Policy reform and academic drift: research mission and institutional legitimacy in the development of the Swedish higher education system 1977–2012

Abstract

Twentieth-century massification of higher education and academic research led to mission diversification and structural diversification of national higher education systems (HESs), but also a tendency of non-university colleges to seek to develop into full-scale universities by the emulation of practices of established academic organizations, a tendency that has been called academic drift. The drift as such can have multiple causes, and in this article, we relate academic drift to the concepts of institutional logics and isomorphism from neoinstitutional organization theory, delineating policy-making, norm shifts and organizational action in response to uncertainty as three component processes of academic drift. Using the case of the organizational field of the Swedish HES and its recent 35-year history, we draw both empirical and theoretical conclusions, and demonstrate the weight of the research mission in the building of institutional legitimacy for university colleges.

Keywords:

• academic drift
• legitimacy
• research mission
• institutional logics
• higher education systems
• Sweden

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Anna Hellsten for great help with preparing the final version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Holmberg has a Ph.D. in research policy and is senior advisor at the Nordic Council of Ministers, specialized in research and education policy.

Olof Hallonsten is postdoctoral researcher in sociology of science at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, focused on research policy and research organization.

Notes

1. ‘Academic drift’ has several synonyms in the literature, and similar trends have been discussed with the use of the word ‘drift’; e.g. ‘epistemic drift’ (which is a wider and deeper drift of the criteria for ex ante and ex post evaluation of scientific activities; see Elzinga 1997) and ‘research drift’ (e.g. Jaquette 2013), see further below. In the USA, the preferred term is ‘mission creep’ (Gonzales 2012), which is not limited to academic contexts but denotes gradual alteration of identities and missions in any type of organization.

2. Since the level of analysis is the organizational field, we avoid analyzing ambitions of individual academics as a composite mechanism of academic drift (Lepori and Kyvik 2010; Neave 1979) or a primary driver behind it (Griffioen and de Jong 2013; Morphew 2000), which would requires a study with another focus.

3. This term, although in Swedish (‘institutionell karriärväg’), has been used, quite accurately, to describe the policy-enabled academic drift process among newcomers in Sweden in the 1990s (Benner 2008, 116; Holmberg 2012, 117).