1 Introduction
The fundamental idea of higher education (HE) for society can be approached from the perspective of liberal education or ‘bildung’. ‘Bildung’ is a concept that emphasises holistic personal development, self-cultivation, moral education, and the nurturing of individuals to become well-rounded, responsible citizens with a sense of cultural and ethical awareness. ‘Bildung’ integrates intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth for a harmonious balance between knowledge
This chapter begins with the idea of hybridity as a characteristic of global HE. The illustrative empirical findings originate mainly from Nordic and European experiences, although hybrid teaching practices have gained considerable attention in USA and Asia (Gudoniene, 2025). In this chapter, hybridity refers to the overlaps between existing lines of demarcation. We observe these lines within the politics of HE and the formation of public policies, as well as within governing universities, the formation of identities and value creation efforts, and the balance of values in society. A theoretical problem is how to understand the hybridity of HE at different levels of societal activities and decision-making. In other words, how can we extend the notion of hybridity from an organisational problem to other facets and contexts of societal activities (Kallunki and Kivistö, 2024). As a complex, multifaceted, and multilateral context of policy formation, HE provides an excellent case for this theorisation.
For a systematic inquiry, we employ the macro – micro – macro ‘bathtub model’ of the society by James Coleman (1990) and combine it with multiple mechanisms that channel the development of hybridity within HE (See Vakkuri et al., 2025). The overarching idea is that the aggregate combination of values produced by HE cannot be deduced from the aspect of political choices on the macro level. Instead, there is a need to unravel the entanglement of goals and values of HE in micro-processes within universities (Pekkola et al., 2022). Therefore, we aim to understand the impacts of hybridity on the
The focus of this chapter is on both the policy aspects of HE and on the value creation aspects in moving from universities as organisations to the balance of values in society (Johanson & Vakkuri, 2017; Vakkuri & Johanson, 2020a). First, we discuss the framework of the analysis and then perform an analysis of HE policy on the basis of the integrative reading of previous studies. These include a discussion on HE and that of hybridity, as well as emergent attempts to combine these two strands of thought. Second, we highlight the policy design of HE and introduce new elements of the design. Third, we introduce the scaffolding of hybridity within universities and the governing and identity issues within facilities of HE facilities. Fourth, value creation in HE is described, and the balance of values is discussed. Last, we conclude the chapter with a discussion of the implication of hybridity within HE.
2 A Plunge in the Bathtub
Our framework (Figure 2.1) seeks to unravel the reciprocal nature of the hybridity of HE policy, in which the hybridity of politics transforms into the hybridity of organisational practices and in which hybrid practices of HE organisations transform, through structural arrangements, mutated identities, and value creation into the ‘hybridised value’, i.e. a balance among social, public and market values.
Higher education among fields and mechanisms of hybridity
The mechanisms of policy design (1), hybrid governance of universities (2), and value creation (3) function as transformation devices between macro and micro levels (1, 3) or among different fields within universities (2). It is possible to consider mechanisms causal agents that direct the political choices to organisational action and define aggregate balance of values in society. In a more interpretative tone, mechanisms appear as connecting devices within temporal processes in policy formation. Policy design incorporates the perspectives on HE embraced by politics, and value creation accumulates value for the aggregate balance of worth. Within universities, hybrid governance follows the form of scaffolding hybridity and influences the formation of multiple identities.
The policy design (1) signifies a first-order mechanism for influencing the properties of organised entities in specifying the broad educational goals as more tangible packages of administrative action. Extensions of the problem definition, a ‘policy mix’ of the employed tools, multiple perspectives of evaluation, and the scope of intervention strategy of the policy design contribute to the appearance of hybridity in HE policy. In an administrative system, the policy design results in a more or less hybrid structural arrangements or ‘scaffolding’ of the micro-operations within universities (B). Scaffolding refers to the construction of tangible hybrid organisational forms. It represents the hybridity of overlaps in ownership, parallel institutional logics or incongruent goals, sources of funding, and variety of control (Vakkuri et al., 2022) among entities operating within the HE policy field.
