The higher education research ‘field’: key developments, questions and possibilities

Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical—smaller state and bigger market—attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the

This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between communities that conduct research on teaching and learning in higher education, focusing on Higher Education Studies (HES) and science Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). The paper responds to HES debates about the strength of its epistemological base and who belongs to that community, and to a perception that DBER is marginalized in the higher education research context. To explicate our perspective, we describe the origins and trajectories of Physics Education Research and Engineering Education Research, as exemplars of DBER. Using Turnbull, we conceptualize HES and these two exemplars as distinct knowledge spaces, with different histories, orthopraxes and participants, and hence different unifying principles, research foci and trust mechanisms. We conclude that HES, DBER and other higher education research communities stand to benefit from multidisciplinary engagement with each other, because of their different perspectives on the problems of higher education.

In this special section of Higher Education, three leading scholars in the comparative study of education speak to distinctive research questions and methods that stem from three different social science frameworks ‐ postmodernism, feminism, and political economy/political sociology. Bill Tierney, co-editor (with Ken Kempner) of The Social Role of Higher Education: Comparative Perspectives(1996), explores “The Autonomy of Knowledge and the Decline of the Subject: Postmodernism and the Study of Comparative Higher Education.” Nelly Stromquist, author of Women and Education in Latin America: Knowledge, Power, and Change (1992), examines “Gender Studies: A Global Perspective of their Evolution and Challenge to Comparative Higher Education.” And Sheila Slaughter, coauthor (with Larry L. Leslie) of Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University(1997), analyzes “Problems in Comparative Higher Education: Political Economy, Political Sociology, and Postmodernism.” Each of these contributors draws on considerable literature outside of the field of higher education to pose issues for future research and to identify a range of methods for undertaking such research in studies of higher education. Long time readers of Higher Education may remember a special issue of the journal in 1996 (volume 32, number 4) entitled, “The State of Comparative Research in Higher Education.” How is the current special issue different? Does it simply “update” the state-of-the-art review of 1996, providing a five-year rolling review of current developments? In a word, the answer is no. The contributors in 1996 for the most part work out of organizational sociology and policy sciences conceptual frameworks, which could be seen as the prevailing perspectives characterizing comparative higher education generally and scholarship in Higher Education in particular. The stories that are featured in such studies have to do with the autonomy of higher education institutions relative to national ministries and federal governments, the

Emerald Studies in Higher Education, Innovation and Technology seeks to provide a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach to these interconnected topics and invites proposals from all scholars working in these fields. The underlying purpose of this series is to demonstrate how innovations in education, educational technology and teaching can advance research and practice and help us respond to socio-economic changes and challenges. The series has a broad scope, covering many topics, including but not limited to learning analytics, open and distributed learning, technology enhanced learning, digital pedagogies, data mining, virtual and augmented realities, cloud computing, social media, educational robotics, flipped classrooms, active learning, innovation networks and many more.

While institutional logics theory has increasingly been applied in higher education research, especially in the past five years, agreement is lacking on how to approach institutional logics analysis. This results in proliferating institutional logics in higher education studies and often confuses newcomers to the field as to how to use institutional logics in their empirical research. As a response to this situation, our study outlines the state-of-the-art application of institutional logics in higher education studies through scrutinising 59 articles that apply institutional logics in organisation studies in the field of higher education. Specifically, we ask the following research questions: What approaches to institutional logics analysis are used in higher education studies? What institutional logics are identified/applied in higher education studies? What challenges are evident in applying institutional logics in higher education studies? How does the use of institutional logics in higher education research contribute to institutional logics theory? The most profound outcomes of our literature analysis are: First, we construct a novel typology of approaches to institutional logics analysis that is positioned on two-dimensions: the reasoning applied (deductive vs. inductive), and the level at which the logic is examined (societal vs. field/local); Second, we create an exhaustive list of institutional logics (over 50) applied and identified in these studies; Third, we discover major challenges in using institutional logics in higher education research. Finally, we clearly define societal-level and field-level logics and suggest a rationalisation of institutional logics approaches in order to fully utilise the explanatory power of institutional logics.

HE SUBJECT OF THIS ESSAY is a problem in the sociology of science that has long been of interest to me. That problem, a candid friend tells me, is somewhat obscured by the formidable title assigned to it. Yet, properly deciphered, the title is not nearly as opaque as it might at first seem. Consider first the signal emitted by the Roman numeral II in the main title. It informs us that the paper follows on an earlier one, “The Matthew Effect in Science, ” which I finally put into print a good many years ago.’ The ponderous, not to say lumpy, subtitle goes on to signal the direction of this follow-on. The first concept, cumulative advantage, applied to the domain of science, refers to the social processes through which various kinds of opportunities for scientific inquiry as well as the subsequent symbolic and material rewards for the results of that inquiry tend to accumulate for individual practitioners of science, as they do also for organizations engaged in scientific work. The concept of cumulative advantage directs our attention to the ways in which initial comparative advantages of trained capacity successive increments of 7 s

The massive global growth of private sectors transforms higher education. It naturally sparks great interest and debate. But analysis lags far behind, as does cross-national documentation. Promoters glorify roles (e.g., access), while critics demonize roles (e.g., moneymaking). Policy makers tend to hold simple views of what private higher education does or what they want it to do, while participants tend to generalize from their own institution. Public discussion thus often revolves around narrow and misleading declarations. The gap is large between self-serving or ill-informed views and more complex reality. Private higher education is least understood where it has just recently become prominent—and that is in much of the world. A few decades ago, private higher education was absent or marginal in most countries. Today, it captures a major or fast-increasing portion of enrollments in Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East and northern and sub-Saharan Africa, East and South Asia, and Latin America. Furthermore, new forms of private

Unplanned Educational Obsolescence: Is the ‘Traditional’ PhD Becoming Obsolete?

