Conference Agenda

Cooperation in higher education is increasingly emphasized in policy discourse and practice as a means to enhance effectiveness and quality. The competitive environment pressures higher education institutions to operate more efficiently across multiple dimensions, from financial and human resources to the quality of studies and research. Consequently, partnerships and collaborations between institutions are among the most common ways to address these pressures. The teaching profession, in particular, is deeply rooted in national education systems, influenced by historically established forms of state regulation, professional expectations, and locally defined educational goals. Although cooperation in teacher education draws on familiar ways, as in other areas of higher education, it is often reconfigured to address unique field-specific constraints and tensions. This leads to more inconsistent and contingent inter-institutional cooperation in teacher education, influenced by legitimacy concerns that differ from broader higher education discussions. Given this context, there is a need for empirically grounded analyses to understand how these forms of cooperation are perceived and enacted in teacher education across various settings, including those that are often overlooked.

This paper is based on an ongoing qualitative study within a larger research project focused on national and international cooperation in teacher education in Lithuania and Finland. It explores the rationales for inter-institutional cooperation at the policy, organizational, and professional levels, as well as the practices that have emerged from this cooperation. Key areas of focus include legitimacy framing, organizational translation, and the mediation of cooperation through competing organizational logics, along with the tensions and dilemmas that arise across institutional and national contexts.

Analytically, the study employs a neo-institutional theoretical framework that emphasizes legitimacy and institutional logics — concepts commonly used in higher education research. This framework provides valuable insights into the motivations behind cooperation and how competing rationalities influence its organization and practice in teacher education. By utilizing this perspective, we can better understand the dynamics at play in these collaborative efforts.

The study is based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in teacher education policymaking, coordination, and implementation in Lithuania and Finland. The document analysis focuses on the national level, collecting all relevant policy and strategic documents related to teacher training and higher education, specifically examining institutional cooperation policies and regulations. This dataset will be enriched by semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in both countries, including individuals involved in teacher education who are responsible for decision-making, coordination, and implementation. Participants will be selected through purposive sampling, with snowball sampling used as necessary. Data collection will be conducted in both countries to facilitate cross-national comparisons across diverse institutional and policy contexts.

To understand inter-institutional cooperation, a qualitative content analysis will be performed, emphasizing discursive features that help interpret the data within a broader context. All data will be analysed using a neo-institutional theoretical framework, focusing on organizational legitimacy and institutional logics. This research examines how inter-institutional cooperation is conceptualized, legitimized, and translated from policy expectations into organizational practices.

The data analysis will employ a theory-informed qualitative approach with a discursive focus, identifying dominant legitimacy narratives, competing institutional logics, and areas of tension or alignment between policy expectations and organizational practices. Cross-national comparisons will highlight similarities and differences across national contexts. Data collection and analysis are ongoing, and the findings will be presented in an EAIR paper upon completion of the analysis.

Introduction

As higher education institutions face pressures to adress complex societal challenges, interdisciplinarity is increasingly demanded and encouraged by policy-makers, funding agencies, and university leaders world-wide (Cummings & Kiesler, 2005; Henkel, 2007). Nevertheless, the power and institutional reach of disciplines remains strong (Weingart, 2014) and interdisciplinary initiatves at universities are often episodic (Rhoten, 2004; Sá, 2008) or are located in informal spaces or at the margins of organisational charts (Klein, 2000).

There is a substantial body of scientic literature spread out across STS, organisation studies, and innovation policies, which adresses the agency of academics (e.g. brokerage, boundary work; Klein, 2021) in practicing interdisciplinarity. Yet, evidence regarding linkages between structure and agency remains thin. Descriptions of actors’ engagement, as well as studies of interdisciplinary structures (in particular centres, graduate schools – often approached from a top-down perspective) exist, but little is known how specific motivational configurations and types of engagement of actors result in the emergence of interdisciplinary structures.

Drawing on a larger project on the emergence of interdisciplinary structures in academic project settings, this submission therefore adresses the following research question:

Which actors engage in and contribute to the emergence of interdisciplinary structures and what motivates them to do so?

Study approach

Drawing on theories that bridge discourses on structure and agency in organisations – Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory and Hallett and Ventresca’s (2006) inhabited institutionalism – as sensitising concepts, a longitudinal, ethnographic, revelatory single-case study of a large (> 60 participants over two project phases), cross-faculty academic project at a German university was conducted. The research question was addressed by employing various methods of data collection and analysis, including participatory observation, two focus group discussions, 24 problem-centred interviews (Witzel, 2000), and the collection of documents and website information. Analysis was guided by principles of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006).

