The Influencing Factors and Implementation Paths of Digital Transformation in Administrative Management in Universities A Fuzzy Set Configurational Inquiry into Chinese Higher Education Administration

Abstract

This inquiry interrogates the influencing factors and the implementation paths of digital transformation inside university administrative management across the Chinese higher education terrain. The administrative core of the university remains an understudied province of digitalisation even while pedagogy and research attract dense scholarly attention (Alenezi et al., 2021). The study mobilises fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis upon an original dataset of twenty six anonymised institutions gathered through a structured questionnaire instrument. Five conditions are theorised through the technological organisational and environmental lens. These conditions are resource utilisation and external motivation and dynamic capability and digital leadership and information technology infrastructure. The outcome is administrative digital transformation success. Necessity testing reveals that digital leadership and dynamic capability and resource utilisation and infrastructure each approximate a necessary precondition while external motivation does not. Sufficiency analysis discloses three equifinal implementation paths that jointly explain the overwhelming bulk of successful cases with a solution consistency of 0.980 and a solution coverage of 0.949. The configurations crystallise into a resource dynamic coupling model and an externally impelled resource model and a compensatory environmental model. Causal asymmetry is confirmed because the recipe for transformational shortfall is not the simple negation of the recipe for success. The contribution lies in rendering administrative digitality as a conjunctural and configurational phenomenon rather than a linear additive one.