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

Operational experience of GNSS receivers with Chip Scale Atomic Clocks for baseline measurements

Currently, one of the topical issues of improving GLONASS system is modernization of its uniformity measurement equipment, including RF measurement equipment and electronic length measurement equipment. To this end, at the Spatial Reference Proving Ground of theSiberian State University of Geosystems and Technologies (SSUGT), the authors of this article carried out a successful experiment to measure a short GNSS baseline by receivers equipped with Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSACs) with instability of 10−11 showed that the mean deviation between the slant distance (D) measured using GNSS receivers connected to CSACs and their certified value varied in the range of 0.1–2.5 mm, with the average value of 0.9 mm. The mean deviation obtained using GNSS geodetic receivers not connected to CSAC and their certified value made up 9.4 mm. The obtained experimental results suggest that substitution of quartz frequency generators with temperature compensation used in geodetic GNSS receivers for Chip Scale Atomic Clocks in any metrological or verification kit increases accuracy and reliability of short baselines measurements results, which highly perspective in view of development of techniques for creating reference baselines with a reproduction error of unit length of about 1 mm per 1 km. The above-mentioned experiment opens up new horizons for the use of Chip Scale Atomic Clocks in such fields of science as metrological support of geodetic equipment, geodesy, etc

The taste for the particular: A logic of discernment in an age of omnivorousness

This article provides an analysis of two leading specialist wine magazines, Decanter and Wine Spectator, and the codification and legitimation of a ‘taste for the particular.’ Such media of connoisseurship are key institutions of evaluation and legitimation in an age of omnivorousness, but are often overlooked in research that foregrounds the agency of tasters and neglects the conventionalization of tasting norms and devices. The wine field has undergone a process of democratization typical of omnivorousness more broadly: former elite/low boundaries (operationalized in the paper through the Old/New World dichotomy) are ignored, and a discerning attitude is encouraged for wines from a diversity of regions. Drawing on the magazines’ audience profile and market position data, and a content analysis of advertising and editorial content from 2008 and 2010, I examine the differences in the use of four legitimation frames (transparency, heritage, genuineness and external validation) for the provenance elements of Old and New World wines. The analysis suggests that the Old World—typically French—notion of terroir, on which the traditional Old/New World boundary rested, has been democratized through the particularities of provenance. Yet, the analysis also reveals continuing differences between the two categories (including greater emphasis on the heritage and external validation of Old World context of production, and on the transparency and genuineness of New World producers), and the preservation of established hierarchies of taste through the application of terroir to New World wines, which retain the Old World and France as their master referent

Engineering access to higher education through higher education fairs

Text from van Zanten A., Legavre A. “Engineering access to higher education through higher education fairs”, in Goastellec G., Picard F. (ed.) The Roles of Higher Education and Research in the Fabric of Societies, Leuven, Sense Publishers, 2014 (in press). Transition to higher education is a major social process. This transition has been mostly studied by French sociologists of education and higher education from perspectives focusing predominantly on the role of the socio-economic status, academic profiles and different tracks followed by secondary school students (Merle 1996, Duru-Bellat and Kieffer 2008, Convert 2010), and, to a lesser extent, on the types of secondary schools attended (Duru-Bellat and Mingat 1998, Nakhili 2005) and the local higher education provision (Berthet et al. 2010, Orange 2013). Although these structural determinants play a major role in explaining significant regularities, they provide more powerful explanations for individuals representing the extremes of the different variables considered, leaving room for the influence of other major factors for those students in intermediate situations. In addition, even in the case of students occupying extreme positions, structural perspectives better explain the distribution of students between different higher education tracks than they do between institutions and disciplines. In this chapter, we adopt a perspective that we see as complementary to and interacting with the perspective centred on structural determinants by focusing on the role of the devices that mediate the exchanges between students and higher education institutions, and more specifically on one device: higher education fairs. Our purpose in doing so is not only to document how these various devices frame, in ways that remain largely unexplored by researchers, exchanges between providers and consumers of higher education but also to point out – and further explore in future publications – how these devices, and the specific features of fairs, contribute to the reproduction and transformation of educational inequalities in access to higher education (Benninghoff et al. 2012)

Controls of knowledge production, sharing and use in bureaucratized Professional Service Firms

One of the main obstacles to the current bureaucratization trend in large professional service firms (PSFs) is the organic nature of professional knowledge production, sharing and use. Centralized knowledge management (KM) systems aimed at codifying ‘best practice’ solutions to recurrent client questions for large-scale reuse are a common strategy increasingly employed to overcome this obstacle. Using a socio-ethnographic case study of a business law firm in Paris, this research examines whether the use of centralized KM systems in bureaucratized PSFs contributes to a shift in power from professionals to managers. More specifically, are administrative controls over knowledge resources increasing, or do professionals retain power (i.e. some level of social and self-control) over knowledge production, sharing and use? The results of this study indicate that, far from losing ground, professionals’ social and self-controls have been reinvented and reformed in a bureaucratized context

Performing Amateurism: A Study of Camgirls’ Work

International audienc