Mapping institutional change research in higher education: A BERTopic-based topic modelling study

Öz

Research on institutional change in higher education has grown quickly, but it remains fragmented across disciplines and theoretical traditions. This study maps the thematic structure of this research in educational sciences and traces how it has changed over 34 years. I analysed the titles and abstracts of 2,623 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (Education & Educational Research, 1992–2025) with BERTopic, an embedding-based topic modelling tool. Placeholder masking kept the names of countries, nationalities and languages from shaping the topics, and key model settings are reported for reproducibility. The model produced 24 interpretable topics covering 1,824 publications. The general Structural Reforms topic fell from 65.6% of topic-assigned publications in 1992–2000 to 12.5% in 2023–2025, while more specific themes such as sustainability, transformational leadership and diversity, equity and inclusion gained weight. In 2023–2025, Digital Transformation became the largest topic (14.8%), and Artificial Intelligence Integration rose from almost zero to 8.1%. Technology-related research developed in successive waves: e-learning, emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation and generative artificial intelligence. Each wave reframed digitalisation with new concepts instead of simply continuing the previous one. These results suggest that institutional change in higher education is studied through several parallel pathways rather than a single dominant narrative. For policymakers and institutional leaders, the findings point to the need to build the capacity for change as a lasting institutional capability rather than responding to each technological, sociological and political disruption separately.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• higher education
• institutional change
• digital transformation
• topic modelling
• BERTopic
• bibliometric analysis

Yükseköğretimde kurumsal değişim araştırmalarının haritalanması: BERTopic tabanlı bir konu modelleme çalışması

Öz

Yükseköğretimde kurumsal değişime ilişkin araştırmalar son yıllarda hızla artmış, ancak farklı disiplinlere ve kuramsal geleneklere dağılmış parçalı yapısını korumuştur. Bu çalışmada, eğitim bilimleri alanındaki bu araştırmaların tematik yapısı haritalanmış ve 34 yıllık süreçte nasıl değiştiği izlenmiştir. Bu amaçla Web of Science Core Collection'ın Education & Educational Research kategorisinde 1992–2025 yılları arasında dizinlenen 2.623 yayının başlık ve özetleri, gömme (embedding) tabanlı bir konu modelleme aracı olan BERTopic ile incelenmiştir. Ülke, milliyet ve dil adlarının konuların oluşumunu etkilememesi için yer tutucu maskeleme uygulanmış, temel model ayarları ise yeniden üretilebilirlik amacıyla raporlanmıştır. Analiz sonucunda 1.824 yayını kapsayan 24 yorumlanabilir konu elde edilmiştir. Genel nitelikli Yapısal Reformlar konusunun bu yayınlar içindeki payı 1992–2000 döneminde %65,6 iken 2023–2025 döneminde %12,5'e düşmüş; buna karşın sürdürülebilirlik, dönüşümcü liderlik ve çeşitlilik, eşitlik ve kapsayıcılık gibi daha özgül temalar öne çıkmıştır. 2023–2025 döneminde Dijital Dönüşüm %14,8 ile en büyük konu hâline gelmiş, Yapay Zekâ Entegrasyonu ise neredeyse sıfırdan %8,1'e yükselmiştir. Teknolojiyle ilgili araştırmalar, e-öğrenmeden COVID-19 salgınındaki acil uzaktan eğitime, oradan da dijital dönüşüme ve üretken yapay zekâya uzanan dalgalar hâlinde ilerlemiştir. Her dalga, bir öncekinin devamı olmaktan çok dijitalleşmeyi yeni kavramlarla yeniden tanımlamıştır. Bulgular, yükseköğretimde kurumsal değişimin tek bir baskın anlatı etrafında değil, eş zamanlı ilerleyen birden fazla yol üzerinden ele alındığını düşündürmektedir. Politika yapıcılar ve kurum yöneticileri açısından ise değişim kapasitesinin, her teknolojik, sosyolojik ve politik kırılmaya ayrı ayrı tepki vermek yerine kalıcı bir kurumsal yetenek olarak geliştirilmesi gerektiğine işaret etmektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• yükseköğretim
• kurumsal değişim
• dijital dönüşüm
• konu modelleme
• BERTopic
• bibliyometrik analiz

