This paper explores the ideological and the practical relationship between neoliberalism and New Public Management (NPM) and the sustainable development agenda of western higher education. Using the United Kingdom and specifically English universities as an example, it investigates the contradictions and the synergies between neoliberal and NPM…

At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sits the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations. In Canada, it is suggested that provinces have increased the number of accountability procedures imposed on universities and that those measures would have had an impact on professors' academic workload. This study discusses the…

This paper aims to analyse the shift in the internal power balance between managerial and academic self-governance as reflected in the perceptions of teaching and non-teaching staff on the tendencies, decision-making processes and actor's roles in these processes. The empirical data used in this paper were gathered on the basis of an on-line…

This chapter analyzes dominant discourses of European school leadership over the timespan of the last three decades and across the school systems participating in this research project. A large body of literature has portrayed a transition of ideas about school principalship toward the image of the school principal as a relatively autonomous and…

Since the end of the 1980s, the Norwegian education system has gone through major reform, influenced largely by new managerialist ideas. Strategies to renew the public sector were promoted as the new public management (NPM). This paper investigates the way ideas connected to NPM reforms have been introduced and interpreted in the Norwegian…

The advent of the new economy brought university reforms to the limelight, and higher education research concentrated on the study of interactions of multi-level, multi-actor policy reforms, to the detriment of studying policy implementation. The ebbing of implementation analysis in the mid-1980s has probably put researchers off following up…

The evolution of Italian universities in terms of growth, economic sustainability and reforms can be interpreted in the light of the élite, mass and universal access categories defined by Martin Trow. The findings from this analysis show that although the number of enrolled students and funding problems propel the Italian university system towards…

Widespread reforms of governance and funding of universities has taken place in most Western countries, many of them influenced by New Public Management (NPM), which includes intensified attempts by the government to steer academic research in a utility direction. One way to do this is through university profiles and priorities of research. This…

The 1988 University Autonomy Act conferred Portuguese universities with a considerable degree of autonomy and designed a governance system based on collegiality. Strong participation of academic and non-academic staffs and students in decisions became the rule and democratic elections of all individual or collective governance bodies were the…

Mental modeling, which is a theory about knowledge organization, has been recently studied by science educators to examine students' understanding of scientific concepts. This qualitative study investigates undergraduate students' mental models of atomic spectra. Nine second-year physics students, who have already taken the basic chemistry and…

The higher education system in Flanders is characterised by tight regulation and a tradition of excluding private providers from the sector. However, as in other European countries, the Belgian public sector has been confronted with the principles of New Public Management (NPM) and trends of liberalisation and privatisation. The same goes for the…

For more than 20 years, new public management (NPM) has been the guiding governance model of university reforms in Europe. One central aspect of this governance model is to strengthen the hierarchy within the universities. Recent research shows that the formal decision-making authority of university leaders and deans has increased in almost every…

In his article "The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries?" Brian Quinn explores to what extent and to what effect academic libraries have become "McDonaldized," according to the concept developed by sociologist George Ritzer. Quinn identifies a number of ways in which the four dimensions of…

University reforms around the world reflect many of the ideas and measures associated with the New Public Management (NPM) reform wave that emerged in Australia and New Zealand in the early 1980s. However, they also display features of the post-NPM reforms introduced in the last decade. In this article I focus on university reforms in Japan,…

This paper demonstrates how the application of New Public Management (NPM) and the accompanying rise of academic capitalism in allocating research funds in the German academic field have interacted with a change from federal pluralism to a more stratified system of universities and departments. From this change, a tendency to build cartel-like…