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Keeping up with coordination: from

Clark's triangle to microcosmographia
a a
Jose Salazar & Peodair Leihy
a
Centre for the Study of Higher Education, 1/715 Swanston
Street, University of Melbourne, 3010, Australia
Published online: 18 Jul 2011.
To cite this article: Jose Salazar & Peodair Leihy (2013) Keeping up with coordination:
from Clark's triangle to microcosmographia, Studies in Higher Education, 38:1, 53-70, DOI:
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Studies in Higher Education
Vol. 38, No. 1, February 2013, 53–70
Keeping up with coordination: from Clark’s triangle to

microcosmographia
Jose Salazar and Peodair Leihy∗
Centre for the Study of Higher Education, 1/715 Swanston Street, University of Melbourne,
3010, Australia
In 1986 (first published 1983) Clark’s triangle of coordination compared national

Downloaded by [Universiti Sains Malaysia] at 00:20 09 September 2013
higher education systems according to the dimensions of state authority, market

and academic oligarchy. The picture was of a particular time, one in which those
three factors could be ably used to illustrate major differences in how
coordination took place. Subsequent sweeping changes in higher education
coordination have led to the alteration of the triangle’s features and assumptions
as it has been adapted over time. This article argues that the vertices of any such
triangle must themselves be alterable in order to indicate changes in the
constitution of salient forces that have been observed, and can be expected.
A new, less time-bound heuristic – microcosmographia – facilitates such
comparisons, with a recast, unified triangle as its kernel.
Keywords: coordination; comparative higher education
Coordination in higher education

This article introduces a heuristic, derived from Clark’s (1986 [first published 1983])
classic triangle, for the analysis of coordination in higher education. Clark’s triangle
is a product of its time, as have been alterations to it at various times since. The new
heuristic – microcosmographia – contributes a way of comparing the coordination
of systems that does not require the suspended disbelief that all possible kinds of
state authority, markets for higher education and institutional leadership are roughly
equivalent functionally, and simply enjoying different levels of power relative to one
another in different national settings or in the same country at different times.
Many forces govern higher education, defining and framing activity. Their
combined functioning both accommodates and informs the nature of the field and
the directions it takes. Certain commonalities can be observed across all systems.
The state and the market greatly influence higher education coordination – as they
do all fields of public policy – addressing the fundamental questions of how authority
is exercised and exchange performed.
The state typically has conspicuous regulatory powers over higher education
systems, imposing norms and regulations, and, if not directing funding, creating the
conditions in which it might be pursued (Jongbloed 2003). In most cases, the market
facilitates trade inputs and outputs, creating a symbolic exchange space.
∗
Corresponding author. Email: p.leihy@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
ISSN 0307-5079 print/ISSN 1470-174X online

# 2013 Society for Research into Higher Education
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.564609
http://www.tandfonline.com
54 J. Salazar and P. Leihy
State and market can be conceived of as opposite extremes of a kind of continuum;

