On stratification in changing higher education: the “analysis of status” revisited

Institutional perspectives in transition: research groups’ profiles and embeddedness in organisational and national context

“…Thus, despite potential convergence of institutional logics in the neoliberal context (Degn et al 2017;Ocasio and Radoynovska 2016;Paradeise and Thoenig 2013) and the simultaneous existence of multiple optional logics (Kraatz and Block 2008), the operational context and the institutional logics of research groups in universities would be qualitatively different from those groups operating in government research institutes (Potì and Reale 2000), and still different from those in companies or other business entities (Ocasio and Radoynovska 2016). Due to the convergence of national higher education policies in Europe (Bloch and Mitterle 2017;Clark 1983;Kauko 2013;Pinheiro et al 2016;Reale and Seeber 2013), we assume that more similarities exist between universities in different countries (Diogo 2016) than between university and a business entity in a single country (Musselin 2000). However, the contexts in which knowledge-producing organisations are embedded are much more complex than those determined by the organisational type.…”

Privileging the Privileged: The Effects of International University Rankings on a Chilean Fellowship Program for Graduate Studies Abroad

“…Accordingly, we assume that the expansion of educational opportunities provided by an increasing number of fellowships available acts as a destabilizing mechanism that defies the existing social order, as they potentially allow new social groups to access resources and educational opportunities that were previously reserved for an exclusive elite group of students. To counteract this trend, by making the relative position of the university to which applicants gained admissions a condition to award the fellowship, rankings serve as a socio-technical device that stabilizes the system back to the prior state of social equilibrium (Bloch and Mitterle 2017;Lipset 1975).…”

“…Many studies have documented the effects of rankings on the stratification among institutions in the global scheme (e.g., Bloch and Mitterle 2017;Vaira 2009), but little is known about the potential social stratification impact of rankings within emerging nations, which typically display relatively higher degrees of social and income inequality, echoed by highly-stratified education systems (Andere 2004). A few studies that have examined the allocation of fellowships among different socioeconomic groups (Andere 2004;Mathews 2007;Perna et al 2015) found that these are disproportionately awarded to individuals of high socioeconomic status.…”

The Perceived Impact of Eight Systemic Factors on Scientific Capital Accumulation

“…Both political economy and sociology are interested in the processes of stratification and differentiation (Bourdieu 1988;Esping-Andersen 1999). The social construction of excellence functions by reducing the complexity of regulations, programs and research expertise into a set of abilities that define actors and stabilize the image of the field (Bloch and Mitterle 2017;Münch 2014). In the social-democratic regimes, the complexity reducing effect would haven taken the form of a horizontal departementalization rather than a vertical hierarchy between institutions (Maese 2017), according to which, within the university sector, all the units would be both "research universities" and "national teaching institutions" (Aarrevaara & Pekkola 2010), offering PhD programs albeit mostly in their specific field of expertise (Benner 2011).…”