Curriculum Change: An Institutional Critique of the Internalist
and Resource Dependence Theories
Mazen Hashem
California State University, Northridge
The National Center of Educational Statistics that in 1950 listed 68 different fields in higher education in the United States, accounted for 934 fields and subfields in 1994 (NCES 1997), many of which were practical in nature (Brint 2002). Such an impressive expansion calls for questioning the forces behind curricular change in higher education. Several factors are usually pointed out: the state, market forces, and educational institutions themselves. Different perspectives diverge in assigning relative significance to these factors. Two opposing views dominate the discussion on curricular change, one stresses internal factors within academia, and another stresses the forces from without. This paper reviews the salient contributions of those perspectives and theorizes an alternative model based on the institutional approach to understanding higher education. The focus of this paper is major shift in curriculum, not minor changes in subject material.
The Internalist Perspective
The classical writings on higher education tend to treat curriculum change from a historical functional viewpoint (Rudolph 1981, Haskell 1984). They typically assess the impact of major social conjunctures on curricula, stressing the role of, often, heroic key figures in the educational establishment. They cite a plethora of societal input that affects higher education, giving special attention to prestigious universities leading the way in the progressive evolution of knowledge. Commenting on the increase in federal government funding of research, Rudolph (1962) writes: ‘…because the accelerating scientific revolution would not permit it to do otherwise…’ (pg. 490). The influential writings of Clark Kerr, (e.g., Kerr 1963, Kerr 1994) take growth and differentiation of US higher education as given, focusing instead on how to pragmatically manage them (Aiken 1971: 113).
However, it is the writings of Burton Clark that epitomize the logic of the internalist perspective: ‘Daily, the faculty enact the university’, he declares (2002: 322). Academia in this view is tribes, territories, and small worlds, governed by its own rules and driven by its internal dynamics. The two main actors in this arena are faculty and administrators; sometimes the governing bodies play an important role, and less often students have some impact (Clark 2002). Similarly, Altbach (1987) maintains that the ‘two basic elements of the academic equation are students and faculty’ (pg. 260). The argument of Altbach does stress societal external forces, but it meets the internalist view in terms of the structural elements crucial to higher education, not it terms of the dynamics that propel change.
The US university system, the internalist view holds, comprises two structural properties and two cultural properties: it is highly centralized and extremely diversified, and it is sharply competitive and peculiarly entrepreneurial (Clark 1997: 21-22). These properties form a unique character of US higher education, which is reflected in three features. First, the subject largely defines the university, and the department-discipline linkage is the source of strength and stability as well as the source of strain (Abbott 1988, Clark 2002). Second, academia operates under immense forces of differentiation (Clark 1987a, 1987b), and the research impulse sets into motion a drift toward ‘applications-generated’ knowledge that is driven by new interorganizational networks (Clark 2002: 330). Furthermore, the incorporation of new bodies of knowledge, along with the limitation in funding, drives the university to teach larger bodies of students (Clark 1997: 25); this, in turn, strengthens the differentiation process, as students become representatives of their new disciplines. Along the same line, Bledstein (1976) notes that the inflation in size of American higher education was matched by inflation in ‘consumer services’ type of curriculum (pg. 297). Similarly, Spitzberg (1987) studies the politics of curricular change focusing on campus-based dynamics and stressing that the US undergraduate curriculum ‘had become a supermarket where each department offered its wares and the institution was only a sum of its parts’ (pg. 298). Adelman (1999) speaks of the impact of student choices and attendance patterns on universities and colleges that increasingly function like a ‘wealthy open market that produces dozen of specialty niches in every sub-sector’ (pg. 39). Case studies of innovation in higher education also come from an internalist perspective, stressing mostly administrative and managerial adjustment (Grant and Riesman 1978, Levine 1980, Townsend, Newell, and Wiese 1992, Kliewer 1999). While the above-mentioned studies discuss different aspects of educational change, they converge on stressing the primacy of internal dynamics.
The Resource Dependence Perspective
Highly critical of the internalist view, this perspective stresses the role of external forces in shaping academia. Slaughter (1997) presents a perspective that draws heavily on social movement and power theories, utilizing, in particular post-modern conceptions of ideology. She notes that in the US, it was the Civil Rights Movement that led to the recognition of black heritage. Social movements were also behind the accommodation of Chicano and other minorities’ demands; they were also fostered the quest for a gendered analysis of society. Science itself, she asserts, entered university curriculum as a diffused social movement. Furthermore, Slaughter (2002) notes that the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement curricular changes was also a social movement. The resource dependence view highlights the effects of many external factors on curricula, including governmental funding agencies, foundations and corporations, the military, and journals and academic associations. Altbach (1993) argues that student interests and culture, when mobilized, significantly influence the academy, although he speaks of larger political and social changes and not merely curricular ones.
