Higher Education and Organizational Theory

Abstract

Abstract This chapter addresses organization and globalization theory development in the field of higher education. Many researchers would qualify the study of higher education as applied, multidisciplinary research. This suggests that scholars focusing on higher education, where appropriate, would import concepts from organizational and globalization theory. This chapter, however, will address two important deviations from this expectation. First, it will show that the concept of globalization only entered the scholarly literature on higher education (organizations) relatively late. Second, higher education researchers were sometimes ahead of organizational theorists, but they used different scholarly language to theorize higher education. Importantly, the use of insights from organizational or globalization theory is affected by characteristics of the object of study and the practical applicability of concepts, especially in light of the policy and management challenges in higher education.