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.