Formation of A Higher Education Organization Identity Between Imaginations and Standards: The Case of Turkish Universities System

Nowadays universities on the one hand try to survive and handle to their managerial system on the other hand cope with constrains from their institutional environment. The constrains are multilateral and including organizational demands, increasing competition in the market, national and international standardization however which are comprise of responding to demands of the students who are grown up in the technological era. Hence, universities are increasingly facing a double-sided pressure: to be innovative with a specific organizational duty while at the same time being an embedded part of a growing, and highly interconnected, internationalized and standardized higher education ‘industry’. This dilemma has both theoretical and practical interest, and is explored in this paper through an empirical study of how one university has dealt with these challenges of innovation and standardization.

In this paper it is investigated that the processes involved in forming an organizational identity, which it is studied during the founding of a distinctive new college by using an interpretive, insider-outsider research approach. It aimed that to identify elements that constitute the identity. It is considered a dilemma that imaginations and innovations attitudes of entrepreneurs of university such as struggles to be innovative and authentic on the other hand centralized structure of state, national and international standardizations and especially idiosyncratic context of Turkey. By studying a Turkish foundation university from its establishment in 2007 to present, and by extensive triangulation of more qualitative studies on this university in this period, the paper concludes that higher education institutions may handle this dilemma by relating it to the continuous struggle for organizational identity. As methodologically has done per deep interview with founding members and content analysis to archive documents since its establishment.