The Quest for Entrepreneurial Universities in East Asia

K. Mok

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317544
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

With the rise of the knowledge economy, universities are under pressure to embrace not just their traditional missions of teaching and research but a third mission of serving economic and social development. This book examines the major strategies that governments in East Asia have adopted to promote this kind of innovation in the education sector.

Chapter 1

Globalization and Higher Education:

Major Trends and Challenges

Introduction

The rise of the knowledge economy has generated new global infrastructures, with information technology playing an increasingly important role in the global economy. Such a development has huge implications for different stakeholders in a national innovation system. For the government, how to make the country thrive in a competitive knowledge economy has become an important national development agenda. That it is often hard-pressed to orchestrate strategic research and development (R&D) activities with higher education has increasingly been seen as one key component of the national innovation system (Edquist and Hommen 2008; Etzkowitz 2008; Lundvall et al. 2006; Nelson 1993). For entrepreneurs, an era of “open innovation” is argued to have emerged, where firms, rather than conducting in-house R&D, have been increasingly outsourcing their research activities to diverse external units, including universities, so that innovation can be achieved in a more efficient manner (Chesbrough 2003; Perkmann and Walsh 2007).

As for universities, apart from performing their traditional missions of teaching and academic research, they are now under tremendous pressures to acquire the third mission of serving economic and social development. The new mission opens up lots of opportunities for universities to establish linkages with the industry sector, namely through setting up university spin-off companies, conducting licensing activities and contract research, providing consulting services, and exploring graduate and researcher mobility between the two sectors. As higher education has become more associated with social and especially economic development, R&D activities in universities can no longer be regarded as purely academic pursuits within the ivory tower. Therefore, structurally, universities are required to build a “university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem” (see Fetters et al. 2010) where “academic entrepreneurship” flourishes (see Wong 2011). In a nutshell, the conception of many countries, especially in the minds of policy makers, is that a closer, interactive cooperation among the government, industry, and academia will lead to sustainable economic growth and enhanced competitiveness in the knowledge economy, where innovation is the key factor supporting such goals.

In order to enhance their national competitiveness in the globalizing economic context, the governments of East Asia have tried to transform their higher education systems to become more responsive and proactive to rapid social, economic, and political changes by not only serving the traditional missions of teaching and research but also supporting economic growth through engaging in entrepreneurial activities such as the promotion of knowledge transfer activities in the last few decades. The major objective of this chapter is to identifying major trends and challenges that the higher education sector in East Asia is facing, particularly when universities are increasingly influenced by the growing impacts of globalization. More specifically, the following discussion focuses on identifying the major trends and challenges confronting higher education development in the selected East Asian societies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Mainland China. In addition, this chapter also examines how and what strategies universities and governments in East Asia have adopted in addressing the growing challenges of globalization.

Globalization: Contested Concepts and Unfinished Debates

In the last decade or so, scholars and writers have repeatedly discussed the nature and impact of globalization at political, economic, social, and cultural levels (see, for example, Held and McGrew 2000; Schirato and Webb 2003). Despite the contested concepts and heated debates on globalization, some scholars have attempted to categorize such discussions into three major schools of thought, namely hyperglobalists, skeptics, and transformationists (Held and McGrew 2000). For hyperglobalists, they strongly believe the global economy is dominated by uncontrollable global forces in which nation-states are structurally dependent on global capital, which is primarily determined by transnational corporations (TNCs). To believers in this strong globalism, the globalizing economy means a drastic shift in structural power and authority away from the nation-state toward nonstate agencies and from national political systems to a global economic system (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton 1999). Unlike these strong globalists, those who oppose the convergence theory think that globalization is overstated and overgeneralized. According to skeptics, nation-states are more heterogeneous and independent in action than they are given credit for. Since they have never responded to external changes in the same fashion, there are a wide variety of local and regional responses to globalization. In this regard, skeptics argue that contemporary levels of economic interdependence are not historically unprecedented. In contrast, the global economy is less global in its geographical embrace, especially when compared with the former world empires. Somehow taking a stand between the hyperglobalists and the skeptics, the transformationists believe that globalization is unprecedented, but there is no convergence. Instead, they believe the globalizing world has resulted in a kind of global stratification, a new international division of labor. It is against this wider context that some nations succeed at the expense of others, and even within nations there are winners and losers. Therefore, the old terms such as the North and the South and the division between the first, second, and the third world are no longer relevant (Held and McGrew 2000).

