Digitally Fielding Higher Education – How Search Engines Construct and Evoke Universities as Organizational Field Actors

Abstract Universities today are expected to act as organizations in national and global fields of higher education. The term ‘field’ has been used to group academic issues for a long time but in contemporary discourse has obtained a material factuality: universities across countries are perceived, described, and compared as acting field entities against each other – independent of regulative, spatial and cultural differences. The perception of higher education as field(s) comes with an increasing theorization and empirical investigations of fields in sociology and organization studies. It is also driven by management changes, deregulation, and distinct socio-technical devices that help navigate an opaque landscape of organizations: what sociology analyzes as a field qualifies more and more as a field beyond the analytical frame. Using student narratives of organizational case studies of three aspiring German private universities as ‘entry points’ the paper investigates the university choice infrastructure through digital search engines. It shows how disparate organizational forms are related, qualified and positioned along selected attributes to evoke directed organizational action. Profane processes of click-navigation allow for field iteration, field approximation, and search engine cascading that build and reinforce the perception of higher education as a social field.