3 Politics and HE
The development of HE institutions followed the societal changes at different stages. As with all sectors and services in society, HE is part of the overall political development of societies. Drawing on the elaboration of Wilson’s (1983) notion of regulation in politics, the type of distribution influences the possible coalition structures and interests of stakeholder groups. The distribution of costs and benefits is an embodiment of political choices, which is often difficult to change. Within HE, distributional forms materialise through gradual political shifts. From a historical perspective, the emergence of European cosmopolitan universities played a role in the destruction of the medieval world order during the Reformation, followed by the nationalisation of the universities and the entanglement of universities with religious wars. Universities gained importance during the formation of industrial societies, which resulted in the migration of the universities outside Europe and the transition from elite HE to mass HE in post-industrial society after World War II (Perkin, 2014).
One key insight into the intersection between politics and policy builds upon the increase in benefits and the costs of policy actions in society. Regarding the types of apportionment, the costs and benefits should not be considered solely in monetary terms as they may refer to a more abstract notion of
Politics and apportionment in the creation of hybridity of HE
| Type of politics | Perspective on HE | Method of apportionment | Nature of institution and lines of demarcation in HE |
| Majoritarian | Egalitarian | Diffuse cost and benefits | Inclusive, demarcation between specialisations |
| Client | Regressive | Concentrated benefits, diffuse cost | Selective, demarcation between levels of prestige |
| Entrepreneurial | Missionary | Concentrated cost, diffuse benefits | Denominational, demarcation between myths |
| Interest group | Elite | Concentrated benefits and cost | Exclusive, demarcation between locations |
Although HE in most of the Western countries and all of the Nordic countries has moved from the elite phase to massification and is close to universal HE (Trow, 1970, 2000), the politics of government involvement in HE revolves around three main viewpoints: (1) egalitarian, (2) regressive, and (3) institutional. First, from an egalitarian perspective, HE offers possibilities for upward social mobility, provides equal opportunities, and decreases inequality. This perspective can be associated with the Nordic welfare model (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and system of Nordic HE (Välimaa, 2018). The delegation of benefits and costs might be broadly distributed from an egalitarian perspective, but the emergence of mass HE entails that a growing part of nations’ resources devoted to the use of universities compete with attention to other policy issues (Trow, 1973).
Second, within a more regressive perspective, the affluent are expected to gain from the resources invested by others in HE. Even during the period of elite education before WWII, the investments and running costs of HE were
Third, institutional explanations for government spending patterns propose the importance of path dependence, which relates to both elite and missionary perspectives. The institutions change slowly and the decisions made by the previous rulers orient the current actions, which restricts partisan options for increasing or decreasing spending on HE (Garritzmann et al., 2021). The institutional explanation proposes the importance of delegating costs and benefits at the point of origin, which cannot be changed quickly. In a historical sense, some of the origins of the university system are denominations related to religious beliefs. The evolution of government followed the ability to use literate catholic priests who were educated and remunerated by the church to operate the proto-governments in the early Middle Ages in Europe (missionary perspective). The quasi-monopoly of the church in supplying expert knowledge for the running of the state was welcomed by the weak political authority. In return, the catholic church acquired considerable influence over secular state-building attempts (Hollenbach and Pierskalla, 2020). The entanglement of politics and religion resulted in the displacement of priests by laymen in the government (Ertman, 1997; Rueschemeyer, 2005), which induced the need to educate the governing elite within institutions other than the church (elite perspective). Notwithstanding, the reality behind official policy is that even in the Nordic countries, HE has retained many elitist features, for example, the inheritance of elite professions such as medical doctors in Finland showcases (Kalalahti & Nori, 2023).
The lines of demarcation point to spheres for separate activities. The notion of hybridity in this context refers to the overlap between the distinct spheres; however, the lines for crossing over are different according to the types of politics and methods of apportionment. Even within most comprehensive and unitary egalitarian HE systems, the lines between disciplines and specialisations are relevant lines between institutions within universities. The hybridity appears in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary efforts across lines of specialisation. The status differences between university facilities add to the differentiation between specialisations and introduce a more nuanced aspect of hybridity in connecting universities with higher and lower status according to the regressive perspective. The missionary perspective uses a belief system as a starting point, in which the hybridisation in the fundamental sense could occur by the amalgamation of myths into a novel belief system. If we assume that the education of a small elite to govern society requires approximately a similar knowledge base, the demarcation lines and points of overlap between educational institutions are geographical rather than substantive.
