Universities have come under increasing pressure to become key drivers of economic development in the age of the knowledge economy. In the case of Italy, there has been concern in recent years about quality and funding of academic institutions, but hardly any reference has been made about the impact of university quality on students' access…

Research associations tend to be voluntary by nature and therefore unstable in character, and thus are subject to threat for their continuity. History has shown that the European Educational Research Association (EERA) is not an exception to this rule. Because EERA Council and the board members are volunteers with limited time, experience and…

Drawing upon their large three-year mixed-method study comparing four English university sociology departments, the authors demonstrate the benefits to be gained from concisely recording biographical stories on life-grids. They argue that life-grids have key benefits which are important for comparative European educational research. Some of these…

New forms of activities now shape and govern the Swedish education system, based on governance through comparison. The focus on comparison can be regarded as soft governance and different types of (self-) evaluations and valuations are, at present, deeply embedded keystones in the decentralised education system. Recently this has, together with…

This article seeks to nuance arguments about the impact of broad policy technologies of auditing processes upon teachers' practices by providing empirical evidence of the effects of such processes, in context. Specifically, the article draws upon a cross section of teachers' accounts of schooling practices in a specialist, academically oriented…

This article analyses educational inequalities related to socioeconomic status (SES) in 12 Eastern European countries that participated in the International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. Economies and educational systems of these countries have undergone critical transformations since the fall of communism. The authors' analyses, using data…

Whether and to what extent we are in the process of reconstructing higher education following the Bologna Process orientation is the issue underpinning this article. To address this issue, the authors consider data from an exploratory survey conducted in a Portuguese university, focusing on the field of education. They take into account the…

The recent establishment of the European Higher Education Area and the ongoing monitoring carried out by the Bologna Follow-up Group raises the question: to what extent have the objectives of the Bologna Process been implemented in the varied higher education systems of the 47 signatory states, including the former Soviet Union states? This…

Now that universities have shifted their priorities to those of the "cash nexus", they increasingly articulate their accomplishments and validate their existence in business terms for a globally competitive academic market. But corporatizing trends and the use of bibliometric tools that rank publication and quantify scholarity impact a…

The ongoing necessity for quality and quality assurance in the entire Bologna process remains one of the main issues for European policy makers. The aims of creating comparable systems and of guaranteeing quality within higher education systems are the reasons for national developments and the eagerness to reform. The situation in two relatively…

The article reports upon findings from four multiple-perspective case studies of successful principals in challenging urban contexts. Each principal was described as making a significant difference to the quality of school education. The findings are obtained from the Polish part of the "Leading Schools Successfully in Challenging Urban Contexts:…

Two specific forms of quality are identified: Type I, which has a managerial focus and stresses fitness for purpose and accountability, and Type II, which is collegial and concerned with enhancement. Through an analysis of the literature on quality in higher education and small-scale empirical research with a sample of academic staff, this article…

Sweden and Switzerland are among the wealthiest countries in the world, but also two countries with different approaches to how to provide welfare. Sweden has followed a social democratic welfare model and Switzerland a liberal model. This has implications for how the education systems have been organised. The Programme for International Student…

The dominant view today is of a global knowledge-based economy, driven by the application of new technologies, accelerating the shift to high-skilled, high-waged European economies. This view is reflected in the expansion of higher education and the key role of higher education in national and European economic policy. The Lisbon agenda seeks to…

This article argues that the "quality" debate in education research is not so much about quality as about creating the conditions in which research and knowledge production in the field of education can be managed and steered. The criticisms of research in education have destabilised the field and promoted its closer dependence on and alignment…