British Universities

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

E-ISSN: 1474-0583|3|1|85-101

ISSN: 0003-9756

Source: Archives européennes de sociologie/European Journal of Sociology, Vol.3, Iss.1, 1962-06, pp. : 85-101

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Abstract

The university is a social institution which, like any other institution, has aims or functions for its members, for other social groups and for society as a whole; it has also a structure of roles, denned, sanctioned and provided with facilities for their performance. The normative conception of the institution—in this case the ‘idea of a university’—may or may not faithfully reproduce an objective description of statistical norms of behaviour. Under conditions of institutional change the two norms do not coincide. In this essay I will consider the British university from these two points of view (i. e. the ‘idea’ of a university and the ‘facts’) in an attempt to understand the discrepancy (i. e. the processes of change which lie behind the differences between wish and reality).