Abstract:
How are Pakistani universities attempting to improve their institutional performance and making reforms? From where do they draw their ideas about the policy and governance practices required for quality improvement? This paper reports on findings from a study of three universities – an old university, a young university and a recently established one. Taking a neo-institutional approach and understanding ‘university governance’ as distributed across three levels –the federal government, the provincial government, and the university itself, a diverse group of respondents representing different levels, i.e., academics, university administrators, political actors, policy actors, and bureaucrats, were interviewed. A particular focus was on whether and how isomorphism plays a role in shaping university governance practices and improving the quality of education in Pakistan. I found a complex interplay between local diffusions, flavoured with the colonial legacy in the form of regulation of old universities, on the one hand, and a pattern of global isomorphism, on the other. Universities are predominantly mimicking each other’s governance practices. First, emulation trends are from old universities towards younger ones in the form of copying regulations and university Acts. Second, the intra-national and inter-institutional isomorphism travels with professional mobility, particularly when university leaderships (e.g. vice-chancellors), mostly from old established universities, adopt and adapt the governance practices of their former institutions in new contexts. Third, at the national and provincial level, policies and practices are dependent on who is in the position of chief executive, minister of education and head of key regulatory bodies. But these trends are also impacted by global isomorphic pressure exerted by funding agencies like the World Bank, the IMF, and ranking agencies. However, these global isomorphic pressures are not wholly accepted but hybridised, filtered, and modified at the discretion of national and local actors. The agency of these actors plays a crucial role in defining new institutional logics which are shaping isomorphism in new ways. I conclude that isomorphism does not manifest identically across various geographies; rather, local practices shaped by individual agency have greater influence in making new institutional logics and new forms of isomorphism. Policymakers attempting to improve the quality of education, governance practices, and performance of universities can benefit from these insights to craft a policy that may take into account these new institutional logics to make their policies contextually appropriate.