This article explores the important role played by higher education in broader skills and economic development policies in England and Scotland. It places the often divergent policy experiments and structural developments in these two countries' higher education systems within an international policy context and explains why England and…

This paper investigates whether students' personal happiness is different from student satisfaction and considers if this may have consequences for university policy and management. It does this by comparing happiness and satisfaction in two cohorts of students from two United Kingdom universities. One is a distinctive research university and…

Shared governance has been a key historical characteristic of higher education although this form of governance has come under increased pressure in recent decades. It is often argued that shared governance is less relevant for tackling the challenges related to a more dynamic environment of the sector. This paper discusses underlying premises for…

Some universities rely on their élitism as one mechanism to attract and retain talented faculty. This paper examines two groups of élite and non-élite universities and the mediating effect that work engagement has on affective commitment and intention to quit. Findings indicate partial support for the mediating effect of work engagement in the…

The purpose of this article is to examine the validity of perceptions by academic staff about their past and present workload and working hours. Retrospective assessments are compared with time-series data. The data are drawn from four mail surveys among academic staff in Norwegian universities undertaken in the period 1982-2008. The findings show…

The article adopts a comparative approach to review three periods of theory development in research into higher education policy implementation. Given the conceptual affinity between Cerych and Sabatier's 1986 seminal study into higher education policy implementation and public policy implementation theory, the field of public policy is chosen for…

This paper analyses junior academic staff's (assistant professors) perceptions of academic work in a highly decentralised Canadian "system". Drawing on recent work by the authors on Canadian university tenure processes and remuneration, the paper compares the perceptions of assistant professor respondents with senior (associate full professor)…

One sees various efforts in developed as well as in developing economies to seek a greater participation of lower-income students in their nation's leading universities. Once lower-income students do enroll in a highly selective institution, what happens to them? How well do they do academically when compared to their more wealthy counterparts?…

The increasing opportunities created for adults by on-line distance universities raise important issues about the payoff to such education. This study uses a unique set of survey data gathered by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in 2009 to estimate the earnings gains of the 2000-2003 cohorts of UOC students in six programmes of study over an…

The need to provide more significant rewards for "teaching excellence" in order to provide parity of status with research in higher education has often been asserted. This paper examines ways in which the idea of rewarding excellent teaching has been understood and translated within a large teaching and learning initiative that was overtly based…

This article examines two groups of Bedouin women who studied in different cultural spaces. The first group, due to a lack of high schools in the Negev (during the 1970s), were obliged to leave the village to study and reside in boarding schools in the central and northern regions of Israel. These women returned to their society of origin after…

This paper contributes to current debates about the contradictory character of approaches to learning and teaching in UK higher education by suggesting an ideal-typical distinction between an academic orientation and an instrumental orientation. The paper suggests that these two distinctive orientations are associated with different kinds of…

University managers should be aware of the importance that efficiency has for their own universities, orientating their actions towards research and teaching excellence. This study estimates teaching and research efficiency of the different departments of a university and tests the complementariness versus trade-off between them. The results…

This article categorises the different criteria and weightings used to determine promotions in UK universities. The criteria were analysed to determine the extent to which they recognise research and teaching equally as evidence for promotion. The results show that universities have largely adopted formal parity in the criteria for senior and…

Higher education in Germany and