Adaptivity as an Institutional Characteristic of Agents in Higher Education
Maksim Golovchin
It is well known that higher education undergoes multiple transformations, which affect the organizational culture of every participant. The article discusses the adaptation of educational agents to the institutional changes taking place in higher education. The author puts forward a hypothesis of the connection of inconsistent and forced educational reforms with the general non-adaptability of agents to them.
The author considers the possibilities of using adaptive environments and conditions – the concept of bounded rationality (H. Simon, O. Williamson, F.A. Hayek, I.U. Zulkarnaev, etc.) and the concept of adaptive rationality (A.D. Chernyavsky, V.L. Tambovtsev, V.V. Volchik, O.S. Sukharev, etc.) on the basis of generalized data of the types of educational agents that contribute to a change in institutional conditions: nonconformists (moderate and extreme), opportunists and conformists (moderate and extreme). The author highlights the main (attitude to innovation) and additional (role in innovation and reaction to innovations) features that are characteristic of this or that type of agent in higher education. The proposed mathematical apparatus for aggregating these traits into an integral indicator is the index of intentionalization.
The author’s typology was tested on the basis of an expert survey among university professors of the Vologda Region conducted in 2019 (53 experts were interviewed). Based on the analysis of expert assessments, it was revealed that representatives of the teaching staff suffer from losses due to their non-involvement in a number of transplant-institutions. This is increasingly manifested in professional activities. As a result of the calculations, it was revealed that the most common are characteristics of moderate non-conformism and opportunism of agents, which, most likely, indicates inadaptability of teachers in the existing conditions.
The author gives recommendations how to introduce a flexible system of adaptation of teaching staff to create comfortable working conditions in the face of general turbulence in the state policy.