Accomplishing transnational education provision : Institutional practice architectures and the enactment of policy and practices

Dempsey, Liz and Trowler, Paul (2025) Accomplishing transnational education provision : Institutional practice architectures and the enactment of policy and practices. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Transnational education (TNE) is a complex and multidimensional project requiring contributions from many different parts of the university to achieve a satisfactory outcome. The current trend for TNE in UK research-intensive universities is towards collaborative arrangements driven by yet more complex objectives in an effort to achieve more targeted outputs and tangible returns for the institution. But how TNE is accomplished within the institution is poorly understood. From a critical realist perspective, using practice architectures informed by social practice theory, this thesis investigates how the TNE project is conceptualised and accomplished in the research-intensive university setting. Data collected from six different universities through a series of semistructured interviews and institutional documentation were analysed using collective case study analysis and framework method. The findings suggest that the TNE project is enabled and constrained by prefigured arrangements within the institution as TNE is dominated by compliance as the most significant feature shaping the project. The three arrangements that comprise the practice architecture analytic (social-political, material-economic and cultural-discursive arrangements) are foregrounded differently at various stages in the TNE project revealing a contested understanding of conceptualisation. Practice architectures highlight the tensions and threats to the TNE project within the institutional setting and these architectures need to be scrutinised, adjusted and reconfigured if the TNE project, as it is valued by academics and higher education leaders, is to perpetuate and grow. The research also suggests that there is a need to expand the theory of practice architectures to take account of “proto-practice reservoirs” within the institution: ideologies, symbolic structures, ways of understanding, forming the ubiquitous structural forces that condition how meaning is made locally. The proto practice reservoirs influence and shape the accomplishment of the TNE project.