The diverse views on globalization outlined above have clearly demonstrated the disagreements among academics and researchers on many aspects of the form, direction, definitions, and significance of globalization. Nonetheless, no matter how we assess the impacts of globalization on the contemporary world, no one can deny that the intensification of worldwide social relations, which link distant regions in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa, is a reality (Hirst and Thompson 1999). Held has said, “We live in a world of overlapping communities of fate, where the trajectories of countries are deeply enmeshed with one another” (Held 2004, 2). Held’s statement clearly suggests that we are living in an increasingly interdependent world, and therefore we are not immune from the growing influences of the market and the ideas and practices of neoliberalism on many different dimensions of the contemporary world. Yang has succinctly summarized the impacts of globalization:

Globalization is the result of the compression of time and space that has occurred since advanced technology allowed the instantaneous sharing of information around the world, leading to a cross-border flow of ideas, ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, capital and financial services, knowledge and technologies, creating a borderless world economy. It has a material base in capitalism and an ideological genesis in neo-liberalism. (Yang 2005, 28)

While some see globalization as an inexorable process of global economic integration (Fukuyama 1992), others see it as a deliberate policy project, which celebrates the market as economic savior (Yang 2005, 28). However, Jill Blackmore (2000) reminds us that globalization is far more complicated. She describes it as

increased economic, cultural, environmental, and social interdependencies and new transnational financial and political formations arising out of the mobility of capital, labor and information, with both homogenizing and differentiating tendencies. (Blackmore 2000, 467)

Central to the ideas and practices of neoliberalism is a shift in the balance between the state and the market, strongly in favor of the latter (Fukuyama 2006, 121). The neoliberal philosophy, with its roots in an intellectual movement promoted by scholars like von Mises and Hayek, advocates the reduction of the role of the state, the opening of national markets, free trade, flexible exchanges, deregulation, the transfer assets from the public to the private sector, and an international division of labour. This political-economic agenda is often referred to as the Washington consensus although some may argue that it is more an ideology than a consensus (Bayliss and Smith 2001; Stiglitz 2002). In recent decades, a major emerging trend from such a political-economic aspect of globalization has been the increased significance of competition. Jessop (2002), Cerny (1990), and Ball (2007) also argue that modern states are struggling to become “competition states,” which aim to “secure economic growth within its borders and/or to secure competitive advantages for capitals based in its borders” (Jessop 2002, 96). In order to enhance the national competitiveness in the globalizing world, higher education is seen to be performing a very important function. Nelson (2012), in his recent volume titled The Global University, asks questions related to the nature, functions, purposes, and missions of being a global university. Does it refer only to ranking in global league tables? What distinguishes its approach to teaching, to research, to knowledge? Whose interest does it serve, and how? The present book is set out against the wider context in which universities in East Asia have been increasingly challenged by globalization, to critically examine how they respond to and what strategies are being adopted in addressing both homogenizing and differentiating tendencies resulted from the processes of globalization.

Challenges of Globalization and University Responses

The Quest for Global Competitiveness and University Governance

In order to enhance their global competitiveness, governments in different parts of the world have started to conduct comprehensive reviews of and implement plans to restructure their higher education systems (Mok and Welch 2003). In response to the growing pressures generated by globalization forces, modern states have attempted to reinvent themselves by moving beyond the welfare state to become the competition state (Gill 1995; Moran 2002; Jordana and Levi-Faur 2005). Governments across different parts of the globe, facing similar competitive pressures, have undertaken regulatory reforms such as privatization or corporatization of state-owned industries or publicly owned organizations such as post offices and universities, opening up new markets to multiple providers and the introduction of new regulatory regimes under the control of independent regulators (Drahos and Joseph 1995; Levi-Faur 1998; Scott 2004). To enhance the efficiency of public policy/public management, modern states may deregulate some areas while enforcing competition in others, hence becoming a facilitator or even a generator of markets. Thus, it is common to witness that the extent of reregulation or recentralization in the processes of market restructuring is accompanied by the emergence of strong regulatory states and by the entrepreneurial role that states play (Chan and Tan 2006; Ng and Chan 2006; Hawkins 2005). Unlike Cerny’s (1997) characterization of the competition state as a basically liberal state, Levi-Faur argues that the state (particularly in the intensified global competitive environment, the emphasis of this book) faces a paradox: “The greater the commitment of the competition state to the promotion of competition, the deeper its regulation will be” (Levi-Faur 1998, 676). More importantly, the actions and mission of the competition state do not necessarily result in the retreat of the state from the market but rather a reassertion of the role of the state under changing social and economic circumstances (Levi-Faur 1998, 676).

In order to promote basic national interests through the creation and enforcement of competition, the developmental states in Asia have taken the opportunity offered by the fundamental economic restructuring processes to transform them into “market-accelerationist states” by proactively shaping the market institutions for the benefits of market creation (Mok 2006a; Lee 2004). Unlike the regulatory state in America that evolved against a liberal market economy context, the regulatory state in Asia has emerged from a context of a combined strong state and a free market economy, by which the state ideologically commits to an “authoritarian mode of liberalism.” As Jayasuriya has rightly pointed out, “this authoritarian liberalism presupposes the existence of a strong (or better described as politically illiberal) state with a capacity to regulate the economy” (Jayasuriya 2000, 329). In order to promote competition in the markets against the context of authoritarian liberalism, a market-accelerationist state is forming (Mok 2006a). The market-accelerationist state has the features of a “dualistic state” as Fraenkel (1941) has described: a strong state combined with a liberal market economy. With this kind of state architecture in place, the success of the markets rests heavily upon the presence of strong regulatory institutions. It is against such a wider sociopolitical context that far more procompetition policy instruments are adopted by modern states to transform the way the public sector is governed. Hence, the higher education sector, like other public policy domains, has gone “private,” while ideas and strategies along the lines of neoliberalism and economic rationalism are increasingly influencing the way public policy is managed (Brehony and Deem 2005; Neubauer 2006).

