1. The role of institutional research in positioning higher education institutions – practices in CEE countries Manja Klemenčič Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Harvard University 27 th Annual EAIR Forum 2015 Krems, Austria 31 August 2015

2. Institutional positioning in higher education as “the process through which HEIs locate themselves in specific niches within the higher education system and these niches (sets of relations) are expected to positively contribute to institutional functioning and performance” (Fumasoli and Huisman 2013) Imperatives towards institutional positioning: from market (enhanced competition for scares resources) and state (responding to changing societal needs) Capabilities for institutional positioning: real opportunities and positive freedoms of institutions (i.e. their decision-makers) to critically shape their responsiveness to higher education environment for the purposes of institutional survival and improved functioning - > deliberate strategic action embedded in heavily institutionalized higher education system and shaped by strategic resources (such as status and prestige) Institutional positioning in higher education

3. Institutional research to feed data and analyses into decision processes towards deliberate positioning is indispensable. Institutional research most often defined as “research conducted within an institution of higher education to provide information which supports institutional planning, policy formation and decision making” (Saupe 1990). The kind of information that is needed for strategic positioning is especially contextual intelligence (if we take Terenzini’s (1993) three tiers: technical and analytical – tier 1; issues intelligence – tier 2, and contextual intelligence – tier 3). The role of institutional research in deliberate institutional positioning

4. The practices of collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing institutional data generally serve two major purposes: - to fulfill mandatory reporting requirements and assessment, - to support university decision-making and planning. Emphasis of institutional research remains on the reporting since the capacity for institutional research is in most universities still fairly limited: - there are a few institutional researchers employed - institutional researchers tend to work with centralized, yet non-integrated information systems Major role of the state in prompting and crucially shaping institutional change in university practice in IR: change in the type and extent of institutional micro data that is requested from regulatory and funding bodies -> exposing the weaknesses in the existing national systems of data collection and analyses. Institutional research in CEE

5. How to develop culture of institutional research that will enable and nurture involvement of students and staff with institutional research and university quality improvement? How to ensure that platforms of institutional research and decision support systems strengthen student and staff agency to act freely, innovate internally and engage externally? Tensions in how institutional research is conceived to support institutional positioning decisions 5

6. Thank you! manjaklemencic@fas.harvard.edu Your experience, your comments? 6