Fresh from the press! "Multiple Competition? An Analysis of Thematic Research Clusters on Competition and Higher Education" appeared in "Higher Education Quarterly"

The new article by Goetze; Kosmuetzky; Kruecken; Seidenschnur, and Vogel analyzes the largely unexplored intellectual structure of the international scientific debate on competition in higher education based on a combination of bibliometric coupling and qualitative content analysis using a database of 2,136 articles.

Götze, Nicolai; Kosmützky, Anna; Krücken, Georg; Seidenschnur, Tim; Vogel, Rick (2026): Multiple Competition? An Analysis of Thematic Research Clusters on Competition and Higher Education. In: Higher Education Quarterly 80 (1), Artikel e70105. DOI: 10.1111/hequ.70105

The authors find evidence for a heterarchical intellectual structure dominated by six thematic clusters: ‘global organizational status competition’, ‘innovation and university-industry linkages’, ‘academics' resources in competition’, ‘management of organizational service quality’, ‘social inequalities and organizational status’ and ‘diffusion of student-related financial policies’. Each cluster highlights a different way of framing competition. We find that these framings are loosely coupled and that the interdependency between different competitions is under-analysed. Additionally, we provide an exemplary examination of country-specific patterns of competition discourse and uncover local variants of global competition imaginaries. By means of the concept of multiple competition, we emphasise this interrelatedness and outline propositions to guide further research.

The article is an outcome of the research unit ‘Multiple Competition in Higher Education’ (DFG FOR 5234), particularly the project ‘Multiple Competition in Research and Teaching’, and the project ‘Competitive Positioning of Universities and Their Members’.