NJCIE 2017, Vol.
1(2), 2-13
http://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.1967
Internationalising Nordic Higher Education: Comparing
The Imagined With Actual Worlds of International Scholar-practitioners
Meeri Hellstén[1]
Associate Professor, Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract
This
comparative case study addresses a timely issue engaging researchers involved
in the internationalisation of Nordic Higher Education, in the context of
Sweden and Finland. The study examines a hypothetical imaginary in the
transition between university international policy statements and their
understandings from the position of a globalised episteme. The investigation
forms a tag-project as part of a funded large international research project
examining ethical internationalism in times of global crises, involving a
partnership between more than twenty higher education institutions in excess of
ten countries across five continents. The data was collected using a
mixed-methods design, whilst being controlled across the matched data
collection period in 2013-2014. Data consisted of policy texts, surveys and
interviews. The current research inquiry reports on a within and across
comparative analyses of certain policy texts and follow-up interviews with
university management. The results yield logical support for a global higher
education imaginary driving internationalisation in ways which reveal
paradoxical associations between the imagined and the real worlds of
international scholar-practitioners.
Keywords: internationalisation;
imaginary; epistemic imperatives; world society theory; Sweden; Finland
For the
past three to four decades, internationalisation of higher education has been a
key global research area which has received surprisingly little attention
within the Nordic comparative scholarship on higher education. This paper
contributes to the latter by offering a case report of comparative results
obtained from a Nordic tag-project aligned to a large international consortium
investigation on ethical internationalism in higher education (EIHE)
(Andreotti, Stein, Pashby, & Nicolson, 2016). Central to the investigation
is an acute interest in examining conceptualisations of a global imaginaries
and epistemes driving the internationalisation of higher education. In the
global higher education imaginary, these epistemic imperatives of
internationalisation are persistently defined at economic and political levels
while causing vulnerability and fragmentation at academic levels.
The
research inquiry in this paper is conceptually emergent with world society
theory applied to international higher education by relying on phenomenologist
cultural constructivism (Meyer, 2010). It seeks to identify the imagined
hypothetical from the actual social worlds of actors (Krücken & Drori,
2009) affecting the ways in which international education may be conceptualised.
The investigative focus derives from the modern global expansion of
economically driven integration of education and employment as determined by
organizations such as the OECD, the European Union and World Economic Forum.
These international organisations have over the past decades constituted
imperatives which have affected the values, ethics and intentions of higher
education in unprecedented ways (Cowen, 2009; De Boer & File, 2009; Ninnes
& Hellstén, 2005; Pusser, Kempner, & Marginson, 2012).
The sense
of uncertainty prevailing in internationalisation of higher education is
factually warranted. In the wake of the World Financial Crises of 2007-09, the
world economic system is challenging universities to increase competitive
knowledge production and strive for innovation driven by social imaginaries
(Taylor, 2002). This demands universities to raise employability targets of
ever more highly-skilled, globally aware young graduates and by utilizing
internationalisation to accomplish these means. There is considerable pressure
on higher education institutions to internationalise performance, supporting a
never before seen escalation of education reform (Altbach, 2016; Aubrey
Douglas, 2016; Marginson, 2016). It has been predicted that this trend will
accelerate even further in times of economic downturn directing universities
towards renewed socioeconomic means for revenue raising (WEF, 2011).
The market
imperatives affecting higher education are felt across the EU-region (Engel,
Sandström, van der Aa, & Glass, 2015), including the Nordic countries
despite their globally unique equity-oriented tradition. Among them, Finland
and Sweden have seen the most compelling case of higher education reform
(Ahola, Hedmo, Thomsen, & Vabo, 2014) as young EU-member states. After
joining the EU in 1995, the two countries have responded differently to
internationalisation of higher education, and especially in relation to the
Bologna process since its inauguration in 1999. Finland has a quantitatively
positive recent history of implementing international higher education by
having achieved the 20-percent EU mobility target through systematic reforms
dating back to the 1980s (Ahola et al., 2014; Välimaa, 2012).
In the
Swedish higher education reform case, the government incentives (HsV, 2008:15R)
to internationalise have to date not been shaped by coherence in the system
(Göthenberg, 2014). Three major reforms in the past 20-year period have not
resulted in agreement on indicators nor outcomes in terms of academic
accountability (but see Ahola et al., 2014 for a statistical overview). In each
country, the higher education field is more or less decentralised giving
universities freedom to internationalise within the limits of the national and
EU mandates, but the incentives, ideologies and policies differ. This freedom
points towards a degree of variability in Nordic internationalisation
structures which encourages aligned comparative analyses within and between
educational fields of the sort reported in this tag-project report.
