Ivar Bleiklie – författare

In this book, an international group of leading higher education researchers draw on a wealth of social theory and comparative, empirical research to analyse current developments and their implications. Different contributions focus on different levels of higher education, the system, the institution and the academic practitioner, in different national and international contexts. However, strong common themes bind these contributions together. They include not only the significance of massification, globalisation, neo-liberalism and managerialism for the governance of higher education, its knowledge and values, but also the complexities of change processes, the importance of context and history and the strength of the stabilities that remain.

The inspiration for this work comes from the career and personal influence of an individual scholar, Maurice Kogan. A central feature of his work has been empirically grounded analysis of interconnections between knowledge, values, authority and power and how these are reflected in institutional structures and individual practices. As a historian as well as a political scientist, he has always insisted on locating contemporary developments in a longer term perspective.

This volume is for researchers in higher education studies, students in postgraduate courses in higher education policy and management, higher education policy makers in national and international organisations, higher education institutional leaders, senior academics, managers and administrators.

Professor Teboho Moja, New York University, USA:

"It will be an invaluable resource inter alia for higher education students, scholars, and institutional leadership."

"The book could provide a major contribution to the field of higher education because of the different perspective different authors present and an array of issues as well as frameworks to discuss them."

"This book is bound for the desktops instead of the bookshelves of administrators, researchers, and graduate students. It is likely to be used time and again as readers explore new ways to transform education systems or institutions, meet their needs for program improvement, policy development, and general research. I expect that most readers will weave through the chapters (...) on an as-needed basis, until they have engaged all its excellent content."

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.

Higher education reforms have been on the agenda of Western European countries for 25 years, trying to deal with self governed professional bureaucracies politically weakened by massification when an emerging common understanding enhanced their role as major actors in knowledge based economies. While university systems are deeply embedded in national settings, the ex post rationale of still on-going reforms is surprisingly uniform and “de-nationalized”. They promote (1) the “organizational turn” of universities, to varying extent substituting collegial loosely coupled entities by “integrated, goal-oriented entities deliberately choosing their own actions (and therefore open to differentiation), that can thus be held responsible for what they do” (2) the diversification of stakeholders, supposedly offering solutions to problems as various as the democratisation of universities, the shrinking of State budget resources and the diversification of university missions offering answers to changes in the making and in the use of science.

When it comes to accounting for these reforms, two grand narratives of public management share the floor. NPM implies a strengthening of the capacity of the core State to direct public services organizations through management by objectives and results or contractualization, assessment, evaluation and. “Governance” focuses on “network-based” governance systems, where coordinating power and control are collectively shared between the major ‘social actors or partners’ at all levels of the decision-making system. Our results suggest that all higher education systems under study were more or less transformed according to both these narratives. It is therefore needed to understand how they combine or create contradictions. This leads us to test a third neo-weberian model. This model reaffirms the role of the State, of representative democracy, (central, regional and local), of public law (suitably modernized),preserves the idea of a public service with a distinctive status, culture and terms and conditions. It shifts from an internal orientation to bureaucratic rules towards an external orientation in meeting citizens’ needs and wishes by means of standardization of work processes and their products, based on a distinctive public service and a particular legal order survived as the foundations beneath the various packages of modernizing reforms.

This book traces the national dynamics of public policies, organizational design and steering tools in seven European higher education and research systems, using these narratives to interpret and test the actual changes and the degree of national specificities and European convergence.

This book is not a sum of national chapters like other presumably comparative. It does not intend to tell once again the story of the transformation of the relationships between the state and universities. It tries to use Higher education system to discuss issues on state intervention and steering and more generally the NPM, governance and neo-weberian models in a specific field.

Furthermore, this book intends breaking the walls between specialists in higher education and specialist in public management and research policy. This well rooted division of labour is less that ever justified as the university mission in research (fundamental, applied, strategic) is underscored by commentors and reformers themselves. For that reason, we have chosen to observe the consequences of the dynamics of public policies, organizational design and steering tools on two specific issues related to the development of research training and organizing within universities: the transformation of research funding on the one hand and the expansion of graduate studies and doctoral schools on the other.

This book asks how modern universities are organized and managed, and questions whether 30 years of university reforms have resulted in stronger managerial structures and leadership control. It further asks whether current organisational and decision-making structures can be explained by public reform policies. The book offers a coherent, empirically grounded and theoretically driven presentation of data and core ideas behind a large scale comparative study of 26 universities across eight European countries. It focuses on the strength of university managerial structures, the role of academics, and how universities relate to and depend on their environment: to governments and other actors; to funders; to evaluators; and to external stakeholders. It further explores how higher education policies are shaped by and affect universities. Written by a cross-disciplinary team of European scholars, this book is unique both in its wide coverage and the depth of its analyses. It will be of great interest to scholars, graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the fields of organisation theory and sociology, policy studies, comparative public policy and administration, and higher education studies. It will also be of interest to higher education policy makers and administrators.