INTERNATIONAL CONVERGENCE IN POLICY AND PRACTICE : TRANSNATIONAL DIFFUSION AND ADOPTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Governments, schools or universities should indeed critically question best practices before adopting them. But do they? Or do best practices gradually spread out as taken for granted templates and models or ‘ritual myths’ for policy makers in other countries. In the case of higher education, the transnational diffusion of ideas, policies and practices is especially common because of its international character. This exploratory paper will survey the mechanisms through which discourses and policies spread throughout the world and the extent to which they lead to international isomorphism and convergence. It is argued that this diffusion cannot only be explained by functional claims of effectiveness and efficiency. Explanations arising from sociologically inspired neo-institutional theories provide alternative or complementary explanations for the convergence of discourses and policies. In the paper a distinction is made between four explanations: imposition, harmonisation, imitation and professional socialisation. While sociological institutionalism predicts convergence, historical institutionalism makes a case for the persistence of national differences, rejecting the thesis of cross-national convergence. To bring together these seemingly contrasting views, it is useful to take a closer look at what the meanings of convergence and isomorphism are, through what mechanisms they come about and to look at the extent to which convergence can actually be observed. The latter is done by looking at developments in higher education and research policies in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. 1 School of Policy and Practice, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney INTRODUCTION: INTERNATIONALISATION OF DOMESTIC POLICIES Domestic politics and policy making is generally analysed in a domestic context, looking at national processes and national power constellations contextualised by national cultures, national laws and national norms. The globalisation thesis claims that institutional arrangements that were previously considered national become to some extent disembedded from this national context and re-embedded in sub-national, supranational or a-territorial contexts (Beerkens, 2003). This is also the case for policies that are usually considered to be located exclusively in the national domain, such as education policies, health care policies and social policies. The fact that they are considered exclusively national, has led to ‘methodological nationalism’ or ‘methodological territorialism’ in many social sciences. Here, social arrangements such as society, culture, law, polity, etc. are implicitly equated with national society, national culture, national law and national polity. Obviously, the national character of such arrangements is still very much present and often dominant. To create a full picture however, it is necessary to address international and transnational influences on domestic policies. Of course, nation states have never been fully autarchic and have always been exposed to influences from outside. However, through the increasing massification and acceleration of flows of people, money, images and ideas and because of the disembedding or globalisation of other sectors of society (e.g. economic trade, media), previous domestic issues have gained an international and/or transnational character. This can be the case because a particular policy sector has gained an international dimension and therefore needs some kind of international coordination. With the increase in international mobility of students for instance, there emerged a need for agreements on recognition of degrees or credits. But also the free movement of labour and the liberalisation of trade in services needed coordination on professional qualifications, for instance in the field of medicine or law. Once a regional (in the meaning of a collection of nations) or a world polity emerges in a specific domain, international organisations and transnational actors can step into or be drawn into domestic policy processes. Formal international organisations such as development banks or the International Monetary Fund step into domestic affairs in many developing countries; transnational organisations like Greenpeace or Amnesty are drawn into national politics by local organisations; multinational corporations exert influence on national environmental or labour policies. But also local policy actors themselves are exposed to more and more external ideas through new technologies, internationalised education, increased travel opportunities, international workshops, seminars and conferences, etc. In such cases there are obvious international influences, even though authority is still fully located in national domains. Because of these international influences in national policy domains it is plausible to assume that national differences are to some extent disappearing and that more and more similarity will occur between countries. If organisations are believed to respond similarly to similar environmental pressures, the globalisation thesis predicts an increased level of convergence because institutional environments have globalised and denationalised to some extent as well (see the work on the world society or world polity approach, e.g. Meyer et. al., 1997; Drori et. al., 2003). This line of thinking resembles the isomorphism thesis that is frequently posited in neo­ institutional theories of organisational behaviour and that predicts organisations to become more alike through coercive, mimetic and normative pressures within organisational fields (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). This argument is apparent in the sociological version of new institutionalism (see Hall and Taylor, 1996). Sociological institutionalism seeks an explanation for the observation that organisations take on specific forms, procedures and symbols and analyses how such practices are diffused through organisational fields or across nations. The adoption of such forms, procedures or symbols is not so much a matter of proved efficiency but is more related to expected social appropriateness or normative legitimacy. Another argument, also based on neo-institutional thinking, is that institutions are durable. According to historical institutionalism, international influences might appear to be implemented similarly on the surface, in practice the historically grown national peculiarities and balances of power will cause divergent practices and results through path-dependency. This historical strand in the new institutionalism rejects the postulate that the same operative forces will generate the same results everywhere in favour of the view that the effect of such forces will be mediated by the contextual features of a given situation inherited from the past (Hall and Taylor, 1996). Institutions – defined as procedures, routines, norms and conventions embodied in the organisational structure of the polity – are seen as relatively persistent features of the historical landscape and therewith sustain the durable differences between institutional contexts. Embeddedness theories (see Dacin et al., 1999 for an overview) reflect this view and see relationships between organisations embedded within a broader set of socio-cultural forces that shape the nature of collective activity, individual organisational action and opportunities and constraints. While on the one hand neo-institutionalism makes a case for cross-national convergence and international isomorphism, on the other hand it makes a case for persistent national differences. To bring together these seemingly contrasting views, it is useful to take a closer look at what the meanings of convergence and isomorphism are. This will be done in the next section where different stages in the process of convergence are identified. Next, the various mechanisms will be explored through which international influences spread and convergence comes about. In the final section the focus is on how international influences are incorporated into domestic policies and on the extent to which convergence can actually be observed. This will be investigated by looking at discourses and policies in three countries in the ASEAN region: Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. These case studies are meant to illustrate the points made in the conceptual parts of the paper. ISOMORPHISM AND POLICY CONVERGENCE Isomorphism and convergence are frequently used interchangeably. Convergence can be defined as the tendency of societies to grow more alike, to develop similarities in structures, processes and performances (Kerr, 1983: 3). Isomorphism is defined as a process of homogenization that ‘forces one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 66). While isomorphism seems to be looking more at shapes and structures, convergence tends to emphasise political and societal directions. Instead of organisational isomorphism within organisational fields, convergence studies focus more on (the growing) isomorphism among nations. It looks at pressures that provide a tendency for government structures and policies in different countries to become more alike. To see to what extent convergence or isomorphism can be observed, it is useful to distinguish between four different stages of convergence, as identified by Pollitt (2002: 477-478). Convergence starts with discursive convergence. In this stage, ‘everybody’ starts talking about similar concepts and a particular idea becomes part of the general discourse. For example, the idea of the knowledge society and the way scientific and technological innovation and higher education promotes economic development has pretty much become a global idea or a global discourse. Even the assumption that this demands greater interaction between university and industry, strategies for life long learning, or certain regulatory pol