The delegation of costs and benefits does not provide straightforward information about the causal links between politics and HE policy. However, the perspectives on HE offer hints on the level of government intervention. It is likely that an egalitarian perspective invites extensive government presence in policy formation and that missionary perspective allows for much larger stakeholder influence with restricted government engagement. Further, elite and regressive perspectives would hold a middle ground in their association with the political interests.
4 Policy Design
Peters and Fontaine (2022) consider policy design an analytic framework that integrates different aspects in an overall strategy to make the policy work by defining causal assumptions to solve policy problems, providing possible instruments for problem-solving, and enabling evaluation of the success of
Technological advancement through innovations has been one motivating force in supporting HE with the hope that the development of innovations would give mature industrialised countries a competitive edge over newly industrialised nations through the interactions among academia, government, and business through manifold ‘helix’ arrangements (Etzkowitz et al., 2023). It seems that HE institutions themselves are very persistent structurally, and the university–industry interaction tends to be industry-specific with little spillover of knowledge across industries (Guan & Chen, 2012). From a dynamic viewpoint, the accumulation of national wealth serves as both a result of knowledge creation and a source of that knowledge creation’s augmentation, which protects the already achieved positions of industrialised nations. Existing national wealth gives industrial countries a head start, as their high-income levels enable further promotion of both innovation and absorptive capacity (Castellacci & Natera, 2013; Johanson & Vakkuri, 2017).
Following the new public management reforms and strong criticisms of the introduction of market logic in HE, alternative approaches to HE administration have been introduced. Most notably, there is a notion of network governance in HE, which emphasises the change in management environment in HE from bureaucratic implementation to a more strategic posture. However, building on the work of public administration scholarship (Greve, 2015; Reiter & Klenk, 2019), Kanniainen et al. (2021) indicate that many other public administration conceptualisations, such as digital governance, collaborative governance, new public governance, public value management, and co-production, have not been widely used as a frame of reference in HE discussion.
Currently, the governance of HE involves a greater range of actors and interconnections (Ferlie et al., 2008). The government’s role has shifted to that of a facilitator of relationships rather than a direct steering agency. On the one
Even though new administrative paradigms and concepts are not widely discussed in the HE context, these developments can be observed in empirical reality, and some studies address co-production, for example, in the field of pedagogy and science studies (Kanniainen et al., 2021). Consequently, although research on the topic of administration within the field of HE is underdeveloped, the emerging consequences of alternative conceptualisations are also evident at universities, as noted by Pekkola et al. (2018).
As an example, collaborative governance and cooperative practices have been included in HE policies, the third mission of universities – to contribute to societal and economic development beyond traditional teaching and research – has been incorporated into university legislation, and universities’ funding sources have diversified. This mission encompasses activities such as community engagement, innovation, and regional development. Unlike teaching, which focuses on educating students, and research, which is aimed at generating new knowledge, the third mission involves practical applications of knowledge to address societal challenges. The third mission emphasises collaboration with external stakeholders to create impactful solutions (Arranguren & Larrea, 2016). This has resulted in an increased role for external stakeholders and customers in the management that emphasises quality assurance (Pekkola et al., 2018). Within the Nordic context, the Norwegian government pushed universities to collaborate and engage in dialogue within the private sector in the 2010’s by introducing dialogue on development contracts that were not connected to funding (Elken, 2024).
