THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF UNIVERSITIES IN CANADA: RATIONALES AND STRATEGIES IN CROSS-BORDER PARTNERSHIPS

In Canada, universities are intensifying their international activities to respond to the high demand to engage in international collaborations. Concurrently, in the Canadian literature, there is a growing interest regarding the study of the internationalization of universities. On the one hand, it appears that provincial variations regarding this process exists, as the results of studies conducted in Ontario and British-Columbia have shown (Buckner et al. 2020; Taskoh, 2014). On the other hand, in each province and territory, the internationalization of universities varies from institutions depending on the language of instruction, geographic location and the academic field. Therefore, it creates contrasting challenges inside the Canadian higher education system. As mentioned by Knight (2004), the features of this process (rationales, benefits, activities and stakeholders) diverge across institutions. In this study, we focus on the case of cross-border partnerships which are one of the components of the internationalization process in universities as well as on the strategies deep-rooted in the management of such partnerships. Despite the high demand from universities to engage in collaborations, developing successful and sustainable partnerships is not an easy task. Nonetheless, more attention needs to be dedicated to investigating how universities cope with their international development and best practices for success. Despite the extension of commercial logics, we state that strategies and practices emerging from the study of the management of international partnerships show great examples of how universities deal with their international development in a more collaborative way. In this light, our study aims to explore rationales and strategies in cross-border partnerships from the perspective of Quebec’s university administrators. It follows a qualitative research design and draws on the case study methodology. We interviewed international advisors and high-level office administrators from three separate French-language universities and one English-language university. We used a hybrid process of deductive and inductive analysis. The research shows that despite an economic-related rhetoric (especially when it tales to recruit international students), the participants show enthusiasm for the symbolic benefits. In terms of rationales, the participants mention building their institutional global ranking and reputation, the need to enhance research, generating revenue, the development of students’ international competencies and global perspective. At the institutional level, the findings demonstrate that administrators’ practices are driven by a combination of symbolic and pragmatic rationales and that they imbue different meanings to a same practice or activity. Moreover, the results highlight several strategies that can lead to more sustainable institutional relationships. We found that discussions of international partnerships management reflected administrators’ specific context such as language, demographics conditions and the position administrators occupy in their organisation.

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