Distance Education Under Organizational Theories: Trends, Tensions, and Directions for Comparative and International Education

This chapter examines distance education as an organizational phenomenon shaped by global, national, and institutional forces rather than by technology or pedagogy alone. In the post-pandemic era, online learning has become widespread, yet its implementation, legitimacy, and sustainability vary significantly across higher education systems. Drawing on historical and comparative perspectives, this chapter situates distance education within long-standing debates about access, quality, governance, and equity, highlighting how recent crises and digital transformations have intensified these tensions. It argues that uneven adoption and recurring failures cannot be fully explained without attention to organizational logics, power relations, cultural meanings, and agentic responses within institutions. To address this gap, this chapter introduces and adapts five theoretical lenses – circuits of power, the model of success and success factors in internet-supported learning environments, the power of persistence, ritual governance, and an integrative organizational model of distance education success – for use in comparative and international education research. Together, these frameworks illuminate how distance education reforms are negotiated, resisted, and sustained across diverse contexts. This chapter concludes by outlining future research directions that position distance education as a critical site for examining organizational change, inequality, and institutional legitimacy in global higher education.