The
scholarly attributes of international cooperation and free intellectual
exchange across borders and the traditional interest in the advancement of
(higher education) knowledge provide a pendulum indicator to current reforms, also
known as the commodity production of (higher) knowledge (Marginson & Sawir,
2011). The internationalisation of higher education is nationally contested by
increasing fragmentation and uncertainty (Andreotti et al., 2016) in terms of
investment value aspects entailed in and by the internationalisation
initiatives across EU member states. The higher education field is caught in
the conflict between the degree of internationalisation and academic quality,
breaking the assumption that merely having internationalisation policies in
place provides for higher quality. Concurrently, a normative functionalist
panacea predicates that internationalisation in itself enhances academic
quality, causing universities to embark in a grand writing project of
international vision statements and aligned strategic initiatives. This remains
baffling to students and unresolved by faculty as they do not translate
effortlessly into observable action and real outcomes. Conceptually then, this
culminates in an ill-fit between visions and their accomplishment in
internationalising higher education (Hellstén & Reid, 2008). This motivates
the current conceptual and empirical exploration of the imagined and the
authentic which, if left unexamined, may lead to contested imaginaries of internationalisation
and contradictory impulses of educational practice (Khoo, Haapakoski, Hellstén,
& Malone, in print).
Internationalisation
grew out of the globalisation movement of the late twentieth century and was
historically defined on the basis of trade theories and economic principles
(Altbach & Knight, 2007: Kuzhabekova, Hendel, & Chapman, 2015;
Robertson & Buhari-Gulmez, 2015). In modernity, the internationalisation of
higher education is frequently discussed in relation to the general topic of
globalisation, which includes political and market regulated flows of people,
money, goods and services (Altbach, 2016; Ninnes & Hellstén, 2005). Many
internationalisation policies are influenced by the world economy forcing
universities to compete on idealistic combined with epistemic imperatives such
as excellence and world-class scholarship (Times Higher Education, 2017).
The agenda
is adaptable to world society theory (Meyer, 2010) which claims that global
political and economic systems are ever more integrated. Modernisation drives a
global academic ecosystem which is converging in internationalisation and
concurrently brings about a clouding of definitions without any critical
inquiry, for example, about internationalisation and international pedagogy
being taken to mean the same thing (Teelken & Wihlborg, 2010). Such
complexity jeopardizes higher education toward uniformity based on conflicting
advice and warranting concurrent international competition and collaboration,
without questioning its net scholarly and educational benefits.
Global
concerns about the internationalisation of higher education were framed by
organisational combined with system level perspectives (King, Marginson &
Naidoo, 2013), closely linked to economical-political-policy demands (Altbach,
2016). Focus was located on academic and organisational climates and cultures,
viewing education primarily from an organisational perspective, as being linked
to economy, politics and policy. The societal position and role of universities
have also been researched in relation to an external global environment. The
political and economic forces of globalisation impact higher education in terms
of market competition allowing transnational corporations to wield power
that transcends national borders (King, Marginson & Naidoo, 2013).
Universities are increasingly expected to operate in what new world economic
regimes coined as a knowledge-based economy. Crucial qualifiers within global
higher education development are university rankings and recruitments of
international students as a way to generate revenue for higher education
institutions. It invites the critical question, how do we associate
internationalisation incentives with overall higher educational quality?
Marginson
(2009) discusses the escalating development in terms of status competition
between leading higher education institutions. Other factors are the new
technologies, political austerity measures in state funding, that create
unrealistic institutional exertions in revenue raising expeditions. This trend
resonates well with the socio-phenomenologist cultural construct (Meyer, 2010)
which holds that “Actor agency is made real through the highly expanded
educational systems now found everywhere” (p. 20). As shown thus far, research
in the past 20 years documents that the rapidly intensifying international
education market (e.g. Altbach, 2016; Knight, 2012; Marginson & Sawir,
2011; Ninnes & Hellstén, 2005) and swift technological advances have
imposed unprecedented pedagogical demands on the scholarship on
internationalisation (Hellstén & Reid, 2008; Trahar, 2011). Concurrently,
there is anxiety about lowering academic standards endangered by a perceived
fragmentation in and of the field. Counteracting such fragmentation may derive
from what Andreotti (2012) called epistemic discord about internationalized
curriculum content, feared employability factors and dissonant conceptions of
pedagogy. These are the most critical components of world societies in
internalization processes. Epistemic imperatives of globalisation in turn,
distort scholarly engagement, diversification or the potential for
transformation of intellectual experiences throughout life.
