DFG research group "multiple competition in higher education"
Researchers at nine universities form the DFG-funded research group "multiple competition in higher education - internationalization and international comparison". They come from the fields of sociology, economics and business administration and are working on nine sub-projects. The research group started in 2021 under the title "multiple competition in higher education" (funding phase I) and added the focus of "Internationalization and International Comparison" with the beginning of funding phase II in 2024.
Universities involved
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Fresh from the press: Buenstorf, G., Hottenrott, H., Kosmützky, A. et al. Analyzing Constellations of Multiple Competition in Science and Higher Education. Minerva (2025).
The term “multiple competition” describes the simultaneous embeddedness of universities as organizations, researchers as individual actors, and state actors in various, nested, and interdependent competitions. Individual and collective actors compete in various—often interconnected—ways for limited symbolic and material resources such as attention, reputation, ranking positions, research grants, high-quality publications, personnel, and jobs. Moreover, the many competitions that individual scholars, universities, and government organizations encounter could strengthen one another. The authors propose a new conceptual framework for analyzing the constellations of multiple competition in science and higher education, using theoretical resources from sociology and economics. They illustrate the added value of this conceptualization for empirical studies using examples from various academic systems.
