What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their ac...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory and society 2021-06, Vol.50 (4), p.577-605
Main Authors: Kindel, Alexander T., Stevens, Mitchell L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action
Capacity building approach
Collins, Randall
Credentials
Education, Higher
Engineering schools
Entrepreneurship
Higher education
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Political systems
Post World War II period
Social aspects
Social problems
Social Sciences
Sociology
Time
World War II
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first called educational entrepreneurship as a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time.
ISSN:0304-2421
1573-7853
DOI:10.1007/s11186-021-09443-3