Conference Agenda

This paper develops a framework for the measurement of the market orientation (MO) of higher education institutions (HEIs) and implements said framework in measuring the nature of MO in HEIs.

Market orientation (MO), a foundational concept in the discipline of marketing, can be understood as the degree to which a firm undertakes behaviours in generating and responding to information about customers and competitors to create value (Bhattarai et al., 2019). Ample evidence supports the benefits of MO on customer, performance and employee-related outcomes (Modi and Sahi, 2018).

The link between a MO and HEI performance has also been empirically established (Abou-Warda 2014). For example, research on the relationship between MO and the performance of academic staff (Kűster and Avilés-Valenzuela, 2010), on student satisfaction (Tran et al., 2015) as well as on a range of subjective assessments of HEI performance (Hammond and Webster, 2014) appears quite strong. This MO HEI performance relationship has been confirmed across a range of European HE contexts, for example Assad et al. (2015) in the United Kingdom, Tanrikulu and Gelibolu (2015) in Turkey, Nagy and Beracs (2012) in Hungary and Flavian and Lozano (2007) in Spain.

However, the transposition of a MO into a HEI context, while argued as warranted, is far from straightforward (Llonch at al., 2016; Rivera-Camino and Molero Ayala 2010; Akonkwa, 2009). The context specific aspects of implementing a MO in a HEI context requiring consideration are significant, namely the treatment of students, types of stakeholders including academic staff, relationship to competitors and the measurement of HEI performance. That is the MO concept needs to be ‘context-specific’ to HEIs (Akonkwa, 2009, p. 312).

A review of literature across European and International contexts serves as a guide for conceptualising MO in a HEI context (Llonch J. et al., 2016; Rivera-Camino and Molero Ayala 2010; Pavicic et al., 2009; Voon, 2008). Thus in a HE context MO is a culture with resulting behaviours, across all departments of the institution, that seeks to understand and respond to; students, collaborating/partner institutions, competitors, parents, employees, employers, funders, other stakeholders as well as wider society and the environment in an innovative and sustainable way. A framework consistent with this conceptualisation is presented as a tool to examine the nature of MO in HEIs. This framework informs the subsequent aim of this research to measure the nature of MO in HEIs.

Different governments deal with restructuring their higher education systems in different ways, aiming for different outcomes. One of the growing tendencies in the national HE policy arena in different contexts has been an attempt to differentiate HE institutions into ‘teaching only’ and ‘research only’, as differentiating the academic system and drifting mission has been considered a primary factor in advancing research (van der Wende, 2014; Altbach, 2009). This paper explores recent reforms in HE system in Kazakhstan with regard to differentiating HEIs drawing upon perceptions of public universities and state-level policy document analysis through addresses the following questions:

• What is the rationale behind the government’s differentiation policies?
• How are the government’s differentiation policies perceived and responded to by HEIs?

This study was conducted as part of doctoral research at the University College London in 2016-2019.

During the early Independence period when the country’s efforts to transition from the dominant Soviet communist agenda of universities as teaching only with limited access to Western market-oriented ideology gave rise to private providers making HE more accessible and provoking massification. After the first decade of the 2000s, the government started seeking to optimise the number of HEIs by merging and/or closing some institutions that failed to meet state standards (OECD, 2017) and transform the system by creating research universities in order to encourage research and innovation development (parlam.kz, 2011). The government’s intention was to concentrate research capacity in selected research universities, giving them more budgetary funding for generating new technologies and innovation, while the rest of the HEIs were recommended to strategize their operations for advancing regional-level research (Canning, 2017). With diverse missions and differentiated by their scope for research and teaching, HEIs are stratified with research universities being at the top of the system and whose main focus is the generation and transfer of new knowledge through research and innovation.

As part of the broader differentiating policies with the focus on developing selected universities into research-intensive institutions, the government implemented a change in the organizational system of public HEIs from state enterprise to a non-commercial joint-stock company type with 100% state ownership, as well as introducing a board of trustees and various councils who will be engaged in governing the university collectively. This reform is carried out in order to provide legal opportunities for enlarging academic and governance autonomy of HEIs which is a completely new phenomenon for the HE system of Kazakhstan. However, what participants conveyed is that while there is an awareness of differentiation policies and drivers behind the emphasis towards developing research in HE, there is no particular effect is observed in relation to their work so far. This might be due to the state policies remaining at a documentary level with no further actions or processes of implementation being carried out or accentuated so far.

While differentiating HEIs might be considered as “tidying up the mess in the system” (policy-maker respondent), it inevitably creates vertical stratification between them. As such, in the case of Kazakhstan with large territories and the system is yet between Soviet legacy and the global hegemony of competition and global positioning (Deem, Mok and Lukas, 2008; Ishikawa, 2009), stratification caused by inequalities of resources in the condition of scarce funding, raises the question of excellence versus equity, and a danger of creating more marginalised institutions while the elites prosper (Halfmann and Leydesdorff, 2010). Such a scenario might be highly probable with institutions located regionally already suffer from insufficient financial and human resources while being pressurised by various state performance-based requirements.

Drawing on the ideas of consumer activism, this paper discusses the student as consumer complaints as an important but often overlooked mode of political agency in marketised universities. The paper starts with unpacking the notions of consumer choice as they relate to the process of boycotting and buycotting. I will then discuss how consumer rights and complaints intersect in marketised higher education (HE) and introduce a number of prominent student complaints from the UK context. The focus of this paper is centred around the question: To what extent can consumer rights provide students with political agency in marketised HE? While this paper is centred around the UK context, it argues that the rise of student complaints is also characteristic of many other European countries.

From a neoliberal perspective, consumers are seen empowered when they have enough choice to exercise their economic interest. Consumption from such perspective involves agency and can be viewed as ‘a free choice to be exercised by individual consumers who are at liberty to pursue their own private needs’ (Shaw et al., 2006, 1054). Many (e.g., McShane & Sabadoz, 2015; Shankar et al., 2006), however, argue that the idea of empowerment through mere consumer choice is misleading. It raises questions about who is engineering the choice, or what privileges are needed to have any actual choice in an economic market.

I argue that to view consumption as a political act, it demands that consumers recognise existing market structures that privilege the corporate profit-seeking and make critical links between their own consumption patterns and broader social issues. When consumers act as citizens, the process of consumption gets intersected with moral and political elements of production and distribution.

It is interesting to consider the extent to which students engage in consumer activism. It is likely that they do so as regards their consumption practices on campuses and beyond as existing research on students’ food preferences has highlighted. The difficulty, however, emerges when we try to consider how students practise boycotting and buycotting in relation to their university choices. Some may use the word of mouth to favour certain universities over others, depending on their political or ethical practices. Or it could be that some actively opt out from studying in Oxbridge or Ivy league due to their exclusionary practices or colonial history. Such choices related to rejecting certain universities should be seen as political acts. These acts, however, are not available to all, and for most students studying in the highest tariff universities is not an option they could consider at all.

Arbel and Shapira (2020a, 2020b) introduce a concept of ‘nudnik’ to capture consumers who are complaints focused and whose actions lead to various legal and reputational sanctions for businesses and corporations. Unlike the usual consumer activists who place their energy on pre-consumption choice making, a nudnik’s agency reflects in demanding that their expectations are met after consumption has taken place (Arbel & Shapira, 2020a). Furthermore, nudniks pursue action even in cases where most consumers remain passive; for them, to complain is a right thing to do even if it relates to something rather minor or does not result in direct individual benefit (Arbel & Shapira, 2020a, 2020b; Furth-Matzkin, 2021).

The idea of consumer as nudnik is an important avenue for exploring consumer agency in HE. It enables us to consider how the student as consumer position can become empowering after the student has entered or exited HE. This is particularly important in marketised universities where students are increasingly positioned as self-interested, focused on value for money and demanding of individual employment outcomes.