Abstract
Competition in higher education is widespread. Its prevalence is accompanied by increasing interrelations between different
competitions. This article systematically analyses the as yet underexplored intellectual structure of the international scholarly
discussion on competition in higher education, including its relation to science and industry, based on a combination of
bibliometric coupling and qualitative content analysis using a database of 2136 articles. We find evidence for a heterarchical
intellectual structure dominated by six thematic clusters: ‘global organizational status competition’, ‘innovation and university-industry
linkages’, ‘academics' resources in competition’, ‘management of organizational service quality’, ‘social inequalities
and organizational status’ and ‘diffusion of student-related
financial policies’. Each cluster highlights a different way of framing
competition. We find that these framings are loosely coupled and that the interdependency between different competitions is
under-analysed.
Additionally, we provide an exemplary examination of country-specific
patterns of competition discourse and
uncover local variants of global competition imaginaries. By means of the concept of multiple competition, we emphasise this
interrelatedness and outline propositions to guide further research.