Incremental institutional change and Australian universities

Much has been written and researched about transformational change and the exogenous events that result in radical institutional transformation. This paper examines institutions as building blocks of social order comprising power and politics and shared understanding to bring about change. Thelen and Mahoney (2010) go beyond a general model of change that describes the collapse of one set of institutional norms to be replaced by another. The model of change proposed takes into account both exogenous as well as endogenous factors as being the source of institutional change. They go on to state that a view of transformation change as being a result of abrupt, wholesale breakdown needs to be rethought to include incremental, endogenous shifts in thinking that can often result in fundamental transformations. This paper gives consideration to these issues to propose the Australian Higher Education sector as a unique sample in which to investigate this type of change.