in any given system at any given time, one can be proportionately more prominent than
the other (which is not to say the decisions of state regulation and market participants
cannot be made independently of each other, nor that their interaction is a zero-sum
game). The relative profiles of these forces interplay, creating a scalar, tug-of-war
tension, discussed with regard to public policy generally by Lindblom (1977).
Clark (1986) customized this basic conception of public policy coordination to shed
light on systems of higher education coordination, combining the dominant forces of
state and market with the traditional, if waning, influence of academic leaders. Clark
presented a triangular space with, at its corners, ‘state authority’, ‘market’ and what
he called ‘academic oligarchy’.
This space is delimited by tensions between the state and the market as well as
organizational arrangements within higher education. Subsequent research shows tra-
ditional academic power as curtailed, but never wholly razed. The state exerts pressure
on traditional academic power bases (Marginson 1997), as does a market orientation,
but even in systems subject to barely bridled market forces for sustained periods,
academics have found ways to retain significant levels of authority (Dill et al. 2005).
Moreover, academic authority and values have grown somewhat distinct from
managerial authority within universities. While the former come from colleagues’
recognition and from acceptance of the academic social order (Finch 1997), the latter
can be conferred by appointment.
Inasmuch as Clark’s heuristic is simple, it is comprehensive and easy to follow.
Since comparison is the main focus, Clark offers limited attention to occasional
forces that have influenced coordination in some national systems but have limited
repercussions in other cases. For example, the symbolic and actual power of student
politics in Latin America at Clark’s time of writing (1986, 156) cannot be assessed
within the triangle.
Clark’s relative positioning of national systems is based upon his own observations,
but is systematic (if Clark was sceptical of any certainties pretended by ‘the murky term
system’ [4] – unsure that system is the best term for what he was describing – ‘system’
is a fortiori a good way to describe his typology in all its bare-boned simplicity). The
coordinating corners are not composed of uniform interactions. While some subfactors
implied within one of the three corners have the ability to increase the influence of that
corner over higher education, others help smooth coordination overall. Conversely,
some processes have an aptitude for restraining the influence of other coordinating
forces. This is particularly relevant for processes attached to the coordinating power
of academic oligarchy and the state, because personally self-interested human actors
(rather than selfless office-bearers) within them compete for authority.
Institutional arrangements for quality assurance offer an example of how different
coordination powers can be improved simultaneously. The introduction of public
agencies for quality assurance in a number of nations over the last decade seems to
reinforce both the state and the academic community’s influence over higher education
systems, and the understanding both forces have of processes and one another. This is
especially true when quality assurance serves as a gateway for access to public funding.
Analysing how the state influences higher education, Clark describes two separate sets
of processes that affect coordination. While the bureaucratic power of government is
enhanced through a number of strategies (by increasing the number of levels of
formal coordination, the jurisdictional scope of administrative agencies, number of
administrators, levels of administrative expertise, and number and complexity of rules),
Studies in Higher Education 55
the political side of government action increases its influence by a different set of tactics
(by upgrading the political priority of issues related to higher education and political
involvement across the sector and by raising standards for university governance).
In Clark’s view, the influence of academic oligarchy is enhanced primarily through
demanding expert judgement on more decisions, and strengthening inter-mural organ-
izations such as unions. Both processes share the same ultimate aim of transmuting
localized authority ‘into national power in many systems, with national academics
thereby becoming worthy opponents of bureaucrats and politicians in putting hands
on the levers of decisions’ (1986, 158–59).
The market does not have authority so much as a space regulated by authorities in
which to operate. Market coordinating power comes from exchange; a ‘method for
organizing cooperation among people’ (161). Clark describes diverse types of
markets following a three-market system laid out by Lindblom.
First, Clark depicts consumer markets where ‘people normally exchange money for
desired goods and services’ (162), and where the extent of consumer choice defines
trade possibilities. Then, he points to labour markets where academic and administra-
tive employment is decided. These markets are heavily intertwined with what are
termed institutional markets, where organizations interact with one another (where
Lindblom had seen these as sites of exchange of goods and services between insti-
tutions, Clark sees institutional markets in higher education as zero-sum positional
competition). Here, ‘relations among institutions are determined largely by the nature
of their consumer and internal labor markets and the positions that the institutions
then assume’ (1986, 165). Finally, Clark highlights interest groups, which can exert
significant influence. Their pressure can be especially effective in addressing the regu-
latory power of the state, and, by extension, the structure of higher education markets.
Initial appraisals of Clark’s triangle noted its chronotypicity; it provides a vista in
many ways specific to the time it was conceived. The complaint was retrospective
rather than anticipatory; Jarausch (1985) argues in an essay review that Clark’s
picture did not pay historical development its due. Conversely, since Clark’s time, a
problem has lain in its continuing currentness; it has often undergone renovation in
order to remain a useful heuristic as the nature of higher education coordination has
undergone considerable transformation.
Evolution, directionality and nomenclature

Clark’s coordination triangle is used to represent a process of delicate balances and
responses to changes of context. In 1983, there was enough stability in national
higher education systems to lend his elegant presentation plausibility; the radical
reform movement of the 1980s, however, was then just warming up. The landscape
has since changed markedly. We can adapt the triangle – but when we do, we
should be mindful of how we might be deviating from Clark’s frame of vision.
The triangle acknowledges crucial factors in coordination, but it is not exactly
neutral in their portrayal. From a rudimentary glance at the graphic presentation
(Figure 1), there is a sense of movement – the triangle is arranged like a ‘play’
button, with market at its pointing tip. Based on Lindblom’s continuum between
authority and markets, we see the Cold War superpowers at opposite ends of the
state authority/market relation (with the USA seeming decidedly ‘sharper’).
The directionality seems to be towards the market and, sure enough, Kogan and
Marton (2006) trace UK, Swedish and Norwegian coordination converging toward a
Figure 1. Clark’s triangle with 1983’s ‘extreme cases’.

Reproduced with kind permission: Burton R. Clark, The higher education system: Academic
organization in cross-national perspective, # 1986 by the Regents of the University of California,
published by the University of California Press.
point near the market vertex from different points along the state authority/academic
oligarchy axis in the period since Clark conceived of the triangle. We could also
note that the pointing towards market in combination with the uppermost position of
state authority foreshadows the rise of new public management, and the lean but
strategic oversight of higher education, ‘steering from a distance’.
The placement of academic oligarchy is not informationally neutral either. While
important enough to be one of three factors, academic oligarchy is visually in the
weakest position. In understanding academic oligarchy, Clark’s case study of Italian uni-
versities in the 1970s is crucial (2008, based on original articles from 1977 and 1978).
Clark showed these institutions to be poorly centralized by the state and under the de
facto rule of leading academics (i baroni – students of English history might be
tempted to think of King John’s barons deftly asserting a collective patchwork of interests
against domination by a central crown). In an earlier work, Clark saw the stable presiding
of chaired professors (‘baronial power’, he called it [Clark and Youn 1976, 4]) over still
guild-like universities as a cornerstone of the nineteenth-century German university in
the heyday of Humboldtian wissenschaft – but inhibitive of contemporary Italian
higher education reforming itself. It is difficult to say whether entrenched oligarchy was
more cause or effect, but the upshot is that it represented ‘system failure’.
The directionality already implied by Clark is developed in different ways when the
triangle has been used and presented by others. In the background to their introduction
of the glonacal agency heuristic (which highlights the glo[bal], na[tional] and [lo]cal
levels in which institutions simultaneously exist), Marginson and Rhoades (2002)
gloss academic oligarchy as ‘professional/collegial’. Arguably, this sounds less
insidious, and possibly even restores (however wishfully) the possibility of healthy
academic power. State authority, on the other hand, is renamed ‘government/
managerial’ – here the idea that the cohorts of managerialism are a force foreign to aca-
demia is clearly implied. The labels chosen by Marginson and Rhoades reflect analysis
evolved by Becher and Kogan (1992). Becher and Kogan, it should be noted, also
present academia (‘autonomy’) as having to go through the state (‘management’ and
‘social utility’) to get to the market, suggesting that their power is filtered.
Marginson and Rhoades go so far as to alter the triangle so that it is no longer an

arrow but a pyramid in profile – twisted around so that professional/collegial is on
top (Figure 2). Perhaps we should not make too much of this, but it is a departure
from Clark’s picture (not just in his work on coordination, but in his entire oeuvre)
of the ascendance of the market. Whether this triangle suggests professional/collegial
is in charge, or a client supported by government/managerial and market, could be
debated. The collocation of government and management is interesting; later in this
article the idea that managers and bureaucrats in particular can talk one another’s
language will be developed.
Jongbloed’s (2003) presentation of the triangle is close to that of Marginson and
Rhoades, and glosses academic oligarchy as ‘academe’ – which has a poetic, mildly
facetious tone that suggests this force is only delusionally on top, much as Clark’s aca-
demic oligarchy has a tone of anachronism. Yet Jongbloed’s picture is one of academe
and the other forces cyclically waxing and waning in relative importance. Jongbloed
intimates that the three points are timeless ideals rather than interplaying, coordinating
factors (Figure 3).
In another recasting of the triangle, Burke (2005) adapts it to refer specifically to
accountability issues (Figure 4). Here, the arrangement is not in the play button position
but is more closely a ‘grounded’ version of Clark’s original than others, with state pri-
orities (with the state as formal regulator) on top. ‘Each of the corners of the Account-
ability Triangle has a bright side and a dark side, reflecting both broad needs and special
interests’, notes Burke (22) – the example of broad popular values and political hobby
horses is suggested in the case of ‘state priorities’. Burke’s triangle acknowledges the
asymmetrical nature of the forces at each corner as they impact upon accountability, but
it is incapable of representing them – here Burke raises important issues about the
inherent tensions concealed by triangular simplicity.
In depicting the recent evolution of Chilean higher education, Brunner (2009) trans-
lates academic oligarchy as the Spanish corporación académica (see Figure 5). Here
Brunner evokes the work of his associate Schwartzman (1993), who acknowledges
that the university is descended from mediaeval corporatism; politically, in such a
Figure 2. The permuted triangle?

With kind permission from Springer Science + Business Media: Higher Education, Beyond
national states, markets, and systems of higher education: A glonacal agency heuristic,
Vol. 43, 2002, 281 –309, S. Marginson and G. Rhoades, Figure 1.
Figure 3. Jongbloed’s churning triangle (2003, 132, Figure 2).

Reproduced with kind permission from Wiley-Blackwell.
Figure 4. Burke’s creative accounting (2005, 23, Figure 1.1).

Reproduced with kind permission from John Wiley & Sons.
Figure 5. Collation of Brunner’s longitudinal application of Clark’s triangle to the Chilean case.
Adapted from Brunner (2009, 306–11, Figures 3.1–3.4) with kind permission from Jose Joaquı́n
Brunner.
sense corporación can have a different pejorative nuance to the available Spanish term
oligarquı́a, but perhaps we should not read too much into this.
Brunner’s use of the triangle assumes that the vertices are static ideals that are
approached or kept distant. A lot of poetic licence must be granted to using the heuristic
for a time series like this, as it treats the three vertices as if each of them were not chan-
ging a great deal, at the same time that they as forces were changing higher education
coordination. Essentially, Brunner modifies a triangle specific to the Chilean case, but is
hoist on the petard of his own inventive adaptation.
Clark’s triangle is designed to depict tensions, rather than diagnose excessive state,
market or academic power. The ways the use of the triangle have departed from
Clark’s original intention can be explained by virtue of changes in the way coordination
itself has changed (as well as the way it has been understood) since Clark presented the
triangle. Brunner and Jongbloed share the approach of using the triangle to show evolution
by national systems, departing from Clark’s use of the triangle as a heuristic for compari-
sons of how coordination occurs between different national systems – permissible depar-
tures, but with concomitant implications. The power of Clark’s triangle for
comparing national systems has diminished inasmuch as the direction away from
academic oligarchy and towards markets (with state authority sometimes, as Brunner
shows, having a catalytic role) has been much shared. How transformations and local vari-
ations continue to manifest requires a more intimate view of the three coordinating forces.
A potential pitfall in using Clark’s triangle to trace evolutions rather than compare
systems is that the triangle does not accommodate shifts in forces and actors that cause
coordination over time. Clark did not need to trace evolutions; his comparisons were
simultaneous. In depicting the three forces as constant, neither Jongbloed nor
Brunner acknowledges the rise of managers as a distinctive empowered group within
and across universities in most national systems over the last twenty years. Members
of this group cannot always be included under an academic umbrella; to ignore
them, or somehow conflate them into academia, is a substantive departure from
Clark’s original triangle.
Clark’s triangle remains a comprehensive system, yet its three corners can be dyna-
mized to reflect different dimensions and distinctions that have become prominent since
the rise of new public management, steering from a distance and other approaches.
Evolution in the way the theory and practice of coordination has changed since
Clark’s time demands that we consider new ‘moveable parts’ that are concealed and
frozen in the triangle.
Microcosmographia: the heuristic

Here we present a coordination heuristic based on Clark’s triangle, but one that seeks to
address how each of the corners of the triangle might change internally over time.
The Cambridge don, Cornford, published the slim volume Microcosmographia
Academica in 1908, satirizing university politics. Cornford’s book examines the
small world (i.e. microcosm) of academia. It is to be wondered what Cornford would
think of higher education studies and its scientistic diagrams, but microcosmographia
is an apt, if lengthy, name for a new coordination heuristic. The name pays tribute to
the traditional self-image of higher education, and acknowledges that public policy
and markets are equally their own worlds. The provenance of the name also hints
that any small, sovereign world is illusory – coordination comprises the cooperation
of each of the three domains. Microcosmographia simultaneously sustains the conceits
of the small worlds of academia, state authority and the marketplace, while also
drawing attention to the fact that they are conceits (see Figure 6).
Microcosmographia alters each of the triangle’s vertices to a triangular domain;
these outer domains might be seen as ‘tuning pegs’ through which the nature of each
of the three forces at work in the central domain is calibrated. Three subfactors are
included in each, conveying a roughly representative array of influences (discussion
will follow of how subfactors are chosen; the very selection of these is based on
‘empirical’ issues arising through attempts to use the triangle, including those
discussed previously in the article). The use of triangles is arbitrary in the true sense
of a word sometimes confused as synonymous with ‘random’; judgements have been
made to produce an illustrative tool that will be familiar to those who know Clark’s
triangle, and should facilitate the depiction of inclusive if not exactly exhaustive
interplays.
This particular arrangement of factors is itself a historical snapshot of the way higher
education coordination has been carried out, is being carried out and, it seems now, will
be carried out. By balancing salient and general forces within this coordination palette,
currently prominent and more dormant subfactors alike are acknowledged, allowing
considerable scope for studying diverse configurations across nations.
In each domain, as in Clark’s triangle, the relative strength of the three forces is to
be plotted. In the public domain, these are the political class, bureaucrats and the
public’s understanding of its collective welfare. In the competition domain, resources,
placement (of ‘products’) and prestige are the corners. The institutional domain
portrays the relative power of managers, academics and students.
Figure 6. Microcosmographia: from vertices to domains.

Three outer domains rather than the ‘fixed’ vertices of Clark’s triangle achieve a
‘timeless’ comparative perspective on coordination. Different configurations within
these triangles reflect differences in the nature of the public, competition or institutional
influences for a system. Within these domains, relevant issues are identified, assigned
respective priority, and are available for those with the will and wherewithal to take
them on; the points of each triangle represent agents and agencies (as we might call
the different kinds of competition) that interact to negotiate disparate interests, which
are then prosecuted on behalf of the respective domain in the central triangle.
The position within Clark’s triangle where a national system is located was the
manifestation of interactions between other factors. Over time (which Clark never
meant to represent) the three forces do not gain or cede dominance in coordination
out of some caring sense of power rotation; they do so as a result of changes within
them, and between them, in a constant negotiation. Microcosmographia offers the
possibility to trace structural transformations in higher education by informing shifts

in its priorities (rather than laying down a reduction of the supposedly most essential
concepts) and, thus, in the relevance assumed in an inner domain corresponding to
Clark’s triangle. Rather than simply naming structures, this heuristic is vitally con-
cerned with how they function.
The make-up and significance of domains

Public domain
The three vertices in the public domain triangle allow two separate forms of state auth-
ority acknowledged as conflated by Clark as his state authority vertex, and one factor
lacking in Clark’s typology but considered important in subsequent work to be used to
indicate what kind of ‘public’ influence is exerted upon higher education coordination.
This is the domain where regulatory frameworks and policy agendas for higher edu-
cation are defined, and where ideology and broad social aspirations manifest and
contend. The public domain is where public funding to the sector (and its level) is
cyclically agreed, and from where administrative procedures for higher education
surveillance are designed and implemented.
Political and bureaucratic coordination are included (along with professional and market
coordination) as processes of integration by Clark (1986, 145ff.). In Clark’s rationale, these
refer to how bureaucrats and politicians conduct certain activities with the aim of increasing
influence over higher education, and are conflated within the state authority vertex – yet are
in many cases quite different. Furthermore, the populace, with its values, aspirations and
perceived needs, also informs the public domain, its murmur often channelled through
the media or self-appointing lobby groups. Becher and Kogan (1992) include ‘social
utility’ (with ‘professional’, ‘management’ and ‘market’ values) as a force informing
higher education coordination, and populace represents this factor in microcosmographia.
Competition domain
Within the competition domain, not sentient actors, but non-planned (yet closely
watched) transactions and interactions determine the context of contestation within
national systems of higher education.
We might liken the competition between competitions with the ordering of a ‘fight
card’ in boxing; different kinds of competition vie to be the headline bout –
competition in each of these dimensions takes place in all higher education systems, but
in different systems, different forms of competition will be predominant (in some, pres-
tige competition is strongest, and ‘leads’ material and placement competition; in others
resource competition will determine prestige and placement orders, and so forth).
While competition includes markets – a seemingly magnetized vertex of Clark’s
triangle – competition can happen without the direct exchange that defines true
markets. Equally, universities can engage in a wide variety of exchanges that do not
involve competition, as could happen with charitable donations (although to be truly
non-competitive these would have to be unsolicited, anonymous and unprompted by
notions of winner-backing or remedial investment). What institutions achieve and
lose through competition and the behaviours they exhibit comprise coordination in
this domain.
The relationship between input markets and output markets in higher education has
been explored from political economy (Rothschild and White 1995; Winston 2003) and
sociological (Marginson 2004) points of view. There is competition in enrolling stu-
dents (an important input for institutions, vigorously graded in selection and recruit-
ment processes) and other resources; there is competition in having value-recognized
qualifications and research (an output, carefully ‘placed’ in the market). Rather than
input and output markets, microcosmographia features resources and placement com-
petition respectively, clarifying the perspective of competitors in taking in ‘materials’
and placing products in a competitive environment.
Clark recast Lindblom’s category of institutional markets as referring essentially to
the zero-sum positional competition (as explored by Hirsch 1976 and later Marginson
1997). Clark employs considerable legerdemain here; by so doing, he takes the market
and exchange out of institutional market. This prestige competition, the corner com-
pleting this domain, is symbolic rather than a market in itself; its would-be substance
is ordinal reputation. There is no market in which prestige can be traded directly
(that is, detached from prestigious goods and services) and no standardized prestige
units have been yet created. Branding and ‘marketing’ (that misnomer for meta-
market advertising), as well as constraints in the speed at which a reputational heritage
can be changed, have profound effects on the contestation of resources and placement
by influencing institutional and systemic standing.
Prestige (which, etymologically, means a conjuring trick) competition can be under-
stood as the extent to which the competition domain that participates in coordination is
enervated by the belief that displays, tricks and claims have meaningful impact on the
way standing is perceived in education. Commissioning flashy logos and the procrus-
tean apportioning of resources to score better on ranking indicators are both consistent
with strong seams of prestige competition within systems; as national systems receive
more global exposure there is an increasing sense that such posturing can put the cat
amongst the pecking order, and call long-standing hierarchies into question.
The separation of prestige and placement – which are, of course, so intertwined
they might sometimes appear co-extensive – isolates the mystique and the magic of
institutional prestige (in which the semblance of mere responsiveness can be toxic to
a confident demeanour) from earnest and openly elastic attempts to find homes for
an institution’s graduates and research outputs (in which claims of usefulness and
employability are often plangent – intimating that those with more prestige offer no
more usefulness and very possibly less). Of course these two concepts feed into one
another, and into the securing of resources, yet these distinctions have potential for por-
traying how competition is structured as a force in coordination. In a systematic use of
the heuristic, investment in both of these subfactors can be measured in terms of outlay
on branding and media liaison, in the case of prestige and in expenditure and
resources devoted to placing a university’s people and its wares (e.g. technology trans-
fer/exchange).
Institutional domain
The institutional domain represents the quest for authority within higher education
institutions – the unique feature of higher education systems as distinct from other
systems, where the particular forms of teaching and research take place. Here, different
internal interests vie for influence over one another and over higher education
dynamics.
On the one hand, Clark’s ‘academic oligarchy’ credited the uniqueness of higher
education (as opposed to other subjects of regulation and competition); on the other,
it presumed the coordinating power of institutions lay in the hands of the increasingly
outmoded academic oligarchs. Far from the last bastion of oligarchic power Clark saw
in some unreformed systems, institutional power has always been with us, perhaps
more vigorous or dormant at different times, perhaps more deferent to markets or to
state authority at different times, but always there. The internal developments within
higher education – the rise of managerialism, academic entrepreneurship and expertise,
collective understandings of students as customers or co-producing inductees of
institutions – can be covered in this domain in a way that reflects that this institutional
area is not out for the count.
It is difficult to say when the category ‘managers’ was first opposed to that of
academics (that universities were being run as businesses rather than according to other
implicit ideals was a bugbear for Veblen [1918], for example), but the tension between
the two would become more and more apparent in the years following Clark’s book.
The triad of subfactors within the institutional domain comes straight from Clark’s
overview, where ‘student, faculty and administrator’ are identities around which uni-
versity subcultures form (1986, 86). The academic oligarchy contains elements of
the second two elements, but, while stating (87) that student cultures had been more
studied, Clark does not reflect a collective student force in his triangle; he saw them
as salient in some national systems but not others, and therefore not suitable for his
comparative triangle (125). The inclusion of students within the institutional domain
here, however, is consistent with Clark’s view of institutional subcultures, and provides
the potential to include systems (such as those in some parts of Latin America still) in
which students and their part in institutional politics are important (indeed, Clark
acknowledges how political ‘jousts’ in Mexico’s elite universities have served them
as training grounds for politicians [156]). Furthermore a distinct and assertive
student voice is now visible in the fast-developing and often groundbreaking Indian
higher education system. It is also important to note that, as institutions and systems
become more market-responsive, it is likely that students (and their families, and
perhaps consumer rights associations) may become a prominent and somewhat
unified voice directly informing coordination in many contexts.
Different configurations in a relatively strong institutional domain overall could be
expected to have patterned ramifications for coordination generally. Strong student
power might inform greater, or lesser, political power in the public domain. Powerful
academics of the kind Clark saw in Italy, whose sense of oligarchy limited prestige
competition, might in another time or place welcome active prestige competition and
its implications elsewhere in the competition domain as an extension of their field’s

traditions of competitiveness.
Microcosmographia in action
The permutations and combinations of coordinating relativities presentable through
microcosmographia are vast, and various patterns may emerge. We can begin to popu-
late the heuristic in order to demonstrate its illustrative virtue. Here we will take two
examples; Australian and Chilean coordination as they stood in 2011. These examples
should be considered a preliminary demonstration to show how a Clark-style triangle
may give an impression of outward similarity that belies different configurations and
likely directions. Such granulation is important if, as Brunner (2009) attempted for
Chilean educational reform, we treat coordination as vectoral to provide comparative
insight into evolving systems.

This diagram (Figure 7) both is and is not Clark’s triangle. If a simple depiction of
coordination as Clark allowed is required, this triangle provides the information con-
tained in microcosmographia in summary form. A crucial caveat, however, is that
the reader must realize that the three points on the triangle are not fixed but dynamic
qualities and forces. Conformity to the time-honoured accessibility of Clark’s depiction
will allow a version of this revised picture of coordination that might be especially
suitable for briefings for university presidents and vice-chancellors, or ministers of
education, with the underlying greater complexity of the full microcosmographia
available as a more in-depth resource.
These two examples are tyros of regulatory reform, with very different political
heritages. In Australia’s case, a neo-liberal watershed came not under a conservative
but a Labor government. Chile, poster child of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development – the developing country that actually seems to have
developed according to western prescriptions – commenced a program of Friedmanite
neo-liberalism at a junta’s behest.
Figure 7. Clark’s triangle relabelled and populated with 2011 examples.

Adapted from Clark (1986) with kind permission from the University of California Press.
Figure 8. Microcosmographia populated for 2011 as per Figure 7.
This is not a case of systemic isomorphism (that is, the ‘institutional isomorphism’
Riesman saw in American universities (1956, 35) in macrocosm), however – it would
be false to interpolate that procedurally similar ideologies (e.g. local instantiations of
neo-liberalism) are leading to similar coordination balances in different countries, and
that similar and consistent future paths can necessarily therefore be projected. The
bold brushstrokes of Clark’s triangle benefit from being supplemented by the regression
of the triangle’s vertices to a view of them as domains within microcosmographia, with
the relabelled version of Clark’s triangle ‘inset’ as the middle triangle (Figure 8).
Domain configurations
The configurations for the two national systems can be briefly explained in order
to show how different ascendancies within public, competition and institutional
domains underlie what might otherwise seem like an isomorphic convergence. More
extensive or intensive empirical research might validate or dispel the positions; the
purpose here is first and foremost one of demonstration. The neo-Clarkian central
domain, a transposition of Figure 6, becomes a synopsis, informed by weighted
relativities within each outer domain.
Australia
The major trend in Australian higher coordination can be viewed as a series of
victories by managers, firstly for supremacy in their own institutional domain, then in
the way they have ‘read’ and effected influence over the public and competition domains.
The managers came to power in the institutional domain in the neo-liberal atmos-
phere that took hold in the 1980s. Academics and students may be the natural social
carriers of the uniqueness of higher education, but managers have managed to convince
academics that they are employees and students that they are customers and products of
their institutions, rather than all being members. Managers took hold in higher edu-
cation by often acting as if it were not, and became a strong and tightly networked
group capable of wielding considerable power in the coordination process.
The victory of managerialism in the public domain comes in the context of an abdi-
cation of direct coordinating responsibility elsewhere within this domain. This has been
made possible by the injection of funding into the system by a prized mechanism of
allowing institutions to recruit international students and charge them higher fees
than locals. (Marginson [2007] has pointed out the discrimination of implicitly treating
local students’ education more as public goods and international students’ as private
goods.) The situation is further complicated by a vocational sector consisting of

access-oriented public institutions and private ‘colleges’ attracting international
applicants, who have been promised preferential treatment in applications as skilled
immigrants to Australia. The populace – with compulsory suffrage perhaps perversely
leading to political contestation increasingly cramped around narrow differences in
economic stewardship – exhibits the apathy of comfort, with a relatively accessible
system of public institutions subsidized by the sector’s export function (nevertheless,
the cash-cow treatment of international students and some dissimulation surrounding
the immigration-study nexus offend many). Politics responds by placing a low priority
on being seen to do anything about or for higher education – a centre-left government
elected in 2007 inherited a centre-right’s decade of not increasing real public invest-
ment in higher education, and by 2011 had done little about reversing this.
Two signal triumphs for managers within the system are telling; the first being the
Bradley Report into higher education (Bradley et al. 2008), which is notable for the
level of input in it from higher education managers, and the effective ratification of
this world-view by government, and the second being an incipient quality assurance
regime run by natural allies in state bureaucracy (using an actuarial model) and man-
agers comfortable with dealing with these arbiters of their own kind (this entente,
however, has its own tensions). The overlapping of the prerogatives of managers and
bureaucrats is also evident in the merging of Australia’s international education peak
body into the Australian Trade Commission in 2010 – education is considered a valu-
able export in the national interest, to be kept away from partisan politics and public
opinion (at least in the expert opinion of the managers who coordinate the system so
well, using the export income stream to insulate politicians from unpopular dilemmas
in raising revenue for education, and the populace from paying).
The extent to which resources follow prestige (reinforced by its effective corollary,
placement) is highlighted by moves following the Bradley Report to allow each insti-
tution to determine how many publicly funded students it will accept (Australian
Government 2010) – more prestigious institutions can identify and exploit opportu-
nities for greater economies of scale, but must concern themselves with prestige
maintenance, while less prestigious institutions risk their previous recruiting grounds
being depleted by more prestigious offers (Trounson and Hare 2011).
Competition for resources features an understood pecking order (the Group of Eight
research-intensive universities at the top), but also an understanding of Brand Australia
(Le Grew 2009) – the notion that the higher education export industry’s interests are
best served by recognizing that, overseas, all Australian education is likely to be
tarred with the same brush in the case of reputational damage or enhancement. This
situation, of acceptance of an ordered (and provincial) hierarchy rather than vigorous
positional competition, can be understood partly in terms of managers’ loyalty
towards one another as a professional class within the system. Competition exists
and is visible in advertising, discussions over resource allocation and boasts about
research outputs and ‘graduate employability’, but it is the hermeneutic function of
managers to vet competitive considerations for inclusion in coordination.
Chile
‘To market, to market’ urged Friedman and Chile’s native Friedmanite Chicago Boys in
the 1970s, promoting privatization in higher education as in other areas of public
policy. The national system is now highly marketized, with a quality assurance
regime trying to filter credibility and order into a system which, in an earlier stage of
expansion (the 1980s), often treated qualifications as products to be bought and sold
with little regard for the particular properties of higher education as a strand for
development (this is reflected in an institutional domain in which managers rule).
Where the Australian system is preponderantly public, in Chile ‘privatism’ ensures
an environment where public universities, although prestigious, only concentrate a
marginal proportion of enrolments (about 20%). Higher education expenditure is
considered a private matter as well, since public funding (below 25%) is rather
limited (Brunner 2009). Markets are essential for allocating private and public
resources alike, with universities and other higher education institutions relatively
free to fight for a viable share.
In this competitive scenario there is no such thing a level playing field. Prestige and
reputation play a crucial role in market segmentation, with sub-leagues of competition
between comparable and stratified providers (Brunner 2009). Just as international
students are an imported wildcard in Australia, and in other anglophonic countries in
particular, in Chile for-profit foreign providers have acquired local institutions –
such developments will increasingly require attention in understanding national
systems. In Chile, vertiginous levels of investment in advertising (much of it
concentrated on the enrolment season) and reputation building are consequences of
the strategic priority placed on capturing the resources essential for survival. Managers
(and entrepreneurs still more uninterested in nebulous academic traditions, who often
own institutions as businesses and seek profits from them) anticipate demands and
adapt swiftly to changing scenarios, applying corporate principles, strategies and
procedures (De la Fuente and Lopez 2010).
A corporate rationality is embedded in the structure and functioning of faculties and
academic departments. Academic capitalism has provided the conditions for the rise
of a new type of academic and for the professionalization of academic life. Yet this
transformation has been carried out at the cost of a weaker sense of community,
greater stratification among professors and narrower, individualized political engage-
ment (Bernasconi 2009). If academics were autonomous entities in the past, now
universities manage them. Students unions have some influence only in public univer-
sities; in private institutions they are untroubled at being considered customers.
In this context, government provides limited funding (most substantially through
student aid and research funding), and regulates the system through quality assurance.
State bureaucrats now largely answer to institutional managers when steering the
system, and public but decentralized agencies have considerable power running
admission processes, quality assurance reviews, and allocating student aid.
Quality assurance and student loans notwithstanding, the Chilean system remains
an ideological fray – neo-liberal marketization exacerbates stratification, even as its
rising tide has lifted most boats (Dickhaus 2010). By 2011, age-cohort participation
had reached 40%. One million students are now pursuing higher education.
However, concerns regarding graduate job shortages have started to emerge – and to
be manifested as placement competition in which institutions, individuals and
regulators alike pay closer attention to creating marketable credentials (Donoso 2011).
Where the competition domain has been a mainsail of a growing system, with insti-
tutional managers and bureaucrats trusted merely to steer it to catch the tailwind of
systemic expansion, it is foreseeable that pressure will be brought on this long-standing
configuration by popular unrest and political concern in the public domain, and by
academics and students concerned that institutional managers are not appreciative
enough of the conferments of higher education. Microcosmographia anticipates the
resetting of the three functional domains that corresponded to Clark’s vertices, not
merely a shift in his triangular space.
As these brief examples show, significant diversity in the values and structures
informing higher education coordination may be identified between systems. The
idea of a relatively weak institutional domain confirms, in a sense, the observations
of Becher and Kogan (1992) and Marginson and Rhoades (2002), that managerial
strength within a system’s institutions infuses them with an extra-institutional perspec-
tive (i.e. public [or state] values can override internally generated institutional politics
and values). As higher education systems and the institutions within them look more and
more, and more closely, at others throughout the world, certain compatibilities and
affinities evident in microcosmographia may be important factors guiding the extent to
which practices can be transposed.
Extensions: hotlines, chain reactions and neural networks

The preceding cases aim to demonstrate the illustrative power of microcosmographia.
While Clark’s triangle offered a comparative snapshot in time, this new heuristic
acknowledges that changes over time are possible in the three forces he represents
and that the three forces differ between systems.
Certain actors at the corners of each domain have particular influences, affinities
and repulsions from certain other actors in their own and other domains. If they
exercise relative power within their domain, these other areas might gain or lose
strength accordingly. These affinities we might call hotlines. Some are mutual,
and some are one-way channels for directive input. In Australia, coordinating
power has been somewhat professionalized by managers and bureaucracy, leaving
other perspectives in their wake. It is conceivable, however, that alliances
between students and academic unions could collectively influence politics and
populace, awakening new dynamics. In Chile, the most businesslike intentions of
managers are tempered by a mindfulness both of the underlying lack of political
consensus over the governmental role in higher education and of market conditions
that often lend themselves more to tactical agility than long-term strategy – to
resolve such uncertainty, it would seem that managers and politicians are poised
to engage more closely, which in turn might pull the cursor of coordination away
from competition.
It is possible chain reactions might follow from hotlines, or that neural network-like
affinities ‘conduct’ sympathetic interactions through the heuristic. For example, a
dominant role for politics, and for the public domain within the central triangle, might
lead – via a linked bureaucracy – to a strong managerial role within the institutional
domain, and crucial resource markets in a tightly controlled competition domain. Such
a chain reaction may cycle on and on, and gain or lose strength and fidelity to its original
impetus as it goes – microcosmographia seeks to track such progressions.
Conclusion
Microcosmographia seeks to harness the simplicity of Clark’s presentation to enable its
basic idea to continue to be analytically useful as higher education systems evolve over
time. The new heuristic extends Clark’s vertices to broader, essential concepts. Clark’s
triangle showed higher education systems poised at an epoch; radical reforms within
higher education and throughout systems of government and societies globally were
about to take hold. Clark’s visual hint of a move towards the market has come true;
the triangle did not anticipate other crucial shifts, however. Much research has used
Clark’s triangle to examine changed circumstances, leading to changes in the way
the triangle has been configured. As we witness increasingly rapid changes for
higher education institutions, for state sovereignty, international regimes and
cooperation, and for the way business is transacted, microcosmographia prompts us
to follow these changes rather than stereotype states as monoliths, institutions as
fiefdoms or markets as invisible – or helping – hands. Microcosmographia allows
us to assay the prospects for coordination in the future, and to examine the functioning
of the basic forces identified by Clark.
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This article was downloaded by: [Universiti Sains Malaysia]

On: 09 September 2013, At: 00:20

Studies in Higher Education

Keeping up with coordination: from

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.564609

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Keeping up with coordination: from Clark’s triangle to

In 1986 (first published 1983) Clark’s triangle of coordination compared national

higher education systems according to the dimensions of state authority, market

Coordination in higher education

ISSN 0307-5079 print/ISSN 1470-174X online

State and market can be conceived of as opposite extremes of a kind of continuum;

Evolution, directionality and nomenclature

Figure 1. Clark’s triangle with 1983’s ‘extreme cases’.

Marginson and Rhoades go so far as to alter the triangle so that it is no longer an

Figure 2. The permuted triangle?

Figure 3. Jongbloed’s churning triangle (2003, 132, Figure 2).

Figure 4. Burke’s creative accounting (2005, 23, Figure 1.1).

Microcosmographia: the heuristic

Figure 6. Microcosmographia: from vertices to domains.

possibility to trace structural transformations in higher education by informing shifts

The make-up and significance of domains

its implications elsewhere in the competition domain as an extension of their field’s

insight into evolving systems.

Figure 7. Clark’s triangle relabelled and populated with 2011 examples.

Figure 8. Microcosmographia populated for 2011 as per Figure 7.

goods.) The situation is further complicated by a vocational sector consisting of

Extensions: hotlines, chain reactions and neural networks

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