On the institutional work of widening participation practice
Keywords: institutions
organizational institutionalism
widening participation practice
evaluation
institutional work
widening participation
higher education

This study is motivated by the following question: when practitioners engage in the project of ‘widening participation’ (WP), what are they hoping to do? Due to both its grounding in neoliberal logics and its aspirations for social justice, the very idea of WP is contested and subject to contradiction. WP, therefore, can mean substantially different things to different people, particularly to practitioners. While practitioner perspectives are chronically understudied in WP research, a nascent body of work on WP practitioners demonstrates that practitioner perspectives are crucial to understanding how policies are translated into material realities on the ground. Contributing to this work, I explore the ways in which WP practitioners understand and assess the institutional change work they are tasked to perform. To do so, I conducted a qualitative case study of the diverse community of WP practitioners who work on the UNIQ residential outreach programme at the University of Oxford, which comprises career WP workers and two previously unexplored subpopulations of practitioners: student interns, and in-house evaluators.
Through a conceptual review of WP literature, I show that dominant conceptual models in what I call ‘critical WP research’ are insufficient for capturing how actors agentically navigate change-work in institutional and organisational contexts. This thesis’ primary theoretical contribution is its proposal that the neoinstitutional sociology of institutions and organisations—often referred to as ‘organisational institutionalism’ (OI)—lends us powerful tools for understanding how actors actively intervene within and/or against institutions as they work toward making higher education institutions (HEIs) more accessible and inclusive. Namely, the growing institutional work perspective (IWP) offers a cogent model for examining how organisational actors engage in purposive action in service of creating, maintaining and/or disrupting institutions. In the WP context, I argue that WP represents a recognisable ‘organisational field’ in UK social life, and thus operates via a unique set of institutional logics, and that higher educational institutions are better understood as organisations that are governed by wider institutional forces. WP practice, I contend, amounts to a form of institutional work, which is enacted in/on HEIs.
To explore the empirical realities of institutional work in the WP context, I selected Oxford WP as my object of inquiry because Oxford represents an exceptional case of how the institutional forces buttressing WP—massification, neoliberalism, an increasing societal priority on inclusivity and social mobility—clash with the formerly hegemonic elite paradigm of education that Oxbridge embodies. Palpable contradictions find their way in every aspect of an Oxford WP practitioner's work: from selecting and targeting students, to determining which ‘myths’ about Oxford to debunk, to evaluating the ‘success’ of their interventions. Practitioners draw on an array of strategies of institutional work, like identity work and category work, to navigate these contradictions. I found that any attempt to make sense of the contradictions inherent to WP practice at Oxford amounts to acts of (de)legitimising Oxford WP. Depending on how they ‘come up against’ (Ahmed 2012:26) these contradictions through practice, WP practitioners either reify the institutional order, or gain access to transformative knowledge that inspires them to push against it.