The resource dependence view does not conceive change in academia in terms of pure economic forces. Rather, it posits that the forces of change are intrinsic to academia but are stifled by the power structure of the society. Only when disfranchised groups are successfully mobilized that we see effective curricular change. Otherwise, the professoriate is conservative in nature (Altbach 1980). Constrained by managerial procedures and cognizant of the politics of research, professors’ aspirations for reform become tamed (Slaughter 1980).
Several other studies make the connection between higher education and the macro societal order. Larson (1977) asserts that the process of professionalization, which intersects with higher education, engages in the formation of new class relations. Similarly, Slaughter and Silva (1985) argue that the US higher education system is organically connected to the political economy of the country, at both the national and state levels. They note that research in prestigious institutions is highly integrated with state and regional economies, and that their ability to acquire resources secures their relative stability. On the other hand, non-elite universities continuously experience volatile conditions that are connected to governmental funding (pg. 302-310). Along the same line, Touraine (1997) argues that class reproduction is one essential feature of the US academic system: ‘It is impossible to say that this production is institutionalized and organized independently of class relationships and the political situation as it is to declare that it is only an ideological tool for the reproduction of class relationships’ (pg. 273). The seemingly benign interests and actions of faculty practically mirror the larger structures of power and opportunities, Slaughter (2002) argues. This perspective also acknowledges the link between higher education system and the market. Slaughter and Leslie (1997) note that faculty are increasingly seeking external funds to do ‘applied research’, which meets commercial, industrial, and governmental research agendas. Academic decisions then become driven by market prerogatives, and university employees function ‘as capitalists from within the public sector; they are state-subsidized entrepreneurs’ (pg. 9). Similarly, Dickson (1984) points that the industry and federal agencies largely influence research and development in science through availing financial resources, directing technology transfer, providing policy advice, and making budgetary decisions. In sum, the resource dependence perspective argues that curricular changes emanate, and are largely imposed, from without.
The Institutional Perspective
The institutional perspective on change in higher education draws on two branches of the institutional theory of organizations. The older version stresses that formal organizational structures, customarily considered the hallmark of organizations, never ‘succeed in conquering the nonrational dimensions of organizational behavior’ (Selznick 1984: 25). Similarly, Perrow (1986) advances a critique of the pure rationalistic understanding of organizations and calls for giving due attention to organizational ‘natural history’. On the other hand, the ‘new institutional’ theory of organizations, rooted in the work of Meyer and Rowan (1977), argues that organizations do not operate according to technical requirements of efficiency and rationality. Instead, organizations seek to satisfy social expectations, constructing around themselves myths of legitimacy. Conformity to institutionalized myths may undermine efficiency and can create conflict within organizations. Nevertheless, organizations usually sacrifice efficiency for the sake of societal approval. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) extend Meyer and Rowan’s argument and show that institutions in an organizational field operate under high levels of mimetic pressures. The explanatory power of the new institutional view in the realm of higher education, however, was challenged by Kraatz and Zajac (1991).
Brint and Karabel (1991) advance a hybrid institutional view that hinges on the old school and accommodate the insight of the new institutional school. They recognize the importance of the availability of positions in the labor-market for higher education graduates, but they point out that students act according to their ‘subjective perceptions’ toward labor-market opportunities (pg. 341). Second, the administrative bodies of educational institutions vary in their response to market forces and vary in their interpretation of its requirements. Third, organizational elites have interests of their own and have ‘mental sets’ tied to their organizations’ history, none of which is uniform across the organizational field. Fourth, centers of power exert influence, but it is seldom a direct one. Large corporations and governmental bodies enjoy “structural power” (pg, 371), which does not equate or translate to outright imposition. Fifth, competition within a field drives institutions to exploit the free space available in an environment. Lastly, institutions operate within a sphere of influence that is generated from within, which collectively could be called ‘organizational assets’ (Brint and Karabel 1991: 352). Thus, this institutional view acknowledges the centrality of the traditional concerns over the rationality of organizations, but does not loose sight of the organizational dynamics and priorities that emanate from within institutions.
