1. Diversity in Vietnamese public universities
Hoang Dang Nguyen – ID: – Pathway: Innovation Management and Policy (IMP)
Supervisor: Professor Jakob Edler and Professor Maria Nedeva
Research topic:
Making sense of diversity of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in a socialist, developing country.  This study examines organisational variety and responses to pressures for change.
Why Vietnam? Because it is interesting to learn how diversity can be in a place where similarity is promoted
Why public universities? Because of its dominance as well as its anticipating radical changes.
Why now? Because Vietnamese Higher Education system is undergoing a major reform, with more autnonomy to a selected group of HEIs.
Research questions:
How can we characterise diversity in Vietnamese Higher Education Institutions (VHEI) in term of strategic management and governance?
How did this diversity emerge?
How do the HEI’s reactions to autonomy influence their performance?
Grounded theory: can generate theories from data collected. Characteristics: data collection and analysis are conducted together, Constant comparison and theoretical sampling are used to support the systematic discovery of theory from the data, Develops the theory from the data collected, rather than applying a theory to the data , Theories remain grounded in the observations rather than generated in the abstract ~ the process is difficult for PhD, higher risk from novice researcher (bias), did not take advantage of governance literature.
Ethnography: focus on behavior instead of the phenomenon (forms)  not selected.
Case study: to analyze the context (Cassell and Symon, 2004). The study aims at understanding how and why the forms have worked (or not). Qualitative data allows greater understanding than Quantitative data. Mixed method is not selected as it is time consuming.
*Question: Should the first question be renamed as “How are VPU internally governed?”
Literature Review
As Whitley (2008) has shown, universities play different roles in different countries and HE systems because they depend on many factors. Diversity has been studied intensively in higher education policy and research(Reichert, 2009). However, the conceptualization and measurement of diversity have been studied insufficiently and unsatisfactorily (Huisman et al., 2015). Diversity can be described as “variety of entities within a system“(Van Vught, 2007). Diversity and variety are is generally considered to be positive for a system (Rossi, 2009; Van Vught et al., 2005). Institutional diversity is considered a positive attribute of the US HE (Morphew, 2009), and even a cornerstone of European HE systems’ strengths (Van Vught et al., 2005). However, diversity as a value in itself is seen very differently in different countries and systems (Reichert 2009).
While institutional diversity have been the main focus of the research literature, empirical studies are needed to understand the underlying factors which influence diversity at different levels of the HE system (Reichert, 2009). This is especially true in the case of socialist countries, where studies of diversity are limited.
Research design: Qualitative comparative case study (Yin, 2015)
Collection method: semi-structure interview & document analysis.
Analysis method: inductive analysis on processes in their context, data triangulation. Iterative analysis.
Characteristics: Focus on contemporary events without controlling them. Has many variables, relies on initial framework, is flexible.
Advantages: Rich and holistic understanding of the phenomenon. Can offer potential valuable findings.
Disadvantages: can be impressionistic (Cassell and Symon, 2004), bias, and challenging to perform.
What to be done:
The unit of interest are the 22 universities who are newly-granted autonomy. A typology will be developed to classify universities. After that several cases will be selected and analyzed.
Potential issues: (Yin, 2015)
Data availability
Data analysis: premature closure
Understanding performance
Theory generation
Potential mitigation strategies: (Yin, 2015)
Case selection base on referrals and connections
Careful category development
Case selection base on typology (developed in the study)
Iterative analysis
Combine local and global understanding of performance
Replication logic