Further, digital governance has had a profound impact on universities. Regarding policy design, there has been an emphasis on open science and platforms that provide access to learning content, courses, and qualifications, as well as digital accreditation. Within universities, digital governance has introduced new forms of control over work, such as online feedback and teaching evaluations and real-time tracking of citations and other bibliometric indices. This has resulted in a separation between academic outputs (e.g., teaching) and academics, especially as content has become digitalised, in addition to emerging issues related to intellectual property rights. (Pekkola & Kivistö, 2019). Some scholars have been concerned with the impact of information
There is some indication of public value management in the HE sector. The focus of HE management and governance has shifted toward autonomous institutions that follow their strategies. External quality assurance practices and state subsidies are often linked to these institutional goals. Universities are increasingly pressured to define their societal impact and relevance and work toward these goals. Among overseeing bodies, including that of the European Union, there have been multiple attempts to define and categorise universities based on their performance and effectiveness, as revealed by the development of rankings to compare institutions. Managers such as rectors and deans are increasingly collaborating with stakeholders, seeking external funding, and legitimising their activities to multiple audiences. Further, universities have developed internal dashboards and follow-up mechanisms to track their progress. (Pekkola & Kivistö, 2019). On the basis of these changes, Broucker et al. (2017) have proposed that public value can serve as a concept to reintroduce the societal missions of HE to the discussion of market-driven governance reforms in HE and to call the involvement of stakeholders to the definition of public value in HE.
5 Scaffolding of Hybridity
The interactions among public, private, and civil society via distinct modes of ownership, parallel but often competing institutional logics or incongruous goals, diverse funding bases, and various forms of social and institutional control exemplify the hybrid characteristics within universities. As hybrid organisations, HE institutions might have owners other than the government, might follow parallel and sometimes conflicting institutional logics or goals, and can gather both public and private funding. Furthermore, a combination of government control, self-control, and stakeholder influence signify a hybrid control regime of universities (Johanson & Vakkuri, 2017; Grossi et al., 2017).
Within the Nordic context, universities are predominantly public in terms of ownership and funding, although private universities with business education and those with religious denominations exist in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Johanssdottir & Jonasson, 2011). However, the increase in the multiplicity of funding sources from public and private pockets is, according to some scholars, transforming universities into “entrepreneurial” institutions
Within the public university system, the autonomous position of the universities separates them from public agencies under the guidance of the ministries. Thus, based on the idiosyncratic governance structures of universities, who owns the universities remains ambiguous. Universities are often allowed to exercise considerable self-control over their internal operations. Within the Nordic context and elsewhere, the HE policy has introduced tripartite objectives into the mission of universities among research, education, and the ‘third mission’ (Vakkuri, 2004). Among hybrid organisations and activities, universities are a particular context. It is not easy to characterise universities as purely public or private. They may be considered hybrids according to all four characteristics of hybrid activities: ownership, parallel institutional logics or incongruous goals, diversity of funding, and control practices. The practical consequence of these structural ambiguities is that governance of universities becomes more complicated, in which third mission activities provide a further challenge.
In HE policy, a discourse on the ‘third mission’ has gained momentum in recent decades (Pinheiro et al., 2015a). In practice, the third mission includes activities such as technology commercialisation, entrepreneurial efforts, advisory services, commercial use of facilities, contract research, collaboration in academic research, staff exchanges, student placements, curriculum alignment, social networking, and non-academic dissemination (Molas-Gallart et al., 2002). Thus, the third mission introduces a new institutional logic that competes with the traditional roles of the professional scholarly community and the democratic student movement. Various measurement schemes, for policy design and managerial purposes within universities, have been developed to capture universities’ third mission activities (Pinheiro et al., 2015b).
In the Nordic countries, there is no commonly agreed-upon definition of the third mission, and the boundaries between the first, second, and third missions remain a subject of debate. An important distinction in the Nordic context is between nonprofit and for-profit activities, as the third mission discourse is often linked to the idea of the Nordic welfare model. Nordic HE institutions are considered integral to this structure. Based on an extensive literature review by Schnurbus and Edvardsson (2020), the third mission has been largely socialised in Nordic countries. University services are often assumed to be free of charge, with companies and other stakeholders unwilling to pay the full cost of these services. As a result, the government is expected to fund third mission activities, resulting in a top-down approach to defining these activities.
