The Structural Differentiation and Empowerment Strategies of Teaching Organizations in Chinese Universities

High-quality talent cultivation is central to China's higher education development, yet the "student-centered" undergraduate teaching reform has a limited effect on improving education quality, revealing a significant gap between reform intentions and outcomes. So it is necessary to explore the essence, causes and governance of the contrast from the organizational level. The study finds that: (1) The essence of the contrast lies in the severe differentiation pattern of university teaching organizations, where a few ideal-type organizations (high professionalism, high embeddedness) coexist with a larger number of floating-type (low embeddedness), weak-type (low professionalism), and other-type (low professionalism, low embeddedness) organizations. The overall imbalance of supply and demand affects people's perception of educational quality; (2) In the organizational field, "coercive isomorphism" and "mimetic processes" are the two main forces driving the differentiation of university teaching organizations. If left unchecked, they may further exacerbate the differentiation, leading to a shift from "four types" to a "two-tier" system; (3) In order to reduce the contrast, it is necessary to empower teaching organizations to release autonomy, empowerment requires implementing tripartite strategies: intra-organizational capacity building, inter-organizational collaboration, and extra-organizational institutional support.