Celebrating the global: internationalization as a global model

• In Event: The internationalization of higher education: conceptualizations, strategies, and consequences

Proposal

Despite its cosmopolitan roots, for roughly 200 years, the university has been considered a catalyst of state- and nation-building. This same university is now being asked to fulfill a very different mission: to produce worldly, entrepreneurial, highly mobile, leaders for a global knowledge economy. Unsurprisingly, universities around the world are re-emphasizing and reframing their missions, purposes, and functions towards their global dimensions – a phenomenon known as internationalization (Knight 2004). The dominant explanation for internationalization views it as a process of organizational change, necessitated by global economic pressures. Drawing on sociological neo-institutionalism, this paper interprets the internationalization of higher education as a result of broader institutional changes, namely changing world cultural norms and the re-structuration of higher education’s organizational field from the national to global level. It argues the rapid incorporation of internationalization into HEIs’ missions and practices around the world reflects both normative and structural changes, namely: 1) a world cultural shift in the ideal graduate of higher education from “national citizen” to a worldly, multilingual, entrepreneurial “global actor”; and 2) the increasing institutionalization of higher education within a global organizational field, characterized by global comparison and competition. Using survey data from 1,298 universities, I offer support for this argument by showing that HEIs that embrace public and teaching-focused missions are less likely to embrace internationalization, while private, globally-ranked, research-oriented universities and those embedded in global higher education professional associations and trans-national higher education fields are all more likely to embrace and facilitate internationalization.

Author

• Elizabeth S. Buckner, University of Toronto