6 Hybrid Governance of Universities
Specifically, the significance of hybridity within universities can be described in terms of organisational goals and mission, the structures of the universities, and the operation and practices for mobilising resources across societal boundaries (See Anheier & Krlev, 2015). The characteristic aspect of hybridity is that it incorporates multiple goals, such as addressing demands of the government, businesses or those of local communities. With incongruous goals or parallel institutional logics, structural separation of activities might offer a solution to, for example, separate the third mission from research and education. The integration of research, education, and a third mission by assimilation and blending might form the basis for a new logic of operation. Further, controversies between differentiated goals and internal cleavages may block possibilities for adapting organisational structures to the demands of multiple stakeholders (Skelcher & Smith, 2015). Multipolar objectives imply that many relevant audiences require justification for the rationality of actions. Therefore, universities need to invest a considerable amount of attention in proving to their audiences that their activities are worthwhile, in terms of both their aims and their performance to garner a variety of resources. In this way, minimising the cost of collaborative governance becomes one subject of economising behaviour.
The triangle of coordination among the state, the academic oligarchy, and the markets in HE systems entails the control of the government and the markets as well as the self-control and peer pressure exerted by the academic profession itself (Clark, 1986). These control forces are understood as mutually exclusive, which implies that for a given HE system, the decrease in state control would result in more control by either the markets or the academic oligarchy. This may implicate higher resource dependency on the markets (external sources of funding) and/or more locally determined forms of coordination and control. Although this may be a somewhat constraining assumption (i.e. many HE systems worldwide may be influenced by parallel and simultaneous
There are multiple possible roles for the university management described by the participation of academic staff in management and the professional autonomy of academics. A combination of high professional autonomy with academics participating in management establishes the building of ground collegial management models, in which the managerial role as the first among equals (Primus inter pares) is not distinct. High levels of professional autonomy and low levels of participation describe the bureaucratic model. Low professional autonomy might result in entrepreneurial management if the participation is vibrant, but the lack of participation allows a managerial model to emerge (Farnham, 1999). Thus, on the basis of the management structures and an understanding of the university as an organisation, the outputs and quality can be framed and evaluated rather differently (Kivistö & Pekkola, 2017).
The HE development has resulted in ambivalent choices. On the one hand, the blurring of boundaries between society and the university institution has narrowed the gap between pure research and applied research, which has not only created significant opportunities for universities to benefit from their commercialisation of scientific activities but also constituted new groups of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ among universities (Powell & Owen-Smith, 1998). The triangle of coordination is a fertile building ground for separate identities between those who adhere to government stipulations, those who embrace knowledge generation, and those who address commercial activities.
7 Multiple Identities
Identity is a human response to questions about who we are. Both individual and collective points of reference and relational characteristics exist when people relate their own identities to those of others. Relational identities grow
In an organisational setting, identity serves as an instrument for identification to introduce the most essential characteristics of an organisation, to distinguish an organisation from other organisations and to demonstrate such identity characteristics over time (Albert and Whetten, 1985). Identities can be of different types: a single identity, a dual identity with competing, often contrasting mental models and belief systems, and multiple identities with a bricolage of identity implications for institutional behaviours. For instance, when teaching-oriented universities try to become a more research type of institution, it is not a question of concentrating on the research efforts as the transformation changes the division of labour between junior and senior faculty members, puts established practices in motion, and requires identity work of all the members to adapt to the new context (Dugas et. al., 2020). The complex characteristics of a hybrid organisation may render a black-and-white statement of its identity narrow and subject to gaming behaviours. We may fail to see the holographic and ideographic form of identities, in which faculties and disciplines exhibit the features of the university as a whole or in which the composite identity is merely an aggregated set of identities of individual units (Albert & Whetten, 1985).
