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Summary

Unbundling

Powered by the growth of for-profit activities, marketisation, massification and a perceived gap between higher education degrees and the demands of an everchanging labour market, unbundling is a process of disentanglement based on the notion that higher education teaching, administration and management are akin to commercial services or products that can be divided or combined in different ways. McCowan (2017, p 736) distinguishes between two types of unbundling. The first type of unbundling occurs through the disaggregation of services or products that were previously delivered or sold together. The second type of unbundling refers to a ‘no-frills’ model where a product is stripped of its non-essential parts so it can be acquired by (and integrated into) other delivery forms and services. Advocates of unbundling view these developments as not only desirable but inevitable given the diverse needs and changing aspirations of individuals, the requirements to make products and services more accessible to a wider range of users, and the pressures on service providers to make their products and delivery mechanisms more cost-efficient and effective. Critics, however, argue that unbundling not only transforms but undermines the values, functions and modes of interaction traditionally performed by higher education institutions and their workers. From this perspective, unbundling is the unravelling of traditional forms of higher education, albeit affecting higher education systems across the globe at different rates and scales through varying intensities and differential effects (McCowan, 2017; Ivancheva et al, 2020).

There are various examples of unbundling across different phases and sectors of education, albeit higher education at the time of writing has emerged as the main site for its innovation and dissemination. A key focus for researchers working this area is the realisation, application and effects of unbundling on curriculum, the academic profession, policy reform, and interactions between public and private institutions and actors (Ivancheva et al, 2020). More concrete examples include the growing division between professionals and organisations involved in the design, delivery or assessment of courses (for example, Massive Open Online Courses; the introduction of low-cost degree courses; the outsourcing of administrative, information and communication technology, and managerial tasks to sub-contractors; the growth of teaching-only institutions; the separation of teaching from research; the expansion of distance education and multi-campus universities; and the emergence of new divisions of labour among academic and non-academic personnel).