Working paper · In progress
Measuring Partnership Activation in Canadian and Turkish Higher Education
Alyson E. King, Osman Gültekin and M. A. Saadan Qasmani
Abstract
Internationalization strategies in both mature and emerging higher education systems increasingly report partnership counts as evidence of global engagement. This article asks what those counts measure. Drawing on neo-institutional accounts of ceremonial conformity and decoupling, and on critiques of partnership asymmetry developed within community-engaged research, we treat the memorandum of understanding as a ceremonial instrument whose signing is frequently the terminal act rather than the initiating one. We construct a comparative dataset of announced institutional partnerships at Canadian and Turkish universities and test each against observable activation within a five-year window, measured through indexed co-authorship, recorded student and staff mobility, jointly delivered programmes, doctoral co-supervision and jointly held external funding. We introduce the partnership activation rate as a diagnostic, together with a measure of agreement half-life, and report substantial non-activation in both systems reached by different routes: legitimacy maintenance under enrolment constraint in the Canadian case, capacity substitution under a national growth target in the Turkish case. The pattern recalls the interwar proliferation of bilateral instruments whose density was mistaken for the condition they were intended to produce. We argue that partnership announcement operates as institutional performance, that it is sustained by ranking, accreditation and reporting regimes which count agreements rather than audit them, and that the reform implication is not fewer partnerships but mandatory disclosure of activation. We close by proposing a reporting standard for institutional partnership portfolios.
Keywords
- MoUs
- partnership activation
- Canada
- Türkiye
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