In their investigation of three aspects of university identity – constructing boundaries, controlling collective resources, and being a special organisation, Seeber et al. (2015) found no uniform move to more rational and hierarchical types of organisations in European universities. Traditional loosely coupled institutions exist in tandem with more managerial institutions. Organisational aspects such as age or size have little effect on the type of identity, but a specialised disciplinary profile coincides with the perception of perceiving one’s own HE facility as a special organisation. In other words, universities as ‘multiple-identity’ hybrid organisations that comprise competing utilitarian managerial and professional beliefs challenge the existence of unitary and stable cultural identity (Winter & Bolden, 2020). However, the existence of multiple identities
8 Value Creation
The valorisation efforts (Vatin, 2013) of universities can be described by three different mechanisms: mixing, compromising, and legitimising. Mixing, compromising and legitimising mechanisms originate from the important blueprints of hybrid organisations and entities. By acknowledging the plethora of value creation literature and research, we frame them as instrumental in connecting hybridity characteristics with multifaceted notions of value and values; things that we hold dear in our lives. First, value has a mixed and therefore ambiguous character (Meynhardt, 2009). As universities are encouraged to simultaneously provide distinct categories of value, mixing as a value-creation mechanism becomes important. Mixing refers to the process of combining previously created or existing value categories with the aim of creating novel variants, blends, and layers of value (Nicholls, 2009). Second, the governance of competing, contradictory, and even conflictual values in universities and HE policy necessitates innovative mechanisms of compromising. Hybridised policy formation incentivises and sometimes forces the reconciliation of competing value-creation logics by pursuing compromises between different value propositions, funding systems, and performance measurements (Campanale et al., 2020). Third, legitimacy is a crucial concern for universities as hybrids. There are multiple legitimacy demands from external audiences, society, and media that may impose constraints, limitations, and important performance measurement problems. However, the same demands may be opportunities for manoeuvring that can benefit from the multiplicity and fluidity of legitimisation requirements (Karré, 2020). Moreover, legitimising value is not only about justifying past activities of hybrid universities or HE policies but also about creating value through the processes of legitimisation and showing integrity before multiple audiences (Moore, 2013).
HE policy is significantly influenced by disciplinary frameworks of intellectual scrutiny. HE policy is aimed at mixing disciplinary areas of scientific research by blending them to contribute to the mission of multidisciplinarity and the common body of knowledge. This is a process of amalgamating novel mixes of scientific value from original elements of value, in which new elements are no longer discernible from old elements (Polzer et al., 2016; Vakkuri & Johanson, 2020a). The ideal of multidisciplinarity motivates scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds to seek “theories of everything” to leave their
In many respects, HE policy is a system of compromising and compromises. While HE policy pursues excellence and novelty in research, it needs to balance this novelty with several other interests and constituencies. The outcome of this compromise can be seen in the three tasks of modern universities: research, teaching, and the third mission (Pinheiro et al., 2015a). As Neave (2002) formulates, historically the university institution has bundled the scientific knowledge production and the socialisation of the new generations into the social order through HE. This bundling has been facilitated by the evolution of knowledge itself. Furthermore, to respond to the evolving nature of knowledge, the university institution has deliberately remained open to new expectations by the society and local actors, thus assimilating new responsibilities, such as the third mission. In terms of HE value creation efforts, the third mission is based on the reasoning that the value and institutional survival of HE policy is related to its success in muddling through the proliferating needs of the society. Compromising among the three tasks has increased new modes of ambivalence in the university institution and in HE policy, as well as among individual academics. For instance, while the legitimate role of a university academic may be to educate the next generation of scientists, she should not do this at the expense of advancing knowledge. This ambivalence regarding the logic of compromising also reads perfectly in reverse (Merton, 1976).
Following the distinction between the state, the academic oligarchy, and the markets, Clark (1986) points to the problems in understanding the legitimisation of value from a single unitary perspective in HE. From the government’s point of view, the fulfilment of HE policy goals and the augmentation of nations’ intellectual capital are at the forefront. For an academic oligarchy, the value is created through high-quality teaching and the generation of new
A managerial solution to differentiated value creation has been to increase the number of indices to grasp the multitude of efforts through performance measurement (Vakkuri & Johanson, 2020b). However, the performance measurement systems are not flawless instruments for detecting the development of manifold goals, which in the aggregate results in a discrepancy between the actual (‘real’) performance and that provided by the measurement instrument. The increased amount of indices may disorient actions from the aspired direction (Koppell, 2005). The use of only a few indices for the totality of actions may distort goal setting, excessively low targets do not encourage further efforts, anchoring goals to previous achievement might decrease output, and rigid targets may result in harsh treatment of students and dishonest representation of the measurement results, among other things (Pollitt, 2013).