Thus, the
exploration of epistemic globalities also determines academic culture(s) as
institutional imperative practice that creates, preserves, reproduces, and
develops through collegial choices of action, participation, relationships,
communication and values (Lehtomäki, Moate, & Posti-Ahokas, 2016). These
are well in line with the latest Bologna priorities leading up to 2020 (being
the social dimension, lifelong learning, employability, student centred
learning, mobility and multidimensionality). Such issues inform on how
institutional forces impose on learning and establish the interrogation of the
epistemic operations of international educational practices in times of change
beyond 2030. Agency is directed towards the imagined and imperative academic
knowledges in the internationalisation process.
The
comparative research on internationalisation in higher education seems well
timed as the role of higher education is also emphasized in the global
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) leading towards 2030 and adopted by the UN
in September 2015 (UN, 2015). The SDG goal number 4 on ‘good quality education
for all’ requires ensuring the equality, equity and inclusion at all levels of
education. The interdependency between good quality education and achievement
of other SDGs has been analysed and highlighted by the UN agencies and the
World Bank (UNDESA, 2015), thus calling for improved knowledge generation and
sharing of qualitative research elements. The interpretation is that it is
pivotal to understand how internationalisation and cross-border collaboration
in higher education contribute to the quality of education delivery. This
utilisation of knowledge may assist higher education institutions to review
their roles in social change and design knowledge-based transformative agendas
(Robson, 2011), as the SDGs cannot be viably achieved without the flow of
progress in global collaboration in education (Sayed & Ahmed, 2015).
In the
theoretical implications outlined above, the concept of episteme is adopted as
an ontological category representing the theory construction framing a dynamic
of an education-oriented mind-set for researching international
communities of scholars in two comparative domains. It makes use of the concept
of global imaginary (Castoriades, 1987) as a new heuristic (Pashby, Haapakoski,
Hellstén, & Khoo, 2016) for analysing the social globalities from the
hypothetical to the actual in the academic world of a collectively configured
international community of scholars. Meyer’s (2010) world society theory is
well aligned here with the methodology of epistemic and global imaginaries, in
that it allows for a scrutinising of the principles leading the human interest
ahead, by reliance on universal values, benevolence, peace, cooperation between
nations, and the striving for common goals of moral practice by defending the
vulnerable. However, the self-interest of nations combined with institutions
driving global economics expansion may cause a loss of influence at the ground
level creating inequality and ensuing unethical practice. Meyer’s (2010) theory
is therefore particularly useful for articulating complexities of the
international education episteme that may be otherwise impossible to transfer
into ethical, equitable, workable human agency.
Comparative
and international methodology has a rigorous tradition of connecting issues
within and across the social fabric of nations and societies (Cowen, 2009). The
adopted method contributes to the field by applying within and across
comparisons in a holistic, multidimensional, heuristic and conceptual research
approach (see e.g. Bray, Adamson, Mason, 2014). The analytic framework applied
in this tag-project aligns with the methodology developed and utilised in the
large EIHE consortium project (Andreotti, 2012). It is generative in the sense
that the data-driven process denounces an ‘a priori’ state of assumptions to be
tested for truth value, but allows for conceptually dynamic deliberation that
goes beyond a mere description of comparative categories. Within this method, a
series of intelligibilities, intricacies and reiterations, and responses to the
fragmentation and shifting grounds of international higher education become
analytically and comparatively malleable (Khoo, Haapakoski, Hellstén, &
Malone, in print).
In this
tag-project of the international EIHE partnership (Andreotti, 2012) focus is
set on a small comparative sample of empirical survey responses collected from
several higher education institutions in Sweden and Finland (Andreotti, 2012).
The EIHE project is an Academy of Finland-funded large international research
project with over 20 participating universities in more than ten countries and
across five global continents. The aim of the EIHE is to investigate global imperatives
imposing upon internationalisation by creating epistemic difference,
challenging issues of accountability, and the civic role of the university.
Empirical (survey, interviews, documents) data were collected at each
participating university and at policy, institutional, management,
administrative, academic staff and student levels. The data was collected by
utilising matched methods from each university during the same time period in
2013-2014 and resulted in a large common database consisting of both text-based
surveys and interview data materials. The data reported on in this article
consists of thematic summative excerpts compiled from 200 surveys and a number
of in-depth interviews from a number of universities in Sweden and Finland (for
details, see Andreotti, 2012).