Contrasting the Three Perspectives
The internalist perspective and the resource dependence perspectives stand at opposite poles. One sees the university mainly as an autonomous actor while the other sees it as a dependent actor. The former conceptualizes that the major forces in academia emit from its solid core, and then get refracted at an outer layer as they encounter the constraints of the larger environment. Compelling as it is, the internalist view reduces the scope of relevant factors to those only in the immediate proximity to academic institutions. On the other hand, the resource dependence view conceptualizes that major social forces impinge on academia and form it in its own image, emphasizing that political and economic factors are the major determinants of academia’s fate. The resource mobilization view highlights intriguing points, but may suffer from causal distance. That is, while it is hard to deny that external factors, such as the role of the state, are central, those same factors could be found operative in any social phenomenon. Consequently, the argument could turn into a kind of truism. Furthermore, the causality ascribed to some factors is doubtful—specifically, the impact of social movements. Social movements themselves are prompted, in part, by changes in the academy. Thus, while this perspective invokes social movements as a major factor in academic change, it undermines the role of ideological and symbolic dimensions in the rise of social movements, as emphasized by several studies (e.g., Melucci 1985, Swidler 1986, Snow and Benford 1988). Furthermore, using social movements as a major factor in academic change becomes more problematic when explaining changes in science. Slaughter considers public demand for science as a ‘broad social movement’ (1997: 9), equating social movements with cultural and social trends. Social movements usually adopt strategies geared toward specific outcomes and could conceivably be considered a direct factor in curriculum change. However, social trends indirectly affect all social institutions, which call for a broader cultural and historical analysis.
Conspicuously problematic in both the internalist and the resource dependence perspectives is the role of the market in affecting curricula: it is absent in the former and obscured in the later. Giving due attention to market forces does not have to take a ‘consumer choice’ view where academia just caters to tastes. Moreover, the market is not just an exogenous factor that affects academia; rather, it is intertwined with it. Such attention is specifically poised in the institutional perspective. It should be acknowledged, however, that the refined argument of Slaughter (2002) has somewhat broadened its critical view. Instead of concentrating on social movements, she also considered the interests of the professional class. Nevertheless, she was quickly to note that such interests were mainly the interests of conservative social movements, and that reformative progressivism saw in science as an empowerment to middle class professionals. Slaughter (2002) also calls for examining the organizational structures that support scholarship, but she does not seem to consider that market forces share in forming those structures.
In sum, the shortcomings of the internal perspective mainly lies in neglecting the independent effect of some external factors that operate in the environment of educational institutions. On the other hand, the resource dependence view falls short in two aspects. First, it tends not to clearly differentiate between proximate and direct influences; for example, the influence of faculty sympathetic to a certain curriculum change is qualitatively different from the influence of a governmental agency pressing for change. Second, it tends to identify singular influencing factors, and then treating the overall outcome as the crude sum of those factors. That is, if the state, funding agencies, and social movements all affect curriculum, how do these factors combine to produce a pointed pressure for change?
The advantage of the institutional perspective is that it sees that higher education institutions operate in an organizational field that has its own interests and priorities, both at the collective level and at the individual-institutional level. Power relations in the society do penetrate educational institutions, but they do not restructure them in their own image. Rather, educational institutions realign external power pressures according to internal power arrangements. Thus, the interests of educational institutions elites are recognized in this perspective, but as interests that are reconciled within organizations that have priorities of their own. Market forces are intertwined with educational institutions because (1) educational institutions compete with other institutions within their organizational fields, (2) knowledge structures are connected to professional structures with distinct power, status, and financial interests, and (3) labor-market opportunities of graduates are crucial for the survival of a field. To be sure, some of these dynamics are connected to external forces. Thus, the institutional perspective on higher education synthesizes some of the issues raised by the critical, resource mobilization perspective but after situating them in a different scheme. The internalist perspective sidesteps the question by focusing on the autonomous nature of the decisions made by faculty and departments in response to external influences.
