HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

Multiple Field Perspectives

W. Richard Scott

Many informed observers believe that the field of higher education is on the cusp of a major change if not a full-fledged revolution. The increased costs of attending college combined with steady reductions in public support have helped undermine confidence in and support for the status quo. Concerns for low completion rates and limited learning have grown (see Chapter 7). These developments have been accompanied by the rapid onset of the digital revolution, which commenced in scattered ways among peripheral players in the 1970s but has now invaded the major colleges and universities and spawned entirely new types of organizational providers (see Chapter 2). I attempt to place these developments in context—historical, structural, and cultural—by employing the concept of organization field. The field approach reminds us to take account of the full range of educational organizations, to realize the extent to which these organizations are supported and constrained by other types of actors, and to attend to sources of change, reactive mobilization by incumbents, and unanticipated effects following from these contending forces.

More importantly, viewing higher education as an organization field allows (forces?) us to recognize the extent to which existing structures and beliefs shape present and future developments. While we describe new initiatives intended to disrupt and renew, we also consider the inertial properties and interests vested in the current systems, emphasizing both their resilience and their capacity to resist and co-opt challenging groups. As DiMaggio (1991) reminds us, examining the origins of fields as well as periods of contestationand struggle reveal much about the underlying and often concealed power processes embedded within every field.

The field concept can be fruitfully employed at the local, regional, national, and even international level. This chapter concentrates on the national level, specifically, the case of the United States. During the forty or so years since the concept first emerged in organization studies, it has been elaborated and challenged by alternative formulations, each of which offers important, and different, insights. I organize this chapter around three competing field models: (1) higher education as an institutional field, (2) higher education as an arena of strategic action, and (3) higher education as a demand-generated outcome. I devote more attention to describing the first, foundational model because it is more fully developed and more widely employed as a guide to understanding our current system. However, the two later-developing models may provide more purchase in understanding recent developments and have more to teach us about the future of higher education.

Higher Education as an Institutional Field

This conception of the field of higher education seeks to explain why there exists a limited number of types of colleges, depict their origin and salient characteristics, and describe the diverse, complex collection of other types or organizations that has arisen to control and support them.

In their foundational formulation, DiMaggio and Powell define an organizational field as consisting of

those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products. (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148)

Like the concept of "industry," an organization field is constructed around a focal population of similar organizations—in our case, colleges and universities—but expanded to include other types of organizations that interact with this population, including exchange partners, clients, funding, and regulatory organizations. Fields incorporate both relational systems, as organizations and their participants create networks to exchange information and resources and enter into status and power relations, and symbolic systems, as these relations are grounded in and infused with shared cultural-cognitive and normative frameworks. In this view, organizations within a field "share a common meaning system and interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside of the field" (Scott, 1994, p. 208). Because these fields are defined by a set of commonly shared institutions, they are here termed institutional fields. Such "local social orders" are the building blocks around which modern societal systems are constructed (Fligstein, 2001, p. 107).

Diverse Providers

According to current accounts, higher education is among the most successful "industries" in the United States. A recent survey of the top universities in the world by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University reported that the top one hundred universities included fifty-three U.S. universities, while the top twenty included seventeen U.S. universities (Institute of Higher Education, 2011). While this view is heartening (if you are an American), it is fundamentally misleading. The top-tier universities are hardly representative of the thousands of colleges and universities in America—some forty-two hundred—that have emerged during the past half century and now account for most of the providers and enrollments in higher education. The elite schools and universities serve less than 15 percent of college students. A field perspective urges attention to the full range of organizational forms—including those programs educating the vast...