To be or not to be a technical university
The technical university category in the national context of Sweden involves two dominant actors, both founded in the early nineteenth century: KTH and Chalmers University of Technology.
Higher education landscapes
Higher education landscapes worldwide are populated with institutions featuring significant differences in terms of their history, size, disciplinary scope, and research funding. In view of such heterogeneity, clustering higher education institutions (HEIs) into categories of one sort or another is a natural response.
The technical university category in the national context of Sweden involves two dominant actors, both founded in the early nineteenth century: KTH Royal Institute of Technology (henceforth KTH) and Chalmers University of Technology (henceforth Chalmers) (Ahlström 2004; Björck 2016).
Approach
In our investigation of how actors within HEIs have related to the organisational category ‘technical university’ in debating, advocating, or resisting organisational or institutional change, we focus on four Swedish HEIs with a substantial orientation towards technical education and research. Based on our own overview of the Swedish institutional setting, we identify an episode in the recent history (1960 and onwards) of each HEI when the identity and formal status of the HEIs (or parts thereof) were subject to negotiation.
Our analysis of cases at four Swedish HEIs shows how in two cases from the 1960s and early 1980s, engineering faculty perceived it as attractive for their institution to remain and become, respectively, an independent ‘technical university’.
Open Access on Springer Link - To be or not to be a technical university: organisational categories as reference points in higher education
Geschwind, L., & Broström, A. (2021). To be or not to be a technical university: organisational categories as reference points in higher education. Higher Education, 1-19.