Lastly, it should be noted, that both the internalist and the institutional perspectives share an important common ground in focusing on the special structural feature of higher education: the discipline-institution dual structure, which gives it a peculiar ability to filter-out highly unwanted external pressures and to maintain a relative high degree of autonomy. As Abbott (2000) notes, the structure of the US academia is peculiarly resilient in being ‘organized into departments that are both pieces of universities and pieces of disciplines. No single university can radically modify its departmental structure without undercutting the employability of its graduates. At the same time, no single discipline can be destroyed unless a large number of universities decide simultaneously to get rid of it’ (pg. 296). Below I present a theoretical framework that delineates the institutional dynamics in higher education in relations to curriculum change, specifically appropriate for understanding it at the undergraduate level in four-year colleges and universities.
An Integrated Model of Curricular Change
This paper conceives that curriculum change in higher education is at the center of three interacting sets of factors: two external and one, multilayered, internal factor, as represented in figure 1. Curriculum change here is concerned with major curricular shifts and the rise of new subfields, not with minor changes in which faculty are intimately engaged. The external factors are the market, including competition with other institutions, and the state. The internal factors are three types of organizational assets: status, organizational memory, and knowledge repertoire. These three sets of factors interact through the peculiar dual structure of the academic institution, a structure that modifies incoming and out-going demands and responses, as well as the expectations and actions of those who are involved in the process.
(See Figure 1)
Market
The higher education system and the market are heavily dependent on each other, although they operate in different organizational fields. On one hand, the market needs professional services that are furnished by the product of higher education—students equipped with desired knowledge and skills. On the other hand, higher education responds to market needs by insuring a measure of compatibility between what is taught in schools and the actual work in organizations. Higher education institutions cannot ignore the demands of the labor-market because their reputation is partially connected to the usefulness of its product (graduates) in such a market; failing to respond to the labor-market affects its very credibility. However, the response of educational institutions to environment’s needs come according to their own terms. The relationship between the market and higher education is not one to one relationship; rather, it is negotiated through thick organizational and social layers. Freidson (1999: 2) argues that although professions ultimately operate in markets, they bask in professional control that is ‘logically and empirically distinct from consumer control and managerial control’: professions are distinct from free markets that are focused on ‘organizing exchange’ between willing buyers and sellers; professions are also distinct from rational-legal administration that is focused on organizing ‘command, or dominance’. Thus, while markets are focused on facilitating societal exchanges and while bureaucracies are focused on coordinating human and other kinds of resources, professions are focused on the viability of their knowledge expertise.
This Freidson’s view of a loose relationship between higher education and the market is not shared by Larson (1977) who considers the process of professionalization as an integral part of the market economy. Larson argues that since professional work became full-time and the normal way of earning a living, capitalist competition started to define its character. The claim to exclusive professional knowledge was not achieved without first controlling the providers of the service ‘at the point of production’, which allowed for the standardization and commodification of their product (pg. 13-15). Thus, Larson implies that knowledge, in the last instance, is defenseless in the face of market forces. However, this conceptualization neglects the role of the accumulated knowledge in insulating professions and in demarcating a space free of direct state or market penetration. Such a space remains highly controlled by educational institutions in which the claim to scientific knowledge is ultimately constructed and defended. Moreover, the slow and gradual nature of knowledge construction and curriculum change obviates arbitrary market dictates. Furthermore, the nature of knowledge itself is a crucial factor in defining its resistance to external interventions, which is a topic discussed in more details when organizational assets are considered.
In sum, the market relishes in its capacity to hire the products of higher education, but the very perception of their needs is partially constructed in educational institutions. Therefore, the influence of large corporations, as big players in the labor-market, does not stem from their direct demands as much as from their power position (Brint and Karabel 1991) and in being job creators. It is exactly such kind of influence that should be recognized: an implied influence that does not have legal or procedural jurisdiction over higher education. While the market is the source that furnishes the haven to which graduates struggle to reach, graduates enter this haven with claimed expertise formulated in educational institutions. As Freidson (1999) reminds us, the influences of the market are largely refracted because, through occupational credentials, professions create ‘labor market shelter’ for themselves. No credible curriculum change can become popular if it conflicts with the very basis of the profession because it fundamentally threatens the symbolic as well as the material position of stakeholders in educational institutions.
