The UK deficit: how Britain's universities are managing deep budget cuts?

C

Branding of UK higher education institutions: an integrated perspective on the content and style of welcome adresses

The transformation to a more market-oriented steering approach in European higher education challenges universities and other higher education institutions to consider developing branding or image management activities. The existing literature focuses either on the content or the style, but we argue that an integrated perspective is needed to fully grasp the processes underlying branding. In a comparative case study of ten UK higher education institutions with varying reputations – five highly reputed versus five low(er) reputed institutions – we demonstrate how and why branding is deployed in welcome addresses of institutional leaders. Our findings indicate that isomorphic tendencies are visible, although brand differentiation could also be identified between highly and lowly reputed institutions. Our findings provide support for the competitive group perspective on branding activities

Session A2: Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel: Migratory Behavior of Fish at Intertidal Fish Passes in Dutch Wadden Sea

Abstract: The Wadden Sea is a large intertidal area in the Northwest of Europe and is listed on the UNESCO’s World Heritage List (UNESCO 2009). The tributaries and estuaries in the Dutch part of the Wadden Sea are relatively small and as such have suffered extensive habitat loss and habitat degradation due to empoldering and measures ensuring flood protection e.g. pumping stations, weirs and sluices. The Wadden Sea and its intertidal barriers offer a unique opportunity to investigate migratory behaviour of fish and fish pass functioning with regards to diadromous fish. To facilitate fish migration intertidal fish passes in the Wadden Sea are often designed to temporarily let water in and/or out from tributaries. Combining the temporal aspects of aforementioned fish passes with the temporal spatial behavioural patterns of fish migration is a challenge. How to combine fish pass functioning with the needs of present fish species and different life stages? The intertidal pumping stations Duurswold, de Drie Delfzijlen en de Helsdeur are researched using telemetry. We have used acoustic telemetry (Anguilla anguilla) in order to investigate behaviour and route choice of seaward migrating silver eels. Analyses of data will provide insight in for example delay and route choice. In addition, a number of migrating silver eels have been detected along the Dutch-Belgian coast which raises the question which routes are favoured by silver eels on their way to the Sargassosea and why. At the pumping station “De Helsdeur” we have PIT-tagged a number of three spined sticklebacks to investigate fish pass functioning in relation to intertidal migratory behaviour and interspecies variation of three spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus acculuatus). Results show that sticklebacks mainly migrate during daylight and at upcoming tide

New study programs and specializations:the effects of governmental funding and paradigmatic development

Studies on the emergence of scientific fields and disciplines produce a number of factors influencing these processes. The present study investigates whether these factors are also relevant in the teaching domain: the emergence of new study programs and specializations within programs. The classification of internal and external factors is applied to such processes of programmatic differentiation. Drawing on social exchange and resource dependency theory, the effects of the governmental funding mechanism of educational provisions (an external factor) and the level of paradigmatic development (an internal factor) are analyzed, using a large data set on processes of differentiation in the Dutch university sector between 1974 and 1993. The two factors proved to be relevant in explaining the emergence of new programs and specializations. In the final section some anomalies and suggestions for further research are discussed