The socioeconomic and sociopolitical environments outlined above have inevitably affected the way higher education is governed. In order to become globally competitive, governments and universities in Asia have started to search for new governance strategies to improve university governance by the adoption of corporatization and incorporation strategies. In order to become more globally competitive, Asian universities have taken world university ranking very seriously and therefore have engaged in a quest for “world-class” university status.

University Restructuring: Incorporation and Corporatization

To survive in this highly competitive world, universities have to become customer-focused business enterprises (Currie and Newson 1998). As the nation-state acts as a player in the new global marketplace (Currie et al. 2003), universities are encouraged to act in market-like ways, and therefore changes begin to emerge in funding, management, and function (Yang 2005; Mok 2006a; Hawkins 2005). Being unsatisfied with the conventional model along the lines of “state-oriented” and “highly centralized” approaches in higher education, coupled with the pressure to improve the efficiency of university governance, a growing number of Asian governments have recently tried to “incorporate” or introduced “corporatization” and “privatization” measures to run their state/national universities, believing that these transformations could make national universities more flexible and responsive to rapid socioeconomic changes (Mok 2006a; Oba 2006; Hawkins 2007). Instead of being closely directed by the Ministry of Education or equivalent government administrative bodies, state universities in Asia are now required to become more proactive and dynamic in looking for their own financial resources. Similar to their Australian and British counterparts, universities in Asia are now under constant pressure to become more “entrepreneurial,” to look for alternative funding sources from the market, strengthening their partnerships with industry and business (Olsen and Gornitzka 2006; Marginson and Considine 2000).

Inclining more toward market and corporate principles and practices, universities in Hong Kong are now run on a market-oriented and business corporation model. Universities in Hong Kong have experienced corporatization and privatization processes, whereby higher education institutions (HEIs) have proactively engaged in fostering entrepreneurship to search for additional revenue sources from the market (Mok 2005b; Lee and Gopinathan 2005). In order to enhance the efficiency of university governance, the University Grant Committee (UGC), the organization that shapes the direction of higher education development in Hong Kong, has recently subscribed to the notion of “deep collaboration” among universities, believing that synergy could be pulled together if universities in the city-state could better integrate. The UGC even supports university merging or other forms of restructuring to further establish Hong Kong as a regional center for excellence in research and scholarship (Chan 2007). Turning universities into enterprises and entrepreneurial institutions is becoming increasingly popular in Hong Kong, while the university presidents or vice chancellors have been heavily involved in fund-raising activities (Chan and Lo 2007).

Similarly, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan has decided to change the statutory position of state universities into an independent judicial entity by adopting principles and practices of corporatization. In order to reduce the state burden in higher education financing, all state universities in Taiwan have to generate additional funds from nonstate sectors, such as the market and enterprises. In order to generate sufficient funds to finance their institutions, various kinds of market-driven strategies have been adopted. More recently, the Taiwan government has attempted to restructure its state universities by passing a new University Act to make state universities independent legal entities. Influenced by the Japan model, state universities in Taiwan have to establish new governance structures; at the same time they are under immense pressure to search for additional financial support from nonstate channels, especially since the Taiwan government has significantly reduced core funding (Lo and Weng 2005; Mok, Yu, and Ku 2013).

In facing a new market economy context, the Chinese government has also found the old way of “centralized governance” in education inappropriate (Yang 2002; Hawkins 2000). Acknowledging that overcentralization and stringent rules would kill the initiatives and enthusiasm of local educational institutions, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) called for resolute steps to streamline administration and devolve powers to units at lower levels so as to allow them more flexibility to run education. In the last decade or so, higher education in the post-Mao era has experienced structural reforms ranging from curriculum design, financing, and promotion of the private/minban sectors in higher education provision, to adopting strategies to develop world-class universities. In order to promote the competitiveness of its higher education in the global marketplace, the Chinese government has introduced various kinds of restructuring exercises to merge universities or to streamline the stubbornly sustained bureaucratic university systems. With strong intention to identify and develop a few Chinese universities into world-class universities, the government has implemented various ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Globalization and Higher Education: Major Trends and Challenges
• 2 Policy Context for the Quest for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Universities in East Asia
• Part I   Questing for Entrepreneurial Universities and Promoting Innovation
• Part II Internationalization and Transnationalization of Higher Education and Student Learning
• Part III University Performance, Changing University Governance and Policy Implications for East Asia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• About the Author
• Index