The State
The influence of the state on higher education institutions comes in the form of funding, direct laws, and in structuring a field’s environment (Dickson 1984), all of which influence, at least indirectly, the direction of curricular change. State influence necessarily varies according to the circumstances that the society is experiencing. However, regardless of the historical context in which state influence was exerted, state intervention is dependent on the nature of the linkage between government and social institutions. Freidson (1999: 6-12) adopts Mirjan Damaska’s typology of state behavior that varies along two dimensions of structure (hierarchical versus coordinate) and of policy orientation (reactive versus activist). The United States government is largely a coordinate-reactive state, although at times of crises and national urgencies it may act as a coordinate-activist state. Therefore, the intervention of the state, in the US case, is mostly indirect and is centered on providing funds; rarely does it concern itself with micro-managing the process of production of its demands. That leaves higher educational institutions in the driving seat of curriculum change, even if it is constrained by the terrain through which it navigates.
Moreover, the state is dependent on academia in forming and executing its demands. The government’s initial move to regulate a profession could be triggered by coordination necessities, by public pressure, or by the state’s tendency to expand its control. Nevertheless, state intervention comes, to a certain degree, academically prescribed although it is legally formulated. This paper suggests that the more complex the issue that the government is trying to regulate the more it finds itself dependent on academic expertise. In such cases, the pressure of the state becomes transformed into a negotiation process between two camps of experts, a process which attends to the priorities of the educational system and to the interests of their elites and decision-making bodies. Furthermore, the interest of government in academia is sometimes pure instrumental and ceremonial (Veysey 1988: 24), leaving much space for academe to maneuver. It should be noted, lastly, that academic professions frequently approach state bureaucracies seeking legal recognition (Wilensky 1964), a process that has some influence on the field’s development. Nevertheless, such influence does not usually penetrate the core of curricula but merely adds procedural rules of promotion and recognition.
Organizational Assets
Higher education institutions bequest a special kind of assets constituted from their symbolic status as the carrier of beneficial knowledge and from their organizational memory of accumulated practices. These two types of assets parallel Bourdieu’s (1986) cultural and social capitals. Academic organizations also rest on a knowledge repertoire that is not reducible to the mechanisms of its production.
Status
The prestige of an educational field is generally based on three-element criteria: (1) the apparent unintelligibility of the knowledge it supplies; (2) the socially accepted claim over an area of expertise that is perceived critical to the society (Larson 1977, Freidson 1999); and (3) the work conditions and the expected future economic payoffs of professionals in the field. Educational institutions have to keep a precarious balance between guarding the aura of a field and asserting its market utility. Keeping this balance, however, is facilitated by the difference in the time needed for change in the prestige level of an educational institution and changes in the labor-market: the labor-market is contemporarily driven and experience short- and mid-term fluctuations; status is historically anchored, stable but not fixed, and experiences mid- to long-term changes. Thus, empowered by status, higher education can continue offering what apparently has no readily available applications until the market shows that its demands are not aberrations or passing fad, and thus giving educational institutions the necessary time to develop an academically adequate response.
Such an understanding departs from two views on professional status changes: the deprofessionalization view and the proletarianization view. The deprofessionalization thesis argues that the standardization of formal knowledge, the rising levels of education, and contest within the subspecialties of a profession have weakened the jurisdictional control over areas of knowledge. The proletarianization thesis argues that the status of professions has been downgraded as they came under the control of large and bureaucratic organizations (cf. Collins 1986). Both claims are refuted by Freidson (1984) who argues that the quantitative and qualitative expansion of professional expertise keeps it above the crude accessibility of the average person, and that there is no clear trend toward the contraction of jurisdictions. He further notes that employment status is not directly connected to economic autonomy, and that the determining factor for status is the position in the market not the type of employment. Brint (1994) agrees in that the legitimacy of expert knowledge has gone unchallenged in the US culture, and Haskell (1984) notes that the apparent disinterestedness of professionals, which bestows status, is maintained through the nature of the world in which they operate. It should be noted here that fields draw status from their own image and from the image of related fields and disciplines with which they are associated. In sum, curriculum change enjoys the luxury of a status canopy under which it adjusts to the environment in a measured way and at its own pace.
Organizational Memory
The second type of organizational assets is relational, which constitutes an embedded feature shaped by the trajectory of institutional development. Organizational strength, as well as chronic impediments, lies in such a history, which is preserved in institutional memory scripts and informal modes of operations (Stinchcombe 1965, Perrow 1986). That is especially true for non-profit organizations and educational institutions (cf. DiMaggio and Anheier 1990). Those formal and informal practices and organizational dispositions act as a market shelter, protecting academic knowledge from arbitrary demands.
