Tension and transition between technical and conformance devices in sino-foreign university alliances towards innovativeness

Organisational literature draws a tension between technical and conformance goals and means for socio-economic development and the merits of one versus the other. However, the tension between the technical and conformance core might be transitive when the focus shifts from evaluating the outcome to assessing the intentions. This study addresses this issue in the context of the Sino-foreign university alliance and its technical-conformance tension at the earlier stages of organisational development through innovativeness. How does conformance influence the link between the intended technical core and organisational innovativeness? This study addresses the question of the tension and transition between conformance and technical core devices used in the strategic alliance formation between universities. We used a unique set of data: the MOU (memorandum of understanding) signed for the Sino-foreign alliance in the internationalisation of Chinese universities. Based on 831 MOUs (1994 to 2013) available in the press release, we coded and developed integrated three main concepts: innovativeness (dependent variable), technical core for technical devices, and conformance for normative devices. After normalising and standardising the dependent variable, we tested the direct and interaction effects. The main effect of the technical core is positive, but the main effect of the conformance core is negative. Thus, the interaction between them is positive. Furthermore, the path of the conformance-to-technical core has stronger effects on the negative correlation than the path from technical-to-conformance.