Comparative Analysis: Assessing the Institutional Impact of Disruptions

The previous chapters provided an in-depth analysis of the ways in which Brexit and COVID-19 impacted student mobility policies in England, France, and Germany between 2016 and 2021. In the following, more general insights into the ways the disruptions played out across different country settings are developed. First, the three-country comparison zooms in on how the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive dimensions of HE internationalisation in each country were affected by Brexit and COVID-19, respectively. Then the overall institutional impact (i.e., radical/partial change or stability) of both disruptions across the country cases is compared in order to discern more general patterns of disruption-related institutional stability and change. As part of this analysis, the theoretical expectations and competing analytical scenarios developed in Chapter 4 are evaluated. The comparison concludes with some further inductively derived findings.