Kaynakça

1. Aghel, M., Azam, S. F., & Md Kassim, A. A. (2025). Global research trends and emerging insights on organizational culture in higher education: A comprehensive bibliometric study. *Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education*. [https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-12-2024-0725](https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-12-2024-0725)
2. Alzahmi, R. A., Syed, R. T., Singh, D., Arshi, T. A., & Kutty, S. V. (2025). Organizational change in higher education institutions: Thematic mapping of the literature and future research agenda. *Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12*, Article 1282. [https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05650-w](https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05650-w)
3. Amalou, S. I. (2024). Organizational climate and performance in higher education: A bibliometric analyses using dimensions database. *Majapahit Journal of Islamic Finance and Management, 4*(1), 1–24. [https://doi.org/10.31538/mjifm.v4i1.55](https://doi.org/10.31538/mjifm.v4i1.55)
4. Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. *Journal of Management, 25*(3), 293–315. [https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303](https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303)
5. Aydemir, H., & Ayden, C. (2025). Yükseköğretim kurumlarında dijital dönüşüm: VOSviewer ile Web of Science tabanlı bibliyometrik analiz [Digital Transformation in Higher Education Institutions: Web of Science Based Bibliometric Analysis with VOSviewer]. *Uluslararası Ticaret ve Ekonomi Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2025*(1–2), 13–21. [https://doi.org/10.30711/utead.1740308](https://doi.org/10.30711/utead.1740308)
6. Bongaerts, J. C. (2022). The Humboldtian model of higher education and its significance for the European University on responsible consumption and production. *BHM Berg- und Hüttenmännische Monatshefte, 167*(10), 500–507. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s00501-022-01280-w](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00501-022-01280-w)
7. Campello, R. J. G. B., Moulavi, D., & Sander, J. (2013). Density-based clustering based on hierarchical density estimates. In *Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining* (pp. 160–172). Springer. [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37456-2_14](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37456-2_14)
8. Clark, B. R. (1998). *Creating entrepreneurial universities: Organizational pathways of transformation*. Pergamon.

9. Clark, B. R. (2000). Collegial entrepreneurialism in proactive universities: Lessons from Europe. *Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 32*(1), 10–19. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00091380009602704](https://doi.org/10.1080/00091380009602704)
10. Diaz-Garcia, V., Montero-Navarro, A., Rodríguez-Sánchez, J. L., & Gallego-Losada, R. (2022). Digitalization and digital transformation in higher education: A bibliometric analysis. *Frontiers in Psychology, 13*, Article 1081595. [https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1081595](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1081595)
11. Downes, S. (2005). E-learning 2.0. *eLearn, 2005*(10). [https://doi.org/10.1145/1104966.1104968](https://doi.org/10.1145/1104966.1104968)
12. Egger, R., & Yu, J. (2022). A topic modeling comparison between LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, and BERTopic to demystify Twitter posts. *Frontiers in Sociology, 7*, Article 886498. [https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.886498](https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.886498)
13. Elton, L. (2003). Dissemination of innovations in higher education: A change theory approach. *Tertiary Education and Management, 9*(3), 199–214. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2003.9967104](https://doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2003.9967104)
14. Erdmann, A., & Toro-Dupouy, L. (2025). The influence of the institutional environment on AI adoption in universities: Identifying value drivers and necessary conditions. *European Journal of Innovation Management, 28*(9), 4365–4398. [https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-04-2024-0407](https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-04-2024-0407)
15. Gikas, J., & Grant, M. M. (2013). Mobile computing devices in higher education: Student perspectives on learning with cellphones, smartphones & social media. *The Internet and Higher Education, 19*, 18–26. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2013.06.002](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2013.06.002)
16. Grootendorst, M. (2022). *BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure* [Preprint]. arXiv. [https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.05794](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.05794)
17. Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020, March 27). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. *EDUCAUSE Review*. [https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning](https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning)
18. Honnibal, M., Montani, I., Van Landeghem, S., & Boyd, A. (2020). *spaCy: Industrial-strength natural language processing in Python* [Computer software]. [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212303](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212303)
19. Kezar, A. (2018). *How colleges change: Understanding, leading, and enacting change* (2nd ed.). Routledge.
20. Kuipers, B. S., Higgs, M., Kickert, W., Tummers, L., Grandia, J., & Van der Voet, J. (2014). The management of change in public organizations: A literature review. *Public Administration, 92*(1), 1–20. [https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12040](https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12040)
21. Maes, G., & Van Hootegem, G. (2011). Toward a dynamic description of the attributes of organizational change. In A. B. Shani, R. W. Woodman, & W. A. Pasmore (Eds.), *Research in organizational change and development* (Vol. 19, pp. 191–231). Emerald Group Publishing. [https://doi.org/10.1108/S0897-3016(2011)0000019009](https://doi.org/10.1108/S0897-3016\(2011\)0000019009)
22. McInnes, L., Healy, J., & Melville, J. (2018). *UMAP: Uniform manifold approximation and projection for dimension reduction* [Preprint]. arXiv. [https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1802.03426](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1802.03426)
23. Micelotta, E., Lounsbury, M., & Greenwood, R. (2017). Pathways of institutional change: An integrative review and research agenda. *Journal of Management, 43*(6), 1885–1910. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206317699522](https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206317699522)
24. Mishra, M. (2025). A holistic review of customer experience research: Topic modelling using BERTopic. *Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 43*(4), 802–820. [https://doi.org/10.1108/MIP-09-2023-0457](https://doi.org/10.1108/MIP-09-2023-0457)
25. Monteiro, A. R., Leite, C., & Barros, R. (2025). Student-centred pedagogies in post-Bologna higher education: Research trends from 2010 to 2020. *Trends in Higher Education, 4*(4), Article 61. [https://doi.org/10.3390/higheredu4040061](https://doi.org/10.3390/higheredu4040061)
26. Ng, E., Fitzsimmons, T., Kulkarni, M., April, K., Banerjee, R., Muhr, S. L., & Ozturk, M. B. (2025). The anti-DEI agenda: Navigating the impact of Trump’s second term on diversity, equity and inclusion. *Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 44*(2), 137–150. [https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-02-2025-0116](https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-02-2025-0116)
27. Özçınar, H., & Öztürk, T. (2023). Eğitim bilimleri çalışmalarında kullanılan ağ yaklaşımının kavramsal haritalanması [Conceptual mapping of the network approach used in educational sciences studies]. *Pamukkale Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi*, (57), 333–355. [https://doi.org/10.9779/pauefd.1087757](https://doi.org/10.9779/pauefd.1087757)
28. Pappano, L. (2012, November 2). The year of the MOOC. *The New York Times*. [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html)
29. Peters, M. A. (2013). Managerialism and the neoliberal university: Prospects for new forms of “open management” in higher education. *Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, 5*(1), 11–26.
30. Pettigrew, A. M. (1985). *The awakening giant: Continuity and change in ICI*. Blackwell.
31. Raman, R., Pattnaik, D., Hughes, L., & Nedungadi, P. (2024). Unveiling the dynamics of AI applications: A review of reviews using scientometrics and BERTopic modeling. *Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 9*(3), Article 100517. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2024.100517](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2024.100517)
32. Reimers, N., & Gurevych, I. (2019). Sentence-BERT: Sentence embeddings using Siamese BERT-networks. In K. Inui, J. Jiang, V. Ng, & X. Wan (Eds.), *Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)* (pp. 3982–3992). Association for Computational Linguistics. [https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1410](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1410)
33. Sułkowski, Ł. (2023). *Managing the digital university: Paradigms, leadership, and organization*. Routledge.
34. Turner, J. H. (1997). *The institutional order: Economy, kinship, religion, polity, law, and education in evolutionary and comparative perspective*. Longman.
35. Wafa, W., Sharaai, A. H., Matthew, N. K., Ho, S. A. J., & Akhundzada, N. A. (2022). Organizational life cycle sustainability assessment (OLCSA) for a higher education institution as an organization: A systematic review and bibliometric analysis. *Sustainability, 14*(5), Article 2616. [https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052616](https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052616)
36. Wang, Z., Chen, J., Chen, J., & Chen, H. (2024). Identifying interdisciplinary topics and their evolution based on BERTopic. *Scientometrics, 129*(11), 7359–7384. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04776-5](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04776-5)
37. Wihlborg, M., & Teelken, C. (2014). Striving for uniformity, hoping for innovation and diversification: A critical review concerning the Bologna Process – Providing an overview and reflecting on the criticism. *Policy Futures in Education, 12*(8), 1084–1100. [https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2014.12.8.1084](https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2014.12.8.1084)
38. Xiao, S., Liu, Z., Zhang, P., Muennighoff, N., Lian, D., & Nie, J.-Y. (2024). C-Pack: Packed resources for general Chinese embeddings. In *Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’24)* (pp. 641–649). Association for Computing Machinery. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3626772.3657878](https://doi.org/10.1145/3626772.3657878)
39. Zhao, B., & Zhou, J. (2024). Research hotspots and trends in digitalization in higher education: A bibliometric analysis. *Heliyon, 10*(21), Article e39806. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e39806](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e39806)