Christine Musselin - Böcker

How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the quality of a product in relation to other products. Only by recognizing qualities and perceiving quality differences can purchasers make non-random choices, and price differences between goods be justified. "Quality" is not a natural given, but the outcome of a social process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits, and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space. While we normally take the quality of goods for granted, quality at a closer look is the outcome of a highly complex process of construction involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries engaged in judgment, evaluation, categorization, and measurement.The authors in this volume investigate the processes through which the quality of goods is established. They also investigate how product qualities are contested and how they change over time. The empirical cases discussed cover a broad range of markets in which quality is especially difficult to assess. The cases include: halal food, funeral markets, wine, labor, school choice, financial products, antiques, and counterfeit goods. The book contributes to the sociology of markets. At the same time it connects to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through cognitive processes of classification.

The main point of this book is to argue that French universities experienced a quiet but important change during the last decade, which allowed them to become pertinent and more autonomous actors within the French university system.

The main point of this book is to argue that French universities experienced a quiet but important change during the last decade, which allowed them to become pertinent and more autonomous actors within the French university system.

On the occasion of Mary Henkel’s seventieth birthday a group of her colleagues have come together to write this volume of articles as a tribute to her work and a token of gratitude for contributions to higher education research. The authors analyse these developments leading up to and possibly beyond the present in a tribute to Mary Henkel’s work using her birthday as an occasion to focus attention on her contributions to higher education research – something she would normally seek to avoid.This book is also a contribute to understanding how research in higher education has developed since its origins as Mary Henkel was one of its founding scholars together with other well-known researchers such as Maurice Kogan, Guy Neave, Ulrich Teichler, Martin Trow, Burton Clark, etc. The book will be useful to all researchers in areas related to higher education, namely governance, academic work, academic identities and quality.

The high level Douro seminars are now a well-established tradition in the annual activities promoted by Hedda, a European consortium of nine centres and ins- tutes devoted to research on higher education, and CIPES, its Portuguese associated centre. At the seminars, each member of a small group of invited researchers presents and discusses an original research-based paper that is revised afterwards taking into account the comments of the participating colleagues. The revised papers form the basis for the annual thematic book published by Springer in the book series called Higher Education Dynamics (HEDY). Paying tribute to the regularity of the seminars, it was decided that the volumes originating from the initiative would be collected in a ‘series in the series’ called the Douro Series. Previous seminars were dedicated to in-depth analyses of different aspects of higher education systems and institutions, including institutional governance, the emergence of managerialism, markets as instruments of public policy, cost-sharing and accessibility of students to higher education and developments in quality assurance. The present volume aims at analysing the change process which the European university is undergoing as a consequence of European integration efforts. In the case of higher education, these have materialised, amongst other things, in the - plementation of the Bologna process, while the Lisbon summit also has important consequences for the university. In March 2000, the Lisbon European Council set the goal for the EU to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world by 2010.

On the occasion of Mary Henkel’s seventieth birthday a group of her colleagues have come together to write this volume of articles as a tribute to her work and a token of gratitude for contributions to higher education research. The authors analyse these developments leading up to and possibly beyond the present in a tribute to Mary Henkel’s work using her birthday as an occasion to focus attention on her contributions to higher education research – something she would normally seek to avoid.This book is also a contribute to understanding how research in higher education has developed since its origins as Mary Henkel was one of its founding scholars together with other well-known researchers such as Maurice Kogan, Guy Neave, Ulrich Teichler, Martin Trow, Burton Clark, etc. The book will be useful to all researchers in areas related to higher education, namely governance, academic work, academic identities and quality.

The high level Douro seminars are now a well-established tradition in the annual activities promoted by Hedda, a European consortium of nine centres and ins- tutes devoted to research on higher education, and CIPES, its Portuguese associated centre. At the seminars, each member of a small group of invited researchers presents and discusses an original research-based paper that is revised afterwards taking into account the comments of the participating colleagues. The revised papers form the basis for the annual thematic book published by Springer in the book series called Higher Education Dynamics (HEDY). Paying tribute to the regularity of the seminars, it was decided that the volumes originating from the initiative would be collected in a ‘series in the series’ called the Douro Series. Previous seminars were dedicated to in-depth analyses of different aspects of higher education systems and institutions, including institutional governance, the emergence of managerialism, markets as instruments of public policy, cost-sharing and accessibility of students to higher education and developments in quality assurance. The present volume aims at analysing the change process which the European university is undergoing as a consequence of European integration efforts. In the case of higher education, these have materialised, amongst other things, in the - plementation of the Bologna process, while the Lisbon summit also has important consequences for the university. In March 2000, the Lisbon European Council set the goal for the EU to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world by 2010.

This book analyzes the reforms that led to a differentiated landscape of higher education systems after university practices and governance were considered poorly adapted to contemporary settings and to their new missions.