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"This book explores the impact of the rise of China on South East Asia, addressing the consequences for some of Asias key economic sectors, including educational services, bio-technology, financial services, and the food industry"--

By developing a series of critical typologies to assess postmodern and poststructural theories, Jarvis mount a ringing defense of the discipline's exisiting research methods and epistemologies, and he suggests that more harm than good has come of the epistemological subversion occasioned by the Third Debate.

Quality assurance (QA) regimes have become an increasingly dominant regulatory tool in the management of higher education sectors around the world. By one estimate, nearly half the countries in the world now have quality assurance systems or QA regulatory bodies for higher education. This paper explores the emergence and spread of QA regimes, the coalescence of regulatory logics around qualifications frameworks, and the broad confluence of such approaches in terms of their impact on the historically contested relationship between the state and university. By focusing on the interlocking regulatory logics provided by QA, the article explores how such approaches impose quasi-market, competitive based rationalities premised on neo-liberal managerialism using a policy discourse that is often informed by conviction rather than evidence.

abstract
The spread of quality assurance (QA) regimes in higher education has been an explosive phenomenon over the last 25 years. By one estimate, for example, half of all the countries in the world have adopted QA systems or QA regulatory agencies to oversee their higher education sector. Typically, this phenomenon is explained as a process of policy diffusion, the advent of marketization, the spread of neoliberalism, massification and, concomitantly, the emergence of a 'global market' for higher education, prompting governments to respond by validating standards, quality, and introducing certification and compliance regimes. In this paper I question the utility of these explanatory frameworks, specifically looking at the case of Hong Kong in order to explore the role coercive institutional isomorphism plays in policy adoption and the implications of this for regulatory performativity.

Frank Knight was one of the twentieth century's most illustrious economic thinkers. His writings and enquiry into the nature of method, theory and knowledge in relation to the activities of social actors, and under what circumstances and with what limitations we might adequately theorise social agency, bequeathed a rich tradition of theoretical and practical insight. Many of his writings centred on the issue of risk and uncertainty, how social actors anticipate the future and manage and mediate terrains of uncertainty and risk, and in doing so change the outcomes that obtain. Knight's contributions essentially constructed a means for assessing and measuring risk in various facets of social activity, seeding insights which remain pertinent today. As the article notes, however, despite Knight's insights and the methodological schema he constructed for probability analysis, remarkably few social sciences – including international relations – have mined his work. Ironically, much that we need to know to more effectively theorise and accommodate the conundrums of risk and uncertainty into social scientific methods Knight long ago handed down to us.

Ulrich Beck has been one of the foremost sociologists of the last few decades, single-handedly promoting the concept of risk & risk research in contemporary sociology & social theory. Indeed, his world risk society thesis has become widely popular, capturing current concerns about the consequences of modernity, fears about risk & security as a result of globalisation & its implications for the state & social organisation. Much of the discussion generated, however, has been of an abstract conceptual nature & has not always travelled well into fields such as political science, political theory & International Relations. This article introduces Beck to a wider audience while analysing his work & assessing it against recent empirical evidence in relation to the effects of globalisation on individual risk & systemic risk to the state. Tables, Figures. Adapted from the source document.

A review essay on books by (1) Bent Flyvbjerg, Mils Bruzelius, & Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2003); & (2) Cass R. Sunstein, Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2002). 1 Figure.