TY - BOOK

T1 - Accomplishing transnational education provision

T2 - Institutional practice architectures and the enactment of policy and practices

AU - Dempsey, Liz

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - Transnational education (TNE) is a complex and multidimensional projectrequiring contributions from many different parts of the university to achieve asatisfactory outcome. The current trend for TNE in UK research-intensiveuniversities is towards collaborative arrangements driven by yet morecomplex objectives in an effort to achieve more targeted outputs and tangiblereturns for the institution. But how TNE is accomplished within the institution ispoorly understood.From a critical realist perspective, using practice architectures informed bysocial practice theory, this thesis investigates how the TNE project isconceptualised and accomplished in the research-intensive university setting.Data collected from six different universities through a series of semistructuredinterviews and institutional documentation were analysed usingcollective case study analysis and framework method.The findings suggest that the TNE project is enabled and constrained by prefiguredarrangements within the institution as TNE is dominated bycompliance as the most significant feature shaping the project. The threearrangements that comprise the practice architecture analytic (social-political,material-economic and cultural-discursive arrangements) are foregroundeddifferently at various stages in the TNE project revealing a contestedunderstanding of conceptualisation. Practice architectures highlight thetensions and threats to the TNE project within the institutional setting andthese architectures need to be scrutinised, adjusted and reconfigured if the TNE project, as it is valued by academics and higher education leaders, is toperpetuate and grow.The research also suggests that there is a need to expand the theory ofpractice architectures to take account of “proto-practice reservoirs” within theinstitution: ideologies, symbolic structures, ways of understanding, forming theubiquitous structural forces that condition how meaning is made locally. Theproto practice reservoirs influence and shape the accomplishment of the TNEproject.

AB - Transnational education (TNE) is a complex and multidimensional projectrequiring contributions from many different parts of the university to achieve asatisfactory outcome. The current trend for TNE in UK research-intensiveuniversities is towards collaborative arrangements driven by yet morecomplex objectives in an effort to achieve more targeted outputs and tangiblereturns for the institution. But how TNE is accomplished within the institution ispoorly understood.From a critical realist perspective, using practice architectures informed bysocial practice theory, this thesis investigates how the TNE project isconceptualised and accomplished in the research-intensive university setting.Data collected from six different universities through a series of semistructuredinterviews and institutional documentation were analysed usingcollective case study analysis and framework method.The findings suggest that the TNE project is enabled and constrained by prefiguredarrangements within the institution as TNE is dominated bycompliance as the most significant feature shaping the project. The threearrangements that comprise the practice architecture analytic (social-political,material-economic and cultural-discursive arrangements) are foregroundeddifferently at various stages in the TNE project revealing a contestedunderstanding of conceptualisation. Practice architectures highlight thetensions and threats to the TNE project within the institutional setting andthese architectures need to be scrutinised, adjusted and reconfigured if the TNE project, as it is valued by academics and higher education leaders, is toperpetuate and grow.The research also suggests that there is a need to expand the theory ofpractice architectures to take account of “proto-practice reservoirs” within theinstitution: ideologies, symbolic structures, ways of understanding, forming theubiquitous structural forces that condition how meaning is made locally. Theproto practice reservoirs influence and shape the accomplishment of the TNEproject.

U2 - 10.17635/lancaster/thesis/2696

DO - 10.17635/lancaster/thesis/2696

M3 - Doctoral Thesis

PB - Lancaster University

ER -