Universities and Pricing on Higher Education Markets

Markets and prices in higher education. When can we speak of markets, and when markets exist, how are prices set

Conceptions and expectations of research collaboration in the European social sciences: Research policies, institutional contexts and the autonomy of the scientific field

This paper investigates the interactions between policy drivers and academic practice in international research collaboration. It draws on the case of the Open Research Area (ORA), a funding scheme in the social sciences across four national research agencies, seeking to boost collaboration by supporting “integrated” projects. The paper discusses the scheme’s governance and its place within the European policy space before turning to awarded researchers’ perceptions of its originality and impact on their project’s emergence and development. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, we analyse the scheme’s capacity to challenge researchers’ habitual collaborative practice as well as the hierarchical foundations of the social science field. We relate the discourses of researchers, located in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, to such structural dimensions of the academic profession as, disciplinary cultures, institutional environments and national performance management of research careers. The paper argues that the ORA introduces novel mechanisms of power sharing and answerability in social sciences research capable of unsettling the autonomy of the scientific field. This analysis offers a new perspective on the often unquestioned superiority of the model of international collaboration induced by schemes such as ORA

The European Center of Science Productivity: Research Universities and Institutes in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom

Growth in scientific productivity over the 20th century resulted significantly from three major countries in European science—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We chart the development of universities and research institutes that bolster Europe’s key position in global science. We uncover both stable and dynamic patterns of productivity in the fields of STEM, including health, over the twentieth century. On-going internationalization of higher education and science has been accompanied by increasing competition and collaboration. Despite policy goals to foster innovation and expand research capacity, policies cannot fully account for the differential growth of scientific productivity we chart from 1975 to 2010. Our neoinstitutional framework facilitates explanation of differences in institutional settings, organizational forms, and organizations that produce the most European research. We measure growth of published peer-reviewed articles indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). Organizational forms vary in their contributions, with universities accounting for nearly half but rising in France; ultrastable in Germany at four-fifths, and growing at around two-thirds in the UK. Differing institutionalization pathways created the conditions necessary for continuous, but varying growth in scientific productivity in the European center of global science. The research university is central in all three countries, and we identify organizations leading in research output. Few analyses explicitly compare across time, space, and different levels of analysis. We show how important European science has been to overall global science productivity. In-depth comparisons, especially the organizational fields and forms in which science is produced, are crucial if policy is to support research and development

Scandinavian Flagship Universities: an Appraisal of Leading National Universities in the European Context

In the immediate post-Sputnik era, Clark Kerr saw America’s breed of universities as “multiversities,” characterized by growing enrollment, an increasingly diversified academic community, and as the emerging driver of knowledge production and innovation (Kerr 2001: xi). This is now a widely shared vision throughout the world. Governments have provided additional funding, fueling further growth in academic programs and attracting talent. One result: the number of perceived stakeholders has increased, along with their expectations

The new political economy of higher education: between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector?s emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the introduction for the special issue, this article makes the case for a multidimensional strategy to probe higher education?s competitive transformation. In terms of conceptualizing the major empirical shifts, we argue for analyzing three core phenomena: varieties of academic capitalism, the discursive construction of inequality, and the transformation of hierarchies in competitive settings. With respect to theoretical tools, we emphasize the complementary contributions of institutional, class-oriented, and discourse analytical approaches. As this introduction elaborates and the contributions to the special issue demonstrate, critical dialog among different analytical traditions over the interpretation of change is crucial for improving established understandings. Arguably, it is essential for clarifying the respective roles of capitalist power and hierarchical rule in the construction of the sector?s new order

The Principles of Campus Conception: A Spatial and Organizational Genealogy.What knowledge Can We Use from a Historical Study in Order to Analyse the Design Processes of a New Campus?

International audienceThis chapter participates to the interest of scholars concerning the relationship between spatial structure and organisational practice. Most researches analyse this relationship through built-up spaces and few studies are focusing on design phase. The study of design processes – organisational and spatial – raises methodological challenges and interrogate how the relationship between these processes could be analysed. In order to discuss the nature of the relationship between both designs: organisational and spatial, this contribution relies on an analysis of the conception processes of a campus.The hypothesis is that a genealogical approach of the history of campus architecture could reveal some specific properties of the campus and could generate a tool – an analytical framework – in order to explore the campus design project processes

Internationalisation and migrant academics: the hidden narratives of mobility

Internationalisation is a dominant policy discourse in higher education today. It is invariably presented as an ideologically neutral, coherent, disembodied, knowledgedriven policy intervention - an unconditional good. Yet it is a complex assemblage of values linked not only to economic growth and prosperity, but also to global citizenship, transnational identity capital, social cohesion, intercultural competencies and soft power (Clifford and Montgomery 2014; De Wit et al. 2015; Kim 2017; Lomer 2016; Stier 2004). Mobility is the sine qua non of the global academy (Sheller 2014). International movements, flows and networks are perceived as valuable transnational and transferable identity capital and as counterpoints to intellectual parochialism. Fluidity metaphors abound as an antidote to stasis e.g. flows, flux and circulations (Urry 2007). For some, internationalisation is conceptually linked to the political economy of neoliberalism and the spatial extension of the market, risking commodification and commercialisation (Matus and Talburt 2009). Others raise questions about what/whose knowledge is circulating and whether internationalisation is a form of re-colonisation and convergence that seeks to homogenise higher education systems (Stromquist 2007). Internationalisation policies and practices, it seems, are complex entanglements of economic, political, social and affective domains. They are mechanisms for driving the global knowledge 2 economy and the fulfilment of personal aspirations (Hoffman 2009). Academic geographical mobility is often conflated with social mobility and career advancement (Leung 2017). However, Robertson (2010: 646) suggested that ‘the romance of movement and mobility ought to be the first clue that this is something we ought to be particularly curious about.