friesen & Hug, 2009; Miège, 2008).
Therefore, this research captures the phenomenon of mediatization by using the metatheoretical framework of institutional logics. These two theories require two critical choices for the research design. First, although mediatization is positioned as a meso-level phenomenon (Hjarvard, 2013), the institutional logics perspective necessitates multi-level research design to capture “cross-level effects” among micro-, meso-, and macro-levels and “contradictions” due to institutional pluralism (Thornton et al., 2012). And second, both theories engage the temporal dimension to capture historical shifts in institutional logics at the field level (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Livingstone, 2009). To meet the two requirements, this research adopts a mixed-method research design that comprises field-level archival analysis, organization-level qualitative document analysis, and individual-level qualitative interviews, thereby covering the meso- and micro-level of the phenomenon. A high-level overview of the research is presented in Figure 1.3.
HIGHER EDUCATION AS A CYBER-CULTURAL INSTITUTION: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EMERGING INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC