From regional alliances to global aspirations: University perspectives from East and Southeast Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Examines higher education regionalization in East and Southeast Asia. • Analyzes rationales behind university memberships in regional university associations. • Argues that memberships in regional university associations are linked to universities’ pursuit of cognitive legitimacy. • Demonstrates that universities pursue cognitive legitimacy through substantive engagement in internationalization and symbolic alignment with a globally legitimized university model. Research on higher education regionalization often emphasizes policy influences and regional contexts while overlooking its intricate connections to global processes. This study theorizes the relationship between supra-national regional and global dynamics in higher education by examining the rationales behind university memberships in regional university associations in East and Southeast Asia. Drawing on interviews with 17 leaders from 15 universities in the region, the findings show that universities join regional university associations both to substantively advance internationalization by expanding international opportunities for students, faculty, and institutional partnerships, and to symbolically signal an identity as globally oriented, research-intensive, and multi-disciplinary institutions. Using the concept of cognitive legitimacy from organizational sociology, this study argues that memberships in regional university associations enhance universities’ cognitive legitimacy in the global higher education field through both substantive engagement in internationalization and symbolic alignment with a globally legitimized university model. Ultimately, the findings highlight that higher education regionalization is not merely a regional phenomenon but deeply interconnected with global processes shaping higher education. In practical terms, the study underscores the strategic importance of regional partnerships as pathways for universities to strengthen their influence on both regional and global stages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".