Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemConvergence and diversification in the domain of institutional policy: The aftermath of Dawkins' reforms( 2022)This study is contextualised by higher education policy reforms initiated three decades ago by the Hawke-Keating Labor Government under the leadership of John Dawkins, then Minister for Employment, Education and Training. The profound changes that these policy choices signalled have since become known as the Dawkins reforms. In a fiscally constrained environment, the Dawkins reforms aimed to improve the higher education system’s capacity to respond efficiently and effectively to Australia’s changing economic, social, and cultural conditions, as part of a broader economic reform agenda. Dawkins prescribed recasting the role of central and state governments, modernising the system structure, changing financial policies, expanding the student population, refocusing programs, and extending research capacity. At the institutional level, reforms foreshadowed included establishing more robust governance, management, and accountability practices. One of the fundamental objectives of the Dawkins reforms was a desire to drive the system towards greater diversity, with universities encouraged to forge their own teaching offerings and research specialisations. However, in recent years it has become clear that progress towards this goal has been at best limited. Indeed, universities appear to have converged their structures and disciplinary profiles, and key institutional practices. This has led policy researchers to suggest there has been a trend across the Australian higher education system towards isomorphism. How might we understand and explain the extent and nature of this isomorphism? In the aftermath of Dawkins’ radical prescriptions for reform, extensive attention has focused on Australia’s shifting higher education policy settings and universities, including studies applying insights from new institutionalism. However, there have been only limited attempts to analyse institutional policymaking in Australian universities, despite extensive public policymaking research, as well as normative and ideology-focused studies analysing discrete academic and administrative institutional policies. There has also been only limited research analysing the mechanisms and processes instituted to govern, manage, develop, and review institutional policy, and the ways, if any, Australian university policy processes mimic particular public policy models, heuristics or theories. Furthermore, studies have yet to analyse the extent to which Dawkins’ promise of diversity has been realised within the domain of institutional policy, and whether institutional policy developments might potentially be a source of isomorphism. To address these gaps in knowledge, I adopted an overall research design involving empirical mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative data collection (i.e., interviews, documents, and a survey), and thematic analysis. This study finds that despite Dawkins central promise of diversity, Australian universities show remarkable homogeneity in policy governance, policymaking processes reflecting the policy cycle heuristic, and key policy suite inclusions. Notwithstanding differences between universities with respect to the form and substance of individual policies, policy management models and technologies, this study finds that isomorphism is expressed in university policy governance and policymaking due to coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures exerted by government, system regulators and the policy practitioner professional network. Updated Threshold Standards and COVID-19 disruptions suggest imperatives for Australian universities to accommodate rapid policymaking and policy implementation evaluation to ensure robust policy governance and legitimacy.