New Study Programs and Specializations: The Effect of Governmental Funding and Paradigmatic Development

Studies on the emergence of scientific fields and disciplines produce a number of factors influencing these processes. The present study investigates whether these factors are also relevant in the teaching domain: the emergence of new study programs and specializations within programs. The classification of internal and external factors is applied to such processes of programmatic differentiation. Drawing on social exchange and resource dependency theory, the effects of the governmental funding mechanism of educational provisions (an external factor) and the level of paradigmatic development (an internal factor) are analyzed, using a large data set on processes of differentiation in the Dutch university sector between 1974 and 1993. The two factors proved to be relevant in explaining the emergence of new programs and specializations. In the final section some anomalies and suggestions for further research are discussed.

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