The Virtual University Is . . . The University Made Concrete?

The application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to higher education has recently gained a new impetus, fired by the promise, and also perhaps the threat, of the 'virtual' university. While there has been much empirical research on individual ICT initiatives, most of this has been narrowly evaluative with little attention paid to their cumulative impacts on the university as an institution. Equally, while there has been much writing on the development of virtual higher education, much of this has been speculative, concerned with the advent of still marginal new institutions and little of it has been empirically grounded. This paper is based on in-depth studies of ICT initiatives in four established universities in the North East of England. It argues that one of the consequences, often unintended, of the introduction of these technologies has been to generate demands and pressures for a more corporate institutional form in which goals, roles, identities and procedures are made explicit and standardized across the institution. To the degree that these demands are met, the result appears to be that the closer that institutions move towards the goal of becoming a virtual university, the more corporate, or 'concrete', their institutional form becomes.