IV ISA Forum of Sociology (February 23-28, 2021)

42

Global Trends and Organizational Challenges in National Systems of Higher Education

Abstract Submissions Closed

RC04 Sociology of Education (host committee)

Language: Spanish and English

Session Type: Oral

Along with the global expansion of higher education enrollments and organizations, expectations for more intensive societal engagement of the organizations have appeared. Regime changes, such as academic capitalism have been discussed in terms of policy programs but less by describing the alignment of new modes of knowledge production with novel education programs. Transdisciplinary problems for higher learning increasingly pressure de/recoupling of traditional disciplinary structures in higher education. In recent decades, expectations for more complex entanglement of scientific research, technological development and commercialization of knowledge have arisen. At university level, organizational changes have led to exploring “commercial imbroglios” (Jason Owen-Smith) that process different knowledge forms with consequences for pedagogical forms used in higher education. This phenomenon comes down to asking conceptual consistency of describing the organizational changes and paying attention to the complex issues in boundaries of diversified systems of higher education. To this end, the organizers of this session welcome contributions that tackle the challenges in the maintenance of organizational boundaries of universities from the viewpoint of different empirical and theoretical approaches. For instance, as institutionalist sociology has hypothesized for global trends penetrating the rather permeable boundaries of higher education organizations, systems theoretically informed views have presumed the opposite, sometimes in rather unusual but yet promising ways of approaching the university of the “next society” (e.g. Dirk Baecker). To better understand the novel forms of organization in societally engaged higher education, the session calls for papers that draw from various theoretical approaches and provide empirical descriptions about the timely phenomena.