Ethical
approval to conduct the study was obtained from the hosting university and each
participating university, respectively. Within the research cohort, consensus
was achieved by allowing consortium partners to utilise the common database for
a range of within and across comparative analyses and dissemination of results.
Some principal methodological positions were agreed upon and which served as
foundation for a discursively oriented approach, whilst allowing for a variety
of epistemological positions to inform individual tag-projects emanating from
the common large body of collected consortium project data. The common
methodological locus is that of the social imaginary (Taylor, 2002) as a
framework for a notion of being and becoming and the “university as an imagined
space” (Andreotti, et.al., 2016, p. 3).
The data
analyses in the current comparative tag-project maintain the fundamental
research consensus agreed upon by the EIHE consortium, by examination of the
‘international higher education imaginary’. However, it elaborates on
methodology by comparing the imagined international with the actual social
world of actors, wherein ‘the imagined’ is characterised by higher education
policy vision and mission statements. The ‘actual worlds of actors’ in the
current methodology are constitutive of interview data excerpts collected from
the higher education institutions in Finland and Sweden.
In a
comprehensive account of the entrepreneurialisation of the university,
Marginson and Considine (2001) illustrate that the globalisation imagery of
higher education has blurred the boundaries between the ideal and mundane
academic actions. Universities caught in the international corporatisation
treadmill are inadvertently compelled to seek endless reinvention and renewal.
One such measure is the official articulation of vision statements, which are
made available through mission statements and centralised strategic
initiatives. Paradoxically, such policy statements make excellent data for an
interrogation of the agency of an international imaginary. This justifies the
first comparative manoeuvre of the current analyses.
The
statements in Table 1 form a summative description of the representative types
of vision and mission articulations found in the data collected from the
Finland and Sweden. In order to comply with the ethical principles, only the
summative and representational connotations of policy statements are presented
so as not to single out institutions in the corpus of data.
Table 1. Summarised university
vision and mission statements in Finland and Sweden
|
Finland |
Sweden |
|
Internationalisation is a cornerstone
strategy |
Internationalisation is a strategic priority |
|
Leveraging international strategies as
quality enhancing |
Internationalisation is a
collective mission |
|
International
strategic partnership alignment with Nordic universities |
Strategic regional internationalisation as
focus in neighbouring countries |
|
Internationalisation
to meet external market pressures |
Internationalisation as emblematic of
sustainable development |
|
Internationalisation as mainstreamed in
university core activities |
Internationalisation as unity in diversity |
|
Internationalisation
as a measure for global competitiveness |
Internationalisation as a mission of
transnational cooperation |
|
Internationalisation for promoting globalisation |
Internationalisation as competitive business
collaborator |
|
Internationalisation
as symbolic of ‘best practice’ |
‘Best’ in internationally acclaimed research
output |
The
combined university vision and mission statements invoke an
internationalisation imaginary that is in alignment with the global
market-oriented policy imperatives seen elsewhere in the higher education sector.
Important determinants of this policy imaginary are exertions toward
cross-institutional status competition (Marginson, 2009), raising hypothetical
indicators toward top performance and strategic quality boosting incentives.
This process may also be interpreted as hypothetical as mission and vision
statements seldom lead to real outcomes at ground level.
The
comparative epistemic imperatives driving hypothetical internationalisation in
policy visions differ only marginally between the two countries, with the
Swedish university visions showing slightly softer power configurations than
articulated in the data from Finland. In both countries the
internationalisation imaginary acknowledges regional development with
neighbouring countries as a symbol of institutional expansion.
The
epistemes of globalisation are saliently present in both data sets in which
internationalisation symbolises what has aptly been termed the commodity
production effect (Marginson & Sawir, 2011). The intelligibilities of
collectivity, sustainability and unity in diversity being characteristic in the
Swedish university policy statements make the most notable comparative
epistemic dissonance, with no matching counterpart in the statements summarised
from Finland.
The second
locus of epistemic interrogation is generated in the discursive interpretations
culminating in the international imaginary as identified by interviewees from
higher education institutions in the two countries. Again, the ethical
principles were adhered to by only allowing for the summative and
representational connotations of interview statements being presented so as not
to single out institutions in the corpus of data.
