The focus of this paper is the impact of multiple stakeholders in a strategic change process in higher education. The paper describes an institutional change and legitimacy formation process from a dialectical perspective by analysing multilevel institutional work and discusses how multilevel strategic actions are utilised as driver for institutional change in higher education.

This paper is based on my doctoral research and research articles. According to the results of my doctoral study, multilevel institutional work and connected transformation mechanisms have special micro-macro linkages. I present a multilevel process model for institutional change in higher education, which illustrates the causal macro-micro relations, where macro-level actions cause micro-level actions, which in turn aggregate up to macro-level actions and further micro-level institutional work. The model shows how strategy works as practice and connects the institutional work with the organisation level and macro level development and higher education policy.

The institutional change in higher education is characterised by the interplay between multilevel boundary work and practice work. In the initial phase managerial regulative actions de-institutionalise the existing political regime. In the second phase, normative actions destabilise the existing internal processes and social arrangements and disrupt existing structures while new ones are introduced and created. In the third phase, normative actions stabilise new internal processes, practices, social arrangements and structure when finally, regulative actions strengthen organisations disciplinary legitimacy by affecting the macro level decision making, inter-organisational relationships and disciplinary structure. This paper illustrates the institutional change process by offering practical examples and characteristics of different types of institutional work.

The empirical focus of the study is in the engineering and technology field in Finland. To find out how institutional change in higher education happens and how multiple stakeholders engage in and affect the change, an event-based process approach was adopted to explain the temporal order of interconnected events and stakeholder actions. A single case study design has allowed to explore and understand in-depth relations between actors to gain contextualised insight into a complex phenomenon in higher education change. Despite its limitations, this single case study reveals interesting inter-university and intra-university dynamics and provides a novel empirical perspective to higher education development by connecting institutional work with institutional change and legitimacy formation.

Keywords: Higher education, institutional change, institutional work, agency, legitimacy, stakeholder.