Professor Vikki Boliver vikki.boliver@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants which recognise that “the school attainment of disadvantaged learners often does not reflect their full potential” and which better reflect the minimum needed to succeed in higher education. In this paper, we draw on in-depth interviews with admissions personnel at eighteen Scottish universities to explore the scope for more progressive admissions policies of this kind in light of universities’ identities as organisations and in light of corresponding organisational strategies for position-taking in global and national higher education fields. We present a theoretical model and an empirical illustration of three hierarchically-ordered ideal types of organisational identity—globally competitive, nationally selective, and locally transformative—and show that the more dominant of these tend to constrain the development of more progressive admissions policies. This is because globally competitive and, to a lesser extent, nationally selective organisational identities are understood to require admission of the ‘brightest and best’, conceptualised as those with the highest levels of prior academic attainment who can be expected to succeed at university and beyond as a matter of course. We conclude that universities must recognise and redress the implicitly exclusionary nature of their organisational identities if genuine progress on widening access is to be made.
Boliver, V., Powell, M., & Moreira, T. (2018). Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities. Social Sciences, 7(9), Article 151. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7090151
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Sep 4, 2018 |
Online Publication Date | Sep 6, 2018 |
Publication Date | Sep 6, 2018 |
Deposit Date | Sep 5, 2018 |
Publicly Available Date | Sep 6, 2018 |
Journal | Social Sciences |
Electronic ISSN | 2076-0760 |
Publisher | MDPI |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 7 |
Issue | 9 |
Article Number | 151 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7090151 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1320777 |
Publisher URL | http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/9/151 |
Published Journal Article
(248 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access
article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Issues of Access, Diversity, and Inclusion In Contemporary Higher Education
(2024)
Book Chapter
Access to Higher Education
(2024)
Book Chapter
The private higher education provider landscape in the UK
(2023)
Journal Article
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search