The modes of operation of the established networks in a field represent its largest assets and most crucial engine. The organizational longevity of higher education provides a momentum that has a value of its own. Kogut (2000) argues that the structure of networks is knowledge: it is ‘an emergent outcome generated by rules that guide the cooperative decisions of firms in specific competitive markets’ (pg. 405). The generative rules of coordination are one kind of capability, Kogut asserts, which adds to the value of a firm. This argument becomes clearer if we remind ourselves that higher education institutions do not operate as individual actors. Instead, considerable background coordination takes place among universities. If such kind of coordination is not evident when looking at universities as administrative organizations, it is certainly evident when looking at them as knowledge organizations, including conferences, associations, and journals. Thus, curriculum change takes place in such multifaceted environment, which is at once resourceful and restraining.
Furthermore, the structure of higher education institutions and their mode of operation are rooted in social practices. Developing new conventions in steering institutions is considered ‘social technologies’ with which different societies are differently endowed, and which their very development is contingent on certain national epochs (Stinchcombe 1965). Thus, the ability of higher education institutions to negotiate external demands is not solely based on status, but also on the established ways of doing business. The processes of curriculum change exactly run through these channels.
Knowledge Repertoire
The paper has argued so far that although curricular changes are ultimately authored by faculty, the space on which changes are inscribed is sustained by status and by well-rooted organizational practices. Yet, a third element related to knowledge itself is essential and is often overlooked. The knowledge repertoire of academic institutions is not constituted solely from the arithmetic addition of bits of ‘useful’ skills, procedures, and the like. Rather, it is a potentiality of an internalized systematic ways of knowing. The boundaries of the repertoire do not stop at technical and informational aspects of knowledge, but also subsume ‘capability’, which points to ‘a strategic skill in the application and integration of competences’ (Boisot 1998: 5; emphasis added). Academicians are free agents who are imprisoned in what they produce, and the totality of their output is intimately connected to a core knowledge that has an inescapable paradigmatic history. Curricular change can wander off the main route, but it cannot cut a field from the larger academic heritage because it represents an indispensable resource.
There are significantly different perceptions regarding the importance of the content of knowledge. Most explicitly, Parsons and Platt (1973) theorize that ‘cognitive rationality’ is a core value in the university and that it has a linkage function between societal subsystems. They also note that higher education represents an ‘institutionalized concern with cognitive matters’ (pg. 33). The content of knowledge is privileged in Clark (1997) as he argues that the subject defines the world of academia. He specifically notes that academic subjects are divided along two continua, the ‘hard-soft’ continuum and the ‘pure-applied’ continuum, and that differences along these two continuums have been documented as affecting ‘work assignments, symbols of identity, modes of authority, career lines, and association linkages’ (pg. 24). Becher (1987) suggests a typology of discipline groupings based on the nature of their knowledge, which are matched by specific academic cultures. The institutional analysis of Freidson (1999) conceives that one of the four constitutive elements of professions is the substantive content of knowledge. Larson (1977: 38-48), stressing the connection between knowledge and capitalism, observes that the content of the subject, the elusive nature of service, and the scientific sounding of a field affect the authoritativeness of professional claims. Brint and Karabel (1991) talk about ‘mental sets’ that develop within an organizational history, which would be conditioned by the nature of the subject. They also note that administrative staff act according to certain interpretations of the environment (pg. 347), which are necessarily influenced by the theoretical premises of their own professional training. Brint (2001) deciphers Dewey’s description of advanced knowledge and concludes that three industry types are ‘knowledge-centered’ (pg. 116). Furthermore, Brint (1994) speaks of ‘professionalized work environments’ that transcend the organizational base of professions (pg. 25), and that higher education is typified by ‘intellectually demanding work’ (pg. 16). These varying theoretical undertakings share a minimum common denominator: professional action is not only constrained by structural positions, but is also conditioned by the cognitive nature of the subject.
Therefore, this paper argues that two aspects of the content of knowledge should be taken into consideration. First, the academic nature of the subject conditions the actions of its constituents and the behavior of institutions that house such body of knowledge. For example, lawyers would appeal to precedence, which is a legally inspired concept; physicists would stress the objective scientificity of their knowledge, while social scientists would stress social desirability or reflexivity—truth claims that are rooted in their respective traditions. Second, different academic fields have different potentials for internal differentiation. Moreover, as the cognitive base of a field defines an inescapable realm within which professional action materializes, it introduces a measure of permanence to such corpus of knowledge. It is neither advantageous for higher education to abandon this accumulated knowledge nor is it possible. That is because the prestige of a field is rooted in its symbolic heritage. The compromise over the value of knowledge is self-defeating. Furthermore, abandoning knowledge is not possible because the edifice of knowledge itself has been integrated within an elaborate structure that has its own market dynamics, and which calls for its own survival, as Abbott (2000) reminds us.
