Imagining the World: Conceptions and Determinants of Internationalization in Higher Education Curricula Worldwide

Abstract

Cross-national analyses of university curricula are rare, particularly with a focus on internationalization, commonly studied as impacting higher education through the mobility of people, programs, and campuses. By contrast, we argue that university knowledge shapes globalization by producing various sociopolitical conceptions beyond the nation-state. We examine variants of such a globalized society in 442,283 study programs from 17,129 universities in 183 countries. Three variants stand out, which vary across disciplines: an interstate model (prevalent in business and political science), a regional model (in political science and law), and a global model (in development studies and natural sciences). Regression models carried out on a subset of these data indicate that internationalized curricula are more likely in business schools, in universities with international offices, in those with a large number of social science offerings, and in those with membership in international university associations. We discuss these findings and their links to changes in universities’ environment, stressing the recursive relationship between globalization and higher education.

Legitimacy, stratification, and internationalization in global higher education: the case of the International Association of Universities

“…In this perspective, universities reflect the dominant logic that prevails during their formative phase. In the case of universities, internationalization can certainly be considered a powerful narrative that steadily increased its relevance in the last decades (Buckner and Zapp 2020;Zapp and Lerch 2020;Buckner 2017Buckner , 2020. We extend the research on the environmental penetration of universities that has so far shown effects on universities' diversity strategies as well as study programs and structure (Oertel 2018; Buckner and Zapp 2020; Zapp and Lerch 2020) by directing attention to universities' internationalization decisions that can partly be explained by contemporary expectations of what constitutes a 'proper' university.…”

“…The additional finding that IAU membership is associated with international offices and curricula as well as regional memberships indicates an emerging 'internationalist' type of university. While the literature highlights that internationalization has multiple meanings for different universities and is articulated in different ways (Buckner and Zapp 2020;Zapp and Lerch 2020;Ramirez 2006;Buckner 2020;Seeber et al 2016;Stensaker et al 2019), the correlation between these variables indicates that there is a cluster of institutions that increasingly embrace the aim to connect across boundaries.…”

“…For example, analyzing corporate social responsibility activities in a large sample of Chinese companies, Raynard et al (2013) find that cognitive frames reflect a state logic that was more dominant in an earlier era, and argue that the earlier frame, once imprinted, remained salient. Similarly, the time of university creation has an influence on the way it adapts to an existing environment and signals its status and belonging (Zapp and Lerch 2020;Oertel 2018;Oertel and Söll 2017). In this sense, younger universities are more likely to look to international organizations such as the IAU to seek legitimacy and use the IAU's prominent and unique status in global higher education governance and its link to UNESCO to augment their standing and underline their participation in the global organizational field of higher education.…”

El impacto de los cursos de negocios a través de colaboración en línea para la internacionalización del Currículo.

“…When talking about curricula internationalization, it is important to define what exactly drives curricula internationalization. Zapp and Lerch (2020) state in their recent research the factors that effectively drive a curriculum to be internationalized, and also identify the factors that do not have any direct impact on the international level of a curricula. They identify that functioning in a globalized economy, working with international nongovernmental organizations, and having an internationalized student body do not increase the odds for an internationalized curriculum.…”

International Organisations and the Proliferation of Scientised Global Reporting, 1947–2019

“…Since the mid-2000s, a new class of populist leaders has entered the political arena around the world promoting an essentialist, often mystified, will of the people, an exclusionary stance toward elites, outsiders and minorities and a good deal of scepticism, if not, aversion, toward scientific knowledge (Mede and Schäfer 2020;Laclau 2005;Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook, 2017;Norris and Inglehart, 2019). These agendas clash with the method and language of science where sober analysis are central and international collaboration and mobility have turned science into a global and, indeed, globalising force (Zapp and Lerch 2020).…”