Suchergebnisse

The turn of the millennium has challenged many to give their view on the prospects for the next 1000 years. In the field of higher education, the timeframe is typically much shorter. While this may be put down partly to modesty, the dynamics of higher education make prediction a risky business. CHEPS has been in the business of higher education policy research for twenty years. To celebrate this important anniversary we offer our own contribution to the debate on the future of European higher education and research. Goals and ambitions for 2010 have been set in the context of the Bologna Declaration and the Lisbon process. What will be the results of the endeavours of those responsible for higher education and those working in higher education? We did not set out to predict any of this, but rather to present plausible and coherent stories about different possible futures. We hope that these will invoke reflection and discussion (and possibly anticipatory behaviour: back to the future!). Our contribution has built on the experience we gained with the successful 2001 CHEPS scenarios on Dutch higher education (¿The Gardens¿). In shifting our focus to Europe as a whole, we carried out a Delphi-survey to gather the views of higher education experts across Europe on the likelihood and desirability of certain developments in European higher education. The results of the two rounds of this survey were valuable inputs to our three scenarios. This 20th anniversary publication contains the three CHEPS scenarios as well as a brief report on the major findings of the Delphi-survey. We found the process to be a real creative challenge that drew on our full capacity for exchanging ideas and debating different points of view. We hope that reading and thinking about the scenarios will give you as much insight and pleasure as we have experienced in developing them.

The article examines, primarily based on large-scale survey data, the functionalist proposition that HE customers, students and employers, demand rankings to be able to adopt informed decisions on where to study and who to recruit respectively. This is contrasted to a Weberian 'conflict' perspective on rankings in which positional competition is key. The article concludes that rankings are better understood as instruments in positional competition for a minority of global players. They are a crucial source of information only for particular groups of international students and employers. The empirical analysis further suggests that the state of economic development, cultural aspects and the availability of top-ranked institutions in the home HE system are important factors in explaining differences in the importance of rankings across countries. We conclude by arguing that national governments and HE institutions should re-visit the assumption of a wide-spread importance of rankings for students and employers.

In English higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework represents a very significant recent policy lever in the continued operation of a measured market in the sector. Conceived as a policy to enhance and make further transparent the quality of teaching, it utilises a variety of key measurements to establish sets of related outcomes upon which effective teaching can be assessed. Drawing upon Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence and adopting policy framing as an analytical approach, we illustrate how the Teaching Excellence Framework and its related discursive techniques are significant in (re)producing the institutional conditions which enable market policy to operate effectively. The article focuses specifically on three core pillars of the marketisation project of English higher education that are strongly affirmed: the further enactment of students as consumers and universities as producers, the related pre-occupation with graduates' employability and future returns; and the uncritical application of metrics to signify institutions' performance value. We show how misrecognition operates by a market policy cloaking itself under the guise of student empowerment and quality, and call for academic and political practices that forge acts of resistance.

Organizational control and environmental influences on organizational behavior are central themes in organization studies, yet little effort has been made to bring them together. In this paper we seek to contribute to filling this gap by investigating and conceptualizing environmental influences on organizational control. The paper examines patterns of organizational control and their environmental couplings through three parallel case studies of public universities in three European countries. We provide a systematic characterization of the space of configurations of control in professional knowledge-intensive organizations along the two axes of centralization of power and formalization of social relationships. We show that environmental characteristics do matter for the contestation and selection of control models. Finally, we unpack and conceptualize the synergetic influence of three environmental characteristics (institutional pressures, resource environment, and external social relationships) as providing sources of legitimacy and power for specific control regimes.