For universities and HE policy, the ultimate question remains: which of the multiple audiences should be convinced at any given point in time (Vakkuri & Johanson, 2020b). The overarching significance of value creation regimes to the macro balance of values in society lies in the notion that the enumeration practices of value creation define the ways in which value can be aggregated in society as a whole. This topic is discussed in the next section.
9 The Balance
Hybridised policy formation contributes to a complex, multifaceted, and aggregated configuration of values within HE. The value of liberal education and that of a ‘bildung’ occupy joint positions in the bottom line of HE. One approach to conceptualising this configuration is to discuss ‘balance’ as a combination of market, public, and social value (cf. Stark, 2009). In this chapter, market value is understood through the mechanism of exchange, which refers to the monetised form of worth that manifests in the transactional systems of societies. Market value often coalesces with the notion of financial value to make value calculable and governable. Undoubtedly, the commercialisation of
As one of the fundamental mechanisms of political systems, the distributional balance within HE defies global monolithic rationality through the mosaic-like imaginary of distributed local rationalities, as well as a collection of voices and identities of people. The aggregate worth of universities and HE policy is not the only goal of societies; instead, it is relevant as to how worth is distributed among distinct parts of society. Fair and legitimate distribution becomes particularly complicated when the costs and benefits of policies are not easily allocated among groups of people and institutions, between societal sectors or across distinct, competing, and conflicting value constellations. Thus, hybridised policy formation in HE provides an interesting yet highly complex setting for exploring distributive problems.
10 Hybrid Higher Education and Beyond
It has been suggested that because of genuine political differences, position of education and HE in particular presents a special case in social policies (Blakemore & Warwick-Booth, 2013). Differences among political denominations and interest affiliations put different pressures on policy formation. The advancement of the knowledge economy emphasises the importance of intellectual capital provided by HE. The future professional workforce is a product of HE, but the acquired knowledge enables the formation of meaningful relationships within society by acquiring an active role as a citizen of the community.
The main contribution of this chapter is to highlight the macro – micro structure within the HE policy area. The main argument of the chapter is that the aggregate value and the delegation of values as represented by the balance of HE cannot be inferred directly from the macro-level political choices
In a more practical tone, the advancement of the knowledge society places higher education at the forefront of progressive political agendas, but the expansion of tertiary education creates competition with other policy areas and raises differing views on the distribution of costs and benefits among citizens. Hybrid arrangements in universities are subject to political influence and government oversight, yet command and control methods are often ineffective as universities adapt locally and decentralise through their multiple identities. This hybridity demands advanced governance skills within universities and contextual understanding from regulators. It is unrealistic to view hybridity as a clear path to success or failure; rather, it is a fundamental aspect of HE policy. The challenge lies in measuring university performance through a single perspective. Universities can generate public, financial, and social value, but the distribution of these values depends on the prioritisation of economic growth, participation, equality, and community development.
As organisations, universities represent ambiguous qualities in terms of ownership, parallel, and sometimes contradicting institutional logic and goals, variety in the source of funding, and differentiated forms of economic and social control. These aspects make it difficult to govern universities as unitary entities. The pressures placed on more entrepreneurial and managerial HE facilities have not been realised within universities. However, in this respect, the difference between public and private universities might be blurring, with private universities moving to produce public value and public universities adapting insight from managing private facilities of tertiary education. In empirical reality, managerial models are blended with features of educational institutions as loosely coupled systems described by lines of specialisations, disciplinary orientations, and academic tribes. The identities within research and teaching evolve slowly and in structural terms, and universities have shown considerable resilience to both continuity and change. Some of the resilience may be explained, at least better understood, by the analysis of this chapter. With hybrid construction, universities have been and will be able to respond to external pressures while preserving their unique idiosyncratic identities. Respectively, the future success of HE policies will be to some extent conditional on understanding the myriad characteristics of this hybridity.
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