The Recruitment Agent in Internationalized Higher Education: Commercial Broker and Cultural Mediator

The internationalization and marketization of higher education has resulted in U.K. universities’ increasing reliance on recruitment agents to boost international student numbers. This places agents and agencies in a position of considerable influence with regard to the educational choices that students make. These institutional and individual relationships have been investigated from a marketing perspective, contributing knowledge about the influence of recruitment agents on student decision making. However, this approach has limitations with regard to understanding the impact of agents on an international student’s subsequent experience in U.K. higher education. The article suggests that theoretical work on mobility, migration, and ethnographies of communication, including the geopolitics of text production, can provide useful lenses for analyzing how agents help international students navigate the journey into and through U.K. higher education. The notion of “cultural mediator” is introduced to analyze the role played by agents alongside that of commercial broker. We argue that future research, shaped by these alternative theoretical perspectives, may help to bridge the apparent gap in understanding between those working in international offices and those involved in teaching in an internationalized university

Evidencing the impact of teaching-related CPD: beyond the ‘Happy Sheets’

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Neutron Scattering at FRJ-2: Experimental Reports 2003

The article seeks to make sense of the choices facing the public leadership development facilitator, in design and in-the-moment programme decisions. The challenge is posited as one of situating knowledge of facilitation practices in a critical relationship with the public sector leadership literature and the critical leadership development literature. The article positions public leadership development facilitation as sitting within three pressing dilemmas, or crossroads, concerning public leadership theory, critical leadership development scholarship and facilitation scholarship. A narrative ethnographic methodology is adopted to explore the constructions of a specific public sector leadership development facilitator as a means of analysing facilitator choices in action. An interpretation of how the facilitator frames and constructs public leadership in relation to the constructions of participants is offered. The article situates facilitator choices as highly political, sitting contextually between the idealism of the public sector literature and the social identifications of participants. The authors offer two dominant forms of facilitation choices (framing and adaptive) as a heuristic for facilitators, practitioners and scholars who wish to reflect further on the role of leadership development in the public realm