Law, Market and Organizational Diversity: Turkish Universities in the Post-1981 Period

We examine the effects of a state intervention on diversity within an organizational field. Our empirical setting is the Turkish higher education field, which underwent a regime change in the early 1980s. The intervention involved an overhaul in the legal framework that included two contradictory forces: imposing a range of strict requirements that would force sameness, and introducing aspirations for greater marketization that created possibilities for competitive differentiation. Our findings from cluster analyses indicate that the regime change did alter the structure of the field. University types that became dominant were shaped either in line with the stipulations of the new regime or involved partial alterations in pre-existing types as well as re-combinations of the old with newly imposed requirements. Diversity and concentration within organizational types followed cyclical patterns over time. Our study also suggests that these results were shaped more by legal imposition and the history of the field than by competitive processes.