ABSTRACTThe present study aims to examine the leadership research in higher education in order to shed light on its development during the last two decades by revealing the evolving trends in research on leadership in higher education, the most prominent scholars working on related research, the most popular topics in related research, and the countries in which the related studies are based. Bibliometric method was employed in the analysis of the original research and review papers published in five prominent higher education journals between 1995 and 2014: Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, The Journal of Higher Education and The Review of Higher Education. The results of this bibliometric analysis show that the majority of the related articles come from three countries: the U.S.A., the UK and Australia. It is also found that the leadership research in higher education is still very scarce and has not shown any meaningful increase during the last two decades. In addition, content analysis is used to provide more in-depth information about the topical focus, purpose and methodology of the selected articles. The results of content analyses are discussed in detail, and suggestions for the future research are provided.

Drawing from a seminal article by Burton Clark that appeared in 2004 in Higher Education Policy, this paper examines the influence of organization studies in higher education policy research over the last 25 years and highlights the potential contributions for future inquiry. It argues that analysis has mainly tackled policy reforms and their impact on universities and colleges. In so doing scholars have focused on external drivers of change, specifically on policy change, and on their structural impact. Hence research in higher education has somewhat neglected the complex reality of the university as an organization possessing its own structures, cultures and practices. This implies that national policy agendas have dominated organizational research in higher education, while the views of practitioners such as institutional managers and administrators have not been sufficiently addressed. By calling for an increased focus on the university as an organization, the article discusses the need to systematize organizational research around distinctive analytical dimensions. It finally proposes a research agenda tackling various aspects of organizational change in higher education.

Higher education studies give considerable attention to understanding change. The interest in change reflects the historical conditions in which higher education emerged as a distinct field of study. Around the mid-twentieth century, a pragmatic need for an academic response to managing larger and more complex higher education institutions and systems was taking shape. This need gave rise to a tradition of studying change in higher education, which has continued into the present. To explore how higher education researchers have been grappling with the problem of change, we examine a selection of works published in this and other higher education outlets since the 1970s. We organize our exploration around three distinct yet interrelated lines of research: (a) change within higher education institutions, which in higher education studies are typically conceptualized as organizations; (b) change concerning nation-states, which are usually conceptualized as systems; and (c) transnational change, sometimes referred to also as global. Each line of research features the field’s telltale dual orientation: (i) contributing to abstract knowledge through academic inquiry, on the one hand, and (ii) generating practical and actionable insights for decision makers, on the other. We find that the field’s dual orientation shapes knowledge creation along each line of inquiry, yet with important variations. We propose more generally that higher education studies’ ability to balance the two orientations is an important source of its legitimacy as a field of research.

Cet article examine a quel point l'enseignement superieur a Hong-Kong et a Singapour a ete affecte par un aspect de la mondialisation, la force du managerialisme, en particulier dans les mecanismes et systemes de direction et de gestion qu'ont adoptes la City University of Hong-Kong et la National University of Singapore en reponse a une vague mondiale d'assurance de la qualite.

Teaching the Library to Students of Higher Education

The impact of higher education institutions on society has become the focus of significant policy attention in recent years, most prominently as part of research evaluation. This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the notion, identifying the key dimensions as source, form, trajectory, intensity, timescale and destination. While acknowledging the importance of porosity between universities and society, and the need to address critical contemporary challenges, five dangers of the impact agenda are highlighted: the normative dimension; the linear relationship; unpredictability; measurement; and instrumentalization. As a response to dominant conceptualizations, the paper proposes the notion of the generative intrinsic as a more robust basis on which to base the work of universities.ResumoO impacto das instituições de ensino superior na sociedade tem se tornado o foco de atenção política significativa nos últimos anos, mais proeminentemente como parte da avaliação da pesquisa. 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Despite increases in the number of articles published in higher education journals using structural equation modelling (SEM), research addressing their statistical sufficiency, methodological appropriateness and quantitative rigour is sparse. In response, this article provides a census of all covariance-based SEM articles published up until 2013 (N = 143) across eight leading higher education journals: The Review of Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Higher Education Research & Development and Journal of College Student Development. Several areas for improvement are found regarding the statistical application of SEM in higher education research. Recommendations are to focus on: building theoretically supported models, data screening, missing data, estimation methods, sample size and power, fit indices, validity and reliability and the testing of alternative models. Best-practice statistical guidelines for higher education researchers wishing to apply SEM to their research are provided.