Findings

Analysis has revealed six major sources of motivation, including access to resources, legitimisation, scientific quality, responding to students’ needs, advocating for the case-study projects’ overaching goal (inclusion-oriented teacher training), and intrinsic motivation. Whereas access to resources was identified as an important starting point in facilitating participation in the multidisciplinary case-study project higher degrees of disciplinary integration – in particular inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations – required intrinsic motivation.

Analysis has resulted in the proposition of a novel typology of interdisciplinary actors. This typology distinguishes non-involved actors, routine actors (participating in and shaping interdisciplinary structures based on previous interests and collaborations), discipline-based actors (participation on interdisciplinary structures for specific purposes with reinforcement of disciplinary scripts), sense-making actors (contributing to the development of interdisciplinary structures through search for disciplinary synergies and common definitions) and two types of strategic actors. Based on their primary source of motivation, strategic actors are divided into pure interdisciplinarians and pragmatic interdisciplinarians – both contributing to the emergence and further development of interdisciplinary structures based on high degrees of intrinsic motivation, the first being motivated by a general predisposition towards interdisciplinarity, while the latter regards interdisciplinarity as a necessary tool to reach specific aims.

Discussion and conclusion

This study underlines that the emergence of interdisciplinary structures in academic project settings constitutes a dynamic social process shaped by both structural conditions and (collective) agency. In the context of the latter, configurations of engagment and motivation of actors – resulting in the typology of interdisciplinary actors presented above – play a crucial role.

Strategic actors and, to some degree, routine actors contributed to the emergence of interdisciplinary structures within the case study project in the sense of what Kroll and Schubert (2023, p. 358) refer to as “interdisciplinary self-organisation”. The remaining types of actors – with the exception of non-participants – contributed to the further development of interdisciplinary structures, although less intentionally and mainly by filling the organisational shell with life.

The distinction between pure and pragmatic interdiciplinarians reflects Darbellay’s (2015) argument that there are two core discourses on interdisciplinarity: one based on an epistemological orientation transcending disciplinary boundaries and one based on a pragmatic orientation foused on problem solving. The pure interdisciplinary academic embodies the former, defined by a commitment to crossing and reflecting on disciplinary divides—what Klein (2021, p. 40) describes as the “synoptic thinker.” By contrast, the pragmatic interdisciplinarian adopts a problem-driven, practice-oriented approach to interdisciplinarity.

This presentation reports the results of studies on the community engagement of universities of applied sciences in Poland. The idea of community engagement has recently become critical for higher education institutions with a growing emphasis of their public accountability and responsibilities toward society (Pinhiero et al. 2022; Benneworth 2018). It refers to partnerships with community actors aimed at addressing social, economic, and cultural challenges through co-created knowledge, engaged teaching, and collaborative research (Boyer, 1996). Despite growing interest in community engagement, it is often politically discussed within a of broader conceptual frame, “third mission” that links universities to regional development, social innovation, and democratic participation (Kohtamäki 2015; OECD, 2007; Benneworth, 2013).

The aim of the study is to explore the concept of community engagement by examining how universities of applied sciences develop networks of partners with the surrounding local and regional community. More specifically, the study aims to examine the role of rectors and their social networks in establishing and developing the community engagement of the university of applied sciences in Poland. By doing so, we use the concept of social capital (Putman 1993, 2000) as an intellectual device to better understand how and why individual relations and personal trust matter in community engagements at UAS.

This is an empirically informed conceptual study that draws from two major sources (a) Individual In-Depth Interviews (IDI) with 20 rectors of Polish UASs and (b) 5 IDIs with representatives of external stakeholders. Some of those IDI were held in person during study visits to regions with UASs. The data was collected over two years (2024-2025) as part of a big research project on universities of applied sciences in Poland (see also: Antonowicz et al 2025; Wasielewski 2025). The selection of UAS was purposive because as regional institutions, they were designed to operate in partnership with local communities and develop strong ties with external actors.

The results of the study demonstrate the critical role of individual-level inter-personal trust (social capital) for institutional community engagement of UASs. They suggest that these relationships are not only initiated on personal level but maintained largely through individual interactions of institutional leaders. However, our findings shed also light on potential risks that comes with the overreliance of institutional relationships that remain under individual ownership. Not only does it make the institutional relationships fragile and prone to various personal disturbances but it also exposes UAS to the attempts of interference into autonomous selection of rectors.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a good account of the role of rectors’ social capital in building the community engagement of UASs. However, it also aims to inform leaders and administrators of locally oriented higher education institutions, such as UASs, when it comes to building an impactful and sustainable community engagement. The study is meant to provide insights for decision-makers by showcasing the prevalent practices in rector’s relationship-building while highlighting potential risks to continuous community engagement associated with these types of activities.