University Autonomy and Organizational Identity: What’s the Story of Regional Universities in Kazakhstan?
Illustrative photograph of a university campus in Kazakhstan. The universities discussed in this article have been anonymised. Photo credit: Abylkas Saginov Karaganda Technical University website
Danagul Yembergenova
In 2018, Kazakhstan granted public universities greater institutional autonomy, encouraging them to become more entrepreneurial, internationally competitive, and responsive to societal and economic needs. But autonomy reforms do more than change governance arrangements; they reshape how universities understand themselves.
Rather than asking whether universities have become more autonomous, our recent research asks a different question: How do universities redefine who they are when formal autonomy expands but practical constraints remain?
Universities do not begin these transformations with a blank slate. They carry organizational histories, traditions, values, and identities that have developed over decades. As new policy expectations emerge, institutions must negotiate these legacies while responding to growing pressures for internationalization, research excellence, and competitiveness.
This blog presents findings from our recent article Negotiating organizational identity under symbolic autonomy: evidence from regional universities in Kazakhstan, published in Higher Education and authored by Ahmet Aypay, Danagul Yembergenova, Aida Sagintayeva and Murat Özdemir.
Autonomy on paper – but not always in practice
Institutional autonomy has become a central feature of higher education reforms worldwide. Governments increasingly expect universities to become more innovative, internationally visible, and responsive to labor market needs while reducing direct state control. Kazakhstan has embraced this agenda through reforms intended to decentralize university governance and strengthen institutional decision-making.
However, our study suggests that legal autonomy does not automatically translate into genuine institutional freedom. Although universities have formally gained greater authority over governance and strategic planning, many regional institutions remain constrained by state funding dependence, rigid accountability requirements, ministerial performance indicators, and limited internal governance capacity. As one vice-rector puts it, “Full autonomy is not possible in an environment where the government provides funding as a founding institution.”
We describe this situation as symbolic autonomy—a condition in which universities appear autonomous in legal terms but continue to operate within strong structural constraints that limit their ability to act strategically.
Organizational identity matters as much as governance
Importantly, our research goes beyond examining whether autonomy reforms succeeded or failed. Drawing on and extending Stensaker’s framework of organizational identity, we show that identity work unfolds differently when autonomy is largely symbolic. Under these conditions, organizational identity is shaped not only by strategic ambitions but also by structural constraints, institutional histories, and regional contexts.
To explore this process, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 63 university leaders and academics across five regional public universities in Kazakhstan. Rather than evaluating policy implementation alone, we examined how institutional actors interpreted, negotiated, and experienced organizational change in their everyday work.
Five universities, five identity trajectories
Our findings reveal that there was no single response to autonomy reforms. Instead, the five universities followed distinct organizational identity trajectories. In four universities, identity change was largely driven by leadership efforts to strengthen the institution’s external image through research excellence, internationalization and global competitiveness. However, these ambitions frequently collided with practical realities, including limited resources, staff shortages, bureaucratic reporting requirements and continued ministerial oversight. Many faculty members viewed these initiatives through the lens of their everyday constraints, creating a gap between the image projected by institutional leaders and the lived experience of academic life.
Although these universities shared a broad orientation towards external prestige, they followed different identity trajectories. Some selectively adapted new ambitions while preserving long-established traditions. Others experienced fragmentation as competing priorities, historical legacies and bureaucratic pressures pulled the institution in different directions. In several cases, externally promoted institutional images proved difficult to integrate into everyday practices, leading to a decoupling between organizational identity and institutional image.
One university, however, followed a markedly different trajectory. Instead of building its identity primarily around external prestige, it grounded institutional development in local culture, regional heritage, and addressing community challenges. The university has preserved local heritage by naming classrooms and laboratories after historical figures, making local culture part of its institutional identity.
Organizational identity, thus, emerged more organically through shared values and collective engagement rather than through top-down strategic branding. Although this university continued to face many of the same structural constraints, including limited resources and bureaucratic pressures, it demonstrated stronger internal commitment and a clearer sense of shared institutional purpose.
Why this matters beyond Kazakhstan
Although our study focuses on Kazakhstan, its lessons extend well beyond one national context. Across Europe and many other higher education systems, governments continue to encourage universities to become more autonomous while simultaneously increasing accountability through performance metrics, rankings, funding conditions, and quality assurance systems. Universities are therefore expected to act independently while remaining closely monitored.
Our findings suggest that successful reforms require more than legislative changes. Universities need sufficient financial resources, governance capacity, and opportunities for meaningful participation by academic communities. Without these conditions, autonomy risks becoming largely symbolic, encouraging institutions to project ambitious public images without enabling genuine organizational transformation.
The study also suggests that regional embeddedness – strong connections to local communities, culture and history – should not simply be viewed as an obstacle to modernization. Instead, these local foundations can become valuable resources for organizational renewal, helping universities integrate external reform agendas with internally meaningful missions.
Looking ahead
Higher education reforms are often assessed by changes in governance, funding or institutional performance. Our findings suggest that another question deserves equal attention: Who do universities become as they reform?
Organizational identity cannot simply be engineered through legislation or strategic plans. It is continually negotiated through interactions among leadership, academic communities, institutional histories and structural constraints. Paying closer attention to these processes may help explain why universities experiencing similar reforms follow very different developmental paths.
As policymakers continue to promote university autonomy across Europe and beyond, paying greater attention to organizational identity may help ensure that reforms foster not only new governance structures, but also meaningful and sustainable institutional change.
Dr. Danagul Yembergenova holds a PhD from the University of Geneva. She is a researcher specializing in higher education governance, university autonomy, organizational identity, and higher education reform. Her research focuses on institutional transformation in Central Asia, with additional interests in secondary education, inclusive education,