In the Shadow of Celebrity? World-Class University Policies and Public Value in Higher Education

The growing popularity of the concept of world-class universities raises the question of whether investing in such universities is a worthwhile use of public resources. Does concentrating public resources on the most excellent universities improve the overall quality of a higher education system, especially if definitions of excellence and world-class are made by external ranking organizations? This paper addresses that question by developing a framework for weighing up trade-offs between institutional and system performance, focusing on the potential system-wide improvements which world-class university programmes (WCUPs) may bring. Because WCUPs are in a relatively early stage of their development, systemic effects are not yet clear. We therefore analyse the ex ante reasons that policy makers have for adopting WCUPs to see if they at least seek to create these systemic benefit

Disentrenching experiment:The construction of GM-crop field trials as a social problem

The paper investigates how field experimentation of genetically modified crops became central to the French controversy on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in recent years. Initially constructed in the 1980s as a cognitive endeavor to be preserved from lay interference, field trials of genetically modi-fied crops were reconceived as “an intrusion in the social space, ” which had to be negotiated with actors from that space. In order to analyze this transforma-tion, the authors suggest that it is necessary to develop an interpretive frame-work that combines theoretical perspectives from science and technology studies and the sociology of social problems, and emphasizes the importance of the way in which actors compete in a heterogeneous public space, to put forward alternative framings of problems. The authors present a detailed analysis of the interactions and conflicts between actors in diverse social arenas in order to better understand the dynamics of this sociotechnical controversy