Abstract
This article explores how grassroots administrators interact with various other actors in the process of forming international partnerships. A top-down and a bottom-up case of building international partnerships for masters and PhD programmes were selected from my fieldwork in a Danish university. The cases were elaborated and analysed using Tatiana Fumasoli’s organisational approach to multi-level governance in higher education. This article concludes that with their personal networks and knowledge about the normative frameworks of certain powerful actors, grassroots administrators could help academic staff who might not know the regulations involved in the internationalisation process, to balance their own interests with their intention of complying with the normative frameworks, and thus enhance their capacities of forming and participating in a successful international partnership.
Highlights
X University (XU) is one of the biggest comprehensive universities in Denmark
The purpose of this article is to study how grassroots administrators interact with diverse actors in the dynamics of building international partnerships
As you will read in the findings, the top-down case is about how a grassroots administrator (Jan, pseudonym) helped a department director and an academic (Peter, pseudonym) undertake the institutional mission of collaborating with some Vietnamese partners; and the bottom-up case describes how a grassroots administrator (Amalie, pseudonym) assisted an academic (Charlotte, pseudonym) in initiating an European Union (EU)-funded international research network
Summary
XU is one of the biggest comprehensive universities in Denmark. Since 2008, it had published two global-oriented overall university strategies (hereinafter referred to as ‘overall strategy’) and two university strategies focusing on ‘internationalisation’ (hereinafter referred to as ‘internationalisation strategy’), signifying its ambition in internationalising the university. XU claimed to be ‘a leading globally-oriented university with a strong engagement in the development of society’ in its overall strategies. The strategies said that XU should try to integrate global collaboration into the university’s education, research, talent development and knowledge exchange through strong interaction and collaboration with researchers and lecturers, public authorities, non-government organisations and enterprises around the world. Its strategies, which set up the ‘formal framework’ for internal individual actors and the ‘organisational identity’ of the university, indicated that XU was a typical MLG organisation that connected with other organisations at multiple levels. Since the launch of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, the European Commission began to become directly involved in educational policies, which had traditionally been a nationally sensitive policy area in the EU (Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation 2009). In order to gain more ‘centrality’ in the EU structure, XU claimed in its institutional internationalisation strategies that it should actively react to EU initiatives, such as participating in the Bologna Process and Erasmus programme and winning more international research grants, especially EU FP7 and Horizon 2020 grants
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