A Dialectical Perspective on an Institutional Change Process in Higher Education

The impact of stakeholders in the development of academic disciplines in higher education is a somewhat infrequently addressed topic in research. This article describes an institutional change and legitimacy formation process from a dialectical perspective by analysing organisational interpretations of and strategic responses to external pressures in higher education. When the interests of stakeholders differ, the pressure between actors creates tensions that are resolved by calculated actions. This article shows how strategic actions of an individual university act as drivers for institutional change in higher education. The results of this study show that changes in isomorphic structures arise through calculated micro-level actions that change the existing path dependency in decision-making and build political legitimacy. Tension-driven process leads to national-level, disciplinary-level and organisation-level changes as an outcome of dynamic interactions and contradictions between actors in a highly competitive and regulated field in higher education. The empirical focus of the study is in the engineering and technology field in Finland. A single case study design allows us to understand in-depth relations between actors to gain contextualised insight into a complex phenomenon. This study reveals dialectical dynamics between universities and between regional- and national-level actors in the development of an academic discipline.