Towards Unified and Stratified Systems of Higher Education? Systems Convergence and Organizational Stratified Differentiation in Europe

The aim of the essay is to provide a descriptive and analytical account of the process of structural change in European higher education systems and institutions which characterizes the last decade. The Bologna Process creates a new institutional environment and new organizational requirements for higher education systems and institutions leading to a blurring between university and non-university institutions. The emerging of international system of rankings is contributing to the tendency to overtake the previously diversified systems structure and institutions towards unified and stratified systems. In this landscape the alternative convergence or diversification seems not to be appropriate to account the ongoing changing process. It is argued that a different dynamic is taking place, more related to structural convergence, organizational differentiation and stratification of institutions. The essay is organized in three main parts. After a brief section dedicated to the definition of some analytical concepts used (diversity/diversification, differentiation, organizational field, institutional processes and pressures, isomorphism.), the following two sections are dedicated to answer as many issues: The first is addressed to the reconstruction of dynamics and factors which are deemed to be at the base of this process; the second, deriving from the previous one, will consider how the process under discussion occurs, answering questions regarding its development dynamics and proposing analytical interpretations of the processes. The theoretical framework used combines new institutionalism and organizational population ecology approaches to structural and organizational change deemed as the most fruitful theoretical perspectives to account the process at issue.