Unpacking institutional competition in Higher Education: The case of the Nordic business school field

In unpacking competition among universities, academic institutions have become embedded in multiple types of nested and interdependent competitions (Marginson, 2006; Krücken, 2019). Despite these findings, there is a lack of knowledge on the initial mechanisms that enable the formation of (emergence) and give momentum to (diffusion and institutionalization) university competition as a phenomenon that has spread across fields, institutions, and basic academic units. In contrast, competition is often taken for granted or simply assumed to emerge. A few studies have discussed the initial processes and early institutionalization of competition within HE (Werron, 2015; Arora-Jonsson et. al., 2020), but even these studies have disregarded questions such as when (under what conditions) and why (drivers and rationales) academic institutions started to compete and how does competition become a part of the technical and institutional environments (forces of institutionalization) in which contemporary universities operate? To bridge this knowledge gap, we ask the following question: Why does competition among academic institutions emerge and how does it become an integrated part of an academic field? We take strategic management literature as our starting point, and pay close attention to actors, their relationships, and agency. Instead of directly explaining competition at the HE field level, we focus on university organizations and explore the preconditions and processes that motivate these actors to compete, and hence, to collectively produce the previously described competitive transformation in the HE field. On combining key contributions emanating from economics, business studies and HE research, we develop a set of generic propositions. Thus, the study seeks to unpack the taken-for-granted competitive discourse in the field of HE. Its main contribution is a novel explanation of why competition emerges among different HE actors and how it becomes the dominant lens through which individual HE institutions (HEIs) explore their identities, belongings, and relationships to other actors within the field. 2 To focus on the origins and to illustrate the emergence of competition, we develop two case vignettes within specific university subfields in the selected empirical context, namely, business schools in Norway and Finland. We provide two brief, but easily relatable, narratives of the birth and early institutionalization of competition as experienced by the actors involved. After the case examples, one historical (Norway) and one contemporary (Finland), we provide theoretical explanations and draw from the extant literature to identify how various actors and their strategic agency and intentions, first, initiate, and second, aid in institutionalizing university competition across the board.