Higher learning in Portugal: A Veblenian approach to the evolution of organizations and hierarchies

The present contribution is a modest and original proposal for studying organizations that once interested Veblen and that interest all of us and that could respond to the continuous, recent and not so recent, appeal that the work of a central figure of American institutionalism. Veblen can be considered in the present research as much as a source of inspiration for fresh and good ideas and working hypotheses (to a similar degree as Schumpeter is for innovation and industrial organization studies). It is surely also an important theoretical point of departure for giving an institutional bent and an evolutionary theory for the study of the internal workings of universities and the evolution of their very population through different periods of growths and crises. First, I use concepts and hypotheses that Veblen used in his studies on the American universities (from Higher Learning in America) and other relevant works. His study of the American universities were then in his time either weak or of recent creation and often with a rather low level of cumulative scholarship, a case that strangely remember us some European higher education systems such as the Portuguese case. Second, the evolutionary approach to (1) the evolution of the organizations (universities and polytechnics) and to (2) the dynamics of selection, hiring policies, promotions and mobility is better adapted for grasping the historical transformations of the national systems of higher education. The object of study is neither static nor simply reducible to representative agents. Finally, the distinction between ceremonial versus production or industrial production is reworked in order to describe some of basic mechanisms in the higher “learning” system, such as the making of hierarchies of teachers, tenure systems, and the problem of internal and external mobility. This treatment will integrate notions coming from Veblen, like ceremonial adequacy, with others from Hirschman, namely the notions of exit, voice and loyalty, Canguilhem (pathology and normal) and Spengler (the problem of order).