Of Clubs and Clans: The ‘National Pattern’ of Higher Education in the United Kingdom and its impact on Law Schools
Andra Le Roux-Kemp
What the paper says
The higher education sector of the United Kingdom with its long history dating back to 1096, has since developed, through a series of government reactions and actions to primarily financial concerns, into a highly stratified institutional environment that not only shapes the hierarchical and relational organisation of its higher education institutions, but also creates ideological and operational differences at the academic unit level. This article provides a comprehensive, historical, and critical overview of how the higher education sector of the United Kingdom came to be in its current differentiated pattern or form, and also the impact this stratified institutional environment has had at the academic unit level, specifically on law schools. It is shown, also with reference to new institutionalism as a theoretical framework for analysis, that this complex pattern of institutional types tends to constrain law schools in their ability to truly flourish, and that some institutional entrepreneurialism, specifically also at the micro or academic unit level such as with law schools, may be necessary to disrupt the organisational logics that sustain this seemingly enduring differentiated pattern of institutional types.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.