In sum, the organizational assets of institutions feed on their inherited status, on organizational memory of agreed-upon practices, and on the nature of knowledge itself. Academic institutions use their assets to advance and augment their position, and successful disciplines erect around themselves intellectual edifices that enable them to filter out unwanted demands. Ironically, the more symbolically expressed the more potent these edifices are (Meyer and Rowan 1977), and curriculum change, therefore, enjoy more autonomy. As figure 1. shows, these three elements of organizational assets represent the internal dynamics through which the wishes and needs of market and the state are appropriated. The external input of the state and market does not freely infiltrate higher education. Rather, the higher educational system selects and reformulates these inputs, producing an output that both satisfies at least a minimum of academic criteria, and at least perceptually satisfies state and market demands.
Conclusion
Before closing the argument, it is helpful to pay a special attention to the interaction between prestige and knowledge. In the early days of US higher education there used to be few prestigious colleges and universities that were looked upon as role models. Collins (1977, 1979) theorized the existence of a cultural market of educational status symbols. This market heightens the drive to seek educational degrees, deflating their relative value. However, the basis upon which status rests shifts with the evolution of society and culture. With the dismantling of aristocracy, the rise of participative democracy, and the transformation of the economy to an industrial one (Bell 1973), academic legitimacy shifted from the pure esoteric toward the practical (Lucas 1994). Those society-wide dynamics have conditioned the changes in knowledge status and allowed the ‘practical arts’ to gain a higher status position than before (Brint 2002). It should be noted here that ‘practical arts’ are not void of scientific basis; the mater rather is that of degree and emphasis.
However, the practical cannot maintain legitimacy solely on its utility. One reason for that is that traditionally prestigious institutions had achieved a high level of immanence, backed-up with huge endowments, that allows them to maintain their traditional basis of fame. The history of the academia is another reason. Academia has defined its character and built its legitimacy on the image of rendering knowledge that is beyond the average person. Moreover, knowledge entrepreneurs themselves, to varying degrees, value abstraction and acknowledge its relative importance. A third and more imperative reason is that practical knowledge poses problems that are theory impregnated. Ultimately, even applied fields are embedded in abstract paradigms, and they cannot escape the occasional engagement in theory, especially after an active period of differentiation (Kuhn 1970).
This paper suggests that the outcome of these forces does not produce crass utilitarian knowledge, but theoretical empiricism. Theoretical empiricism became the basis of academic prestige because it represented the optimum resolution of the advantages of abstraction and the advantages of the applied. Such new basis is consequential for academic institutions since it allows less than prestigious institutions to become visible. However, traditionally prestigious institutions can also adapt to the new realities and maintain their status at the same time. Morgan (1998) shows that today’s universities cluster around different kinds of offerings and program choices and suggests ‘that some schools are able to sell prestige while other sell specific job skills’ (pg. 53). As far as the subject of knowledge is concerned, Lucas (1994) suggests that in the US there was an inversion in field statuses where ‘hard-core’ sciences occupy the highest prestige, followed by social sciences and business-related subjects, leaving humanities at the bottom of the status hierarchy (pg. 313). This might be true specifically as market and as student popularity status, and may not reflect status within academic circles.
The internalist and the resource perspectives point to important dynamics that are observable in the US higher educational system. However, the former underrates powerful external pressure while the latter underestimates the ability of the multilayered higher educational system to absorb such pressure. This paper has suggested an institutional model conceives higher education as a special kind of organizations, as a site in which conflicting demands are resolved according to academic, evolving standards. The US higher education system is subject to influences from several sources, which are often contradictory. It negotiates state and market demands through its dual structure, cushioned by deference to its status, buffered by organizational memory, and engulfed in a complex knowledge repertoire. Ironically, academic production itself often acts as a stimulus to the rise of external pressures, giving hints of possible demands to state and market. Eventually educational institutions change through innovation and adaptation, maintaining their historical legitimacy and allowing them to produce knowledge worthy of respect.
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Figure 1 : The three sets of factors affecting curricular change
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