In defence of international comparative studies. On the analytical and explanatory power of the nation state in international comparative higher education research

Abstract

Higher education is undergoing a process of globalization and new realities of a globalized higher education world are emerging. Globalization also has a profound impact on higher education research. Global and transnational topics are theoretically and empirically elaborated and seem on the rise, whereas the international comparative outlook seems to become outdated in a world where national spaces become more and more global. On the basis of a bibliometric analysis of the state and development of both international comparative and global and transnational higher education studies and based on a critique of the methodological nationalism, this article discusses the analytical and explanatory power of international comparative higher education studies and lessons that both fields can learn from each other. The suggestion is that international comparative studies could embrace transnational and global studies to develop towards a methodological glocalism instead of being outlived.

Keywords:

• international comparative research
• global and transnational studies
• methodological nationalism
• methodological cosmopolitanism
• methodological glocalism

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Tatiana Fumasoli and Georg Krücken for comments on a conference paper version of the article presented at the 27th Annual CHER Conference in Rome in September 2014. I also thank Romy Wöhlert and Richard Hardack for their comments on an earlier version of this article as well as two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging appraisal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Anna Kosmützky is assistant professor at the International Center for Higher Education Research (INCHER-Kassel), Kassel University. At INCHER is responsible for the research area ‘Change of Knowledge’, which comprises research and research projects related to the knowledge production of universities. She is an expert in international comparative research and her research interests include higher education research, science studies, organizational studies with a focus on methodological issues and both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Notes

1. Beyond global and transnational studies, single-country studies also belong to the family of international higher education. These studies provide detailed analyses and thick descriptions of single countries as well as deep insights into the uniqueness of the respective case. Such studies are implicitly internationally comparative in that the investigators interpret their findings by contrasting what they learn about the country they actually studied with what is known or is believed to be true about some other country or countries (see Bleiklie 2014, who includes this type of research into the realm of comparative research, and Ragin [1987] 2014; Carnoy 2006, who label this type implicitly comparative research). Such studies usually do not have a global or transnational approach. Even if phenomena are investigated that appear to occur globally or have a transnational dimension, they are first and foremost examined within the framework of the nation state and national higher education system.

2. Journal of Higher Education, Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, European Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Studies in Higher Education, Higher Education Quarterly, Review of Higher Education. Comparative Education as well as Comparative Education Review were excluded because their focus is not primarily comparative higher education, but rather comparative education in general.

3. It is also important to note that scholars who studied higher education institutions were, of course, already interested in international comparison before the 1960s.

4. There has also been critique of the dominance of the nation state as exploratory framework in comparative higher education studies (e.g. Marginson and Rhoades 2002) earlier, as in comparative studies in other fields and disciplines (see e.g. Esser and Hanitzsch 2012; Esser and Pfetsch 2004; Bray et al. 2007; Cowen and Kazamias 2009). Part of the critique advocates for the inclusion of other macro-level units like world regions, countries, subnational regions, social milieus, language areas, cultural thickenings and particularly for contrasting different spatial macro-level units. Some of the authors who criticize the nation as unit of analysis do not criticize it because they are using other – larger or smaller – analytical units, but because nations have lost part of their specificities, due to transfers and mutual dependencies between nation states and regions. But the explicit critique of an MN has originated in sociological debates and global and transnational sociological studies. Also imminent MN of international comparative analyses has already been discussed earlier in the neighbouring field of comparative education, and several authors have advocated reframing comparative education (e.g. Arnove 2003; Schriewer 2003; Dale 2005).

5. There is empirical evidence to suggest that higher education research, particularly in the USA, has a national bias. As Tight (2014, 1) recently put it, higher education researchers in Europe and in the USA are ‘working in two separate silos’. He studied citation patterns of US journals and non-US journals, and found that US-based authors dominate the former and also basically cite literature published in the USA, whereas European authors are more likely to refer to research published in US journals.

6. Tilly (1984) has developed a similar typology earlier (see Kohn 1989, 21, for a discussion of similarities and differences of both typologies, where he also refers to even earlier similar classifications). Livingston (2003) has already utilized Kohn's typology for approaches in comparative media- and communication studies but without adaptions.

7. Admittedly, it is difficult to differentiate particularly the types in which nation is the/a object of analysis and the type in which nation is the unit of analysis (Kohn himself mentions this). The difference between both seems to play out basically alongside with the distinction between qualitative and quantitative empirical studies in higher education systems. Whereas the former tend to study national higher education systems as objects of analysis, the latter have a tendency towards conceptualizing national higher education systems as units of analysis. Therefore, I suggest merging these two categories into one at this observational/methodological level.

8. Beyond higher education research the processes of travelling and translating of ideas have been developed as conceptualizations of adaptation processes of global trends (e.g. Czarniawska and Sévon 2005; Sahlin and Wedlin 2008). Others have engaged in the analysis of borrowing and lending processes between nations (e.g. Phillips and Ochs 2004; Steiner-Khamsi 2004).

9. Bleiklie (2014) subsumes such studies under the type of grand theories, in which they definitely fit. But comparative studies aimed at grand theories can – as they did traditionally – focus on similarities and differences or – as they do more recently – on interrelations. And as pointed out in this article, studies with a global or transnational focus do not necessarily aim at grand theories, but rather can be engaged in identifying causal regularities, thematic comparison, etc.