The last decade has seen cross-national collaborative developments in research and teaching, such as research networks, institutional consortia, but also initiation of dual diplomas, joint degrees and study plans gaining momentum. These types of collaborations across national boundaries are increasingly developing, fuelled by various motives such as policy exhortations and incentives, higher education institutions’ quest for strategic transnational partnerships, and last but not least, academics’ traditional and renewed interest for international linkages.

While it is been argued that, increasingly, collaborative premises in higher education stem from a range of external incentives and expectations, it is worth noting that collaborative working in research has traditionally been driven by the ‘heartland’ of academia. Hence, collaboration involves a number of factors with strategic, ideological, professional and epistemic (i.e. knowledge-related) aspects. Briefly put, structural considerations, such as external impetus, policies and funding, apposite regulations, adequate infrastructures and so on, are interacting with more agentic aspects such as professional trajectories, capital and allegiances, knowledge quests and interpersonal network dynamics.

Given this complexity, we will be asking the following questions: Is collaboration in agreement or in tension with the value systems that governs academia? What does the study of collaborative settings reveal about the epistemic and social organisation of academia? To what extent promotion of collaboration creates a normative framework that interacts with academic commitments, identities and values? The aim of this presentation is to unpack motives for collaboration in academia using social theory. We will examine the collaborative phenomenon from a range of perspectives which will enable us to consider continuities, but also changes, in the debate and the normative systems that underlie advocacy or opposition of collaboration.

In conceptualising collaboration, we propose an approach that builds on two broad theoretical strands and reflects wider conceptions of higher education. The first pertains to an ‘internalist’ conception of HE that espouses ideas of distinctiveness of academia, based on academic professionalism, normativity of scientific communities and views of knowledge (Henkel, 2000; Becher, 1989; Knorr-Cetina, 1999). It prioritises norms bounding the profession and the pursuit of internally valued goals such as knowledge generation or recognition by peers (Merton, 1942). The second strand is viewed as ‘externalist’ and considers higher education, just as other organisations, an adaptive enterprise whose sustainability depends on its capacity to respond to changing exogenous conditions in their attempt to capture resources (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). From the point of view of its relationship with society, Nowotny and colleagues (2001) claim that discrete categorisations of modernity (e.g. state, society, market, culture and science) are dissolving and institutional boundaries are getting increasingly porous. Knowledge should be integrated in the ‘new public space’ - the so-called agora where science and society, the market and politics co-mingle (p. 203) and socially distributed expertise emerges. This conceptual framework becomes a heuristic in understanding what drives collaboration and contemporary developments in higher education settings and provides us with a double lens apt to capture both, degrees of change but also (resilience) endurance of tradition. 

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