This contribution aims at exploring the significance of the new generation of UNESCO conventions for the recognition of higher education qualifications. It discusses three possible scenarios and links them to the empirical findings of a study that compares the enabling conditions of the first generation of recognition conventions established in…

This paper describes the most likely social structure awaiting "knowledge workers" in the knowledge economies of high- and medium-income nations. Commentators from across the political spectrum and in diverse institutional positions have been noting that the source of new products and industries is increasingly "cognitive". They have been…

This paper argues that higher education has a long history of globalising, though the form of these processes has been different. Two are identified; first, a normative order based on common frameworks; second, the expansion of formal exchanges of inputs and outputs from higher education. Different countries, however, are positioned differently in…

This paper analyses the way in which global university models are adopted in research universities in Indonesia and Malaysia. It first provides the global context in which these models have evolved and the processes through which they spread. How these global models interact with local policies and institutions is the topic of the empirical part…

One of the themes of the recent sociology of higher education has been the globalisation of knowledge and the professional transfer of scientists and researchers. In this paper we show how these transfers of people and knowledge are disproportionately characteristic of: (a) some institutions; and (b) some cost centres. We argue that universities…

Globalisation, the internationalisation of academia as a whole, and the Bologna Process have recently placed European higher education in a state of change. By critically reading policies and documents on internationalisation from 16 universities in Australia, Canada, Sweden and the US, three internationalisation ideologies (idealism,…

This paper examines the organisation of the production of knowledge about international issues in US higher education, drawing on six case studies of Middle East studies. We review three key findings. First, we suggest that the American model for studying "the international" is rooted in a default, and outmoded, way of thinking about international…

This article argues that local discourses are narrowed through globalisation policies and questions whether one can characterise as "post-globalisation" a state of global and local unification in one capitalist discourse. Further, the article critically engages with such a state of the world, questioning the export of neoliberal western education…

This article presents the results of a research project concerned with analysing and identifying the discourses and related strategies used by Spanish-German trans-migrant families to support and develop bilingual and intercultural competences stemming from their transmigratory experiences. Using the biographical-narrative approach, we reconstruct…

Institutional change entails balancing multiple competing, inconsistent and often loosely coupled demands and concerns, often simultaneously. This article poses the following question: How are patterns of internationalisation of research among academic staff at universities balancing two worlds of change, that is, governance by the university…

Through the "Tuning-Latin America" competencies project, Latin American universities have been incorporated into the Bologna Process. In 2003 the European Commission approved an initiative of this project for Latin America and began to promote it among ministries, university presidents' organisations and other institutions in Latin America. This…

This paper employs new regionalism theory and regulatory regionalism theory in its analysis and theorisation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as a counter-hegemonic Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) regionalism. As (initially) the regionalisation of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, ALBA is centred around the idea…

High EdWell aware of the growing importance of the global university ranking exercises, many governments in East Asia have introduced different strategies to benchmark with leading universities in order to enhance the global competitiveness of their universities. With strong determination to do better in such global ranking exercises, universities…

Over the last two decades institutions of higher education have been subject to new modes of regulatory governance. This essay applies a "regulatory lens" to higher education governance with a view to understanding the sometimes contradictory relationship between the globalisation and regionalisation of higher education and the transformation of…

This paper analyses the relation between power and politics under the conditions of economic globalisation and transnational policy-making in education. The paper argues that power lies not only with the producers of the dominant educational discourse nor simply with the very discourse which is circulated and reproduced in national legislations,…