Institutional Entrepreneurship in Action: Translating Community Colleges Across India

Abstract

Initiated in 1995, community college in India grew from a grassroots movement into a national policy priority. Rather than achieve stability as a cohesive system, three distinct but overlapping community college models developed. To begin to understand the forces shaping this unexpectedly fragmented landscape, I conducted an embedded case study focused on how advocates defined what it means to be a community college in India. Over one year of data collection, I conducted interviews with 99 advocates and practitioners at 35 community colleges, government offices, and higher education facilities in 7 states.

Guided by interwoven concepts from institutional theory – translation, institutional entrepreneurship, and an institutional logics perspective – I find that all three models focus on preparing marginalized students for employment aligned with a national priority on skill development and a global trend of promoting community colleges as a tool for economic and educational justice. Yet, the ultimate form, function, and field position of community colleges remain in flux.

A desire to “make skills aspirational” coupled with a national “degree obsession” led advocates into what I call recognition chasing – a process focused on securing community colleges a formal place within higher education through regulatory support. Guided by a perceived need for government recognition, an interdependent network of advocates initiated each successive model by promoting a globally acceptable yet locally differentiated vision for the community college. Translation was a continually responsive process at the organizational and system level, which resulted in three distinct but overlapping models championed by new advocates offering new opportunities for recognition.

Strategies to achieve legitimacy were generally top down and based on personal relationships to help overcome challenges associated with the centralized and individual-centric bureaucracy that controlled higher education. Advocates offered desirable frames, mobilized allies, and developed standards and norms, but the ability to influence community college policy was largely concentrated within a small group of people and organizations. What I call coercive cooperation came to define each community college model by providing minimal but controlling oversight through selection processes, the creation of guidelines, and hosting workshops to disseminate information to practitioners. As a result, the role of personal relationships was elevated above the need for collaborative problem solving in the field building stage.

Advocates’ actions were both constrained and enabled by a shifting constellation of the community, state, market, professional, and religious logics influencing community college development. Given the complex resource environment with competing demands for action, logic seeking, or aggressively pursuing the influence of multiple logics on community college development, was necessary. For a grassroots movement to gain regulatory backing and desirable market outcomes, in a bureaucratic emerging economy, advocates actively engaged in logic seeking to secure legitimacy for a new organizational arrangement. They doggedly chased government backing, courted relationships with industry partners, and shaped the curriculum to meet specific employer needs based on professional standards. Ultimately, logic seeking was not an attempt to resolve or mitigate complexity; instead it was the active pursuit of complexity.

Findings have broad implications for theory, practice, policy, and research. It is important to understand the interconnected forces shaping the development of community colleges in India, because without careful attention to policy and practice, community colleges in India may serve to reinforce the inequitable social system they are intended to disrupt.