Table 2. Summarised university
management interview statements in Finland and Sweden
|
Finland |
Sweden |
|
Target placed at top 50 universities, but
rankings not essential, provides a paradox |
Internationalisation representing
diversification of higher education |
|
Internationalisation is a form of income
generation for universities |
Shortage of curriculum offers in English
obstructs international enrolments |
|
Internationalisation is subsidised by the
Ministry through specific budget indicators |
No specific budget assigned to
internationalisation seen as impeding implementation |
|
Internationalisation has to date not yielded
increased revenue for universities |
- |
|
Leveraging internationalisation as a
necessary part of accreditation and quality assurance |
International faculty members excluded from
contributing collegially with low academic support |
|
Staff lacking in English proficiency is
hampering internationalisation |
Obstacles to internationalisation are
attributed to low-level English language skills among faculty |
|
International variation in degree structures
is seen as a deterrent of mobility |
Need to promote curriculum in the English
language to attract more international enrolments |
|
Incoming mobility is taken as indicator of
‘globalising the curriculum’ |
Internationalisation at home: local students
refrain from taking part in internationalisation incentives |
|
Internationalisation is a struggle between
time and resources |
Diverse student backgrounds among home
student body interpreted as internationalisation indicator |
Table 2
shows the comparative variation of inferences between the institutional world
of actors of international higher education in Sweden and Finland. The overall
discourse in both countries can be taken to signify a globalised
internationalisation episteme owing to an imaginary of economic and
competition-oriented imperatives, upon localised authenticities. Table 2
illustrates the suggestion whether the international imaginary shapes a chase
on the treadmill of coercive knowledge production, which is predicated upon a
collegial countering of its implementational potential. Whilst the interview
data from Finland yields a comparatively clearer hard-line, and globalised
imaginary than does the data from its neighbour, the Swedish data articulates a
less structured approach albeit embedded in ambiguity and soft-policy measures.
In
comparing the two data sets, Table 1 and 2 make visible the contrasting ways in
which local international offices respond to the predictable refrain in
university vision and mission statements that simultaneously convey a paradox
between a normative hypothetical essentialist internationalisation episteme
(i.e. the policy data) and it’s perhaps relentless retributory modes of action
(the interview data). In both data sets, the ‘actual world of social actors’
(Meyer, 2010) that finds itself within the grips of internationalisation
missions (Table 1) are left with the meagre option but to antagonise
vulnerabilities, embedded in local obstacles, deterrents, struggles, and
impediments to real implementation (Table 2). Paradoxically then, actualising
the interchange from mission statements to real life intelligibilities remains
a matter of normalizing the intrinsic human instability in fronting
international systems of adaptation.
As stated
in the introduction of this article, the current analyses form a smaller
tag-project to a larger multinational and cross-institutional higher education
study (Andreotti, 2012). As such, it necessarily selects a distinct set of
units of comparison from two neighbouring countries, with two educational data
sets that directly respond to the conceptual objectives. It is possible that
alternative modes of readings are available from the same data, however as
explained, the heuristic choices utilised in the current analyses have been
carefully deliberated (Andreotti et al., 2016) to give justice to an accurate
within and across comparative research design. As such, the analyses presented
in this small case report are limited to the comparison of the imagined
hypothetical to the actual worlds of actors (Meyer, 2010) and should be read
within the larger frame of the EIHE project publications (see Andreotti, 2012).
Further research may consider the deeper analyses of the role of agency as a
major influence on a more integrated higher education system, including of
course, the analyses of policy borrowing. This focus would contribute
comparatively to further studies of conceptualisations between world society
theory, world system theory and world culture theory.
The results
of this short case study provide support for a conceptually intensifying
imaginary of internationalisation that is contiguous to the policy visions
articulated in the two comparative data sets. Across interviews in both Finland
and Sweden, statements made by informants can be lexically clustered as
matching within each university and resonate almost identically with the policy
statements within universities, but are simultaneously contrasting between
universities. This provides a clear indication of the discursive power of the
written policy data texts on forming aligned international epistemes regardless
of their truth value, and thus remaining in the imagined hypothetical.
Generally, the influence of comparison supports a feasible adaptation of
Meyer’s (2010) world society theory. It is evident in comparisons made between
‘the imagined hypothetical’ of the university vision and mission statements,
with ‘the actual social worlds of actors’ appearing in utterances made and in
discourse on university management. These entities are working within the
confines of such policy statements. It provides further evidence on the case of
an increasingly integrated higher education system in our comparative case of
the two countries.
The author
would like to thank Professor Vanessa Andreotti de Oliveira and the Academy of
Finland and the EIHE project partnership for the data and consultations
provided for this study.
No
potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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