Theorizing the Governance of Higher Education: Beyond the ‘Republic of Scholars’ Ontology

Scholarship on higher education has long been dominated by organisational and functionalist literatures, leading to what we argue has been a ‘republic of scholars’ ontology which has denuded the prospects for theory development or explanatory models able to account for the configuration and changing patterns of higher education governance. To address this problem, this chapter proposes three correctives to traditional analogical frameworks. First, abandoning standpoint-guildism perspectives and adopting political economy and market segmentation lenses of inquiry. Second, abandoning methods of inquiry that situate the locus of change in higher education governance predominantly in mechanistic institutional-group processes and adopting instead frameworks that focus on the sociology of goods, their classification and value construction (esteem, reputation) as central drivers in market stratification and coextensive processes of divergence and convergence. And third, adopting more analytically rigorous conceptions of convergence and governance as a means of overcoming what we term has been a false empiricism; i.e., the tendency to conflate policy labels and political rhetoric with policy instruments and governance tools to produce overly inflated images of convergent higher education governance trajectories.