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The study explores how organisational identities of Norwegian universities and colleges were affected by governmental policies concerning the quality of teaching and learning during the 1990s. By combining elements of new and old institutionalism, a neo-institutional perspective is developed emphasising how organizational identities are transformed through the interaction between the individual organisation and its environment - where governmental policies play an important role. Based on the assumption that symbols, myths and social constructions are important determinants for organizational behaviour, a study of changes in organisational identity is seen as vital for uncovering whether Norwegian higher education has been going through a fundamental reorientation about its tasks, roles and responsibilities when it comes to teaching and learning in the period between 1990 ¿ 2000.

Introduction and overview of the book / BjØrn Stensaker and Lee Harvey -- Accountability: understandings and challenges / BjØrn Stensaker and Lee Harvey -- Accountability in Australia: more power to government and market / Jeanette Baird -- Accountability in Africa: a disciplinary power in African higher education systems / Gerald Wangenge-Ouma and Patricio V. Langa -- Accountability in China: primitive attempts / Shuiyun Liu -- Accountability in Eastern Europe: becoming like everywhere else? / Paul Temple -- Accountability in Western Europe: shifting quality assurance paradigms / Andre Sursock -- Accountability in Latin America: focusing on quality assurance and funding mechanisms / Maria-Jose Lemaitre -- Accountability in the United States: sorting through an American muddle / Robert Zemsky -- Accountability and cross-border higher education: dynamics, trends and challenges / Robin Middlehurst -- Transnational accountability initiatives: the case of the EUA-audits / Alberto Amaral and Maria Jose Rosa -- Managerial and political strategies for handling accountability / William F. Massy -- Conclusions and reflections / BjØrn Stensaker and Lee Harvey.

Internationalisation and globalisation are intertwined and complex phenomena that have attracted the interest of higher education scholars for several decades. This article offers some reflections on how research on internationalisation and globalisation has developed over the years and the perspectives that appear to have dominated these studies. A key argument is that while the field is, in many ways, booming—both in the numbers of publications and with respect to topics explored—whether substantial theoretical advances have been made is questionable. Many publications still tend to be quite descriptive with shallow observations, mostly on reporting national trends and political agendas. As internationalisation and globalisation undoubtedly continue to make an impact on higher education in the years to come, there is a need for a stronger theoretical basis, which can underpin future studies. The current article discusses potential future advancements enabling a more integrated, theoretical grounding for understanding and interpreting internationalisation and globalisation in the years to come.

AbstractEuropean higher education has witnessed a substantial growth in regulatory arrangements in external quality assurance (EQA) during the last couple of decades. This current article describes the central characteristics and trajectories of this expansion, and discusses drivers of this development drawing on an institutional perspective. Empirically, three distinct, although overlapping, stages in the building up of a regulatory regime are identified — from formalization and agencification of EQA at national level, establishment of common standards at a European level, to the current stage of an emerging global market-based system. This combination of institutional layering, path-dependency, and conversion can be explained by the nature of political context and the ambiguities of regulation of quality in higher education. In the conclusion it is argued that the development of external quality assurance as a regulatory field is an example of how the dynamics of an evolving regulatory regime may in an unexpected way limit the public control of highly institutionalized fields.

Governments in Europe have emphasized the development of more autonomous public universities over the last couple of decades. Often, the aim of these reform policies has been to stimulate to a more competitive and agile higher education sector, where increased formal autonomy is perceived as a key condition to strengthen the strategic capacity of universities. These reforms have resulted in considerable shifts in the internal governance models of some universities, while others have kept their traditional governance models. In this article, instrumental and cultural perspectives derived from organizational theory are used as lenses to compare how universities with different internal governance models organize and structure their strategic development processes. Our findings suggest that internal governance models have little impact on the design and organization of strategic processes. In conclusion, it is argued that changes in internal governance arrangements alone are not enough to drive transformation in higher education institutions, and the issue of formal institutional autonomy is intimately linked to how various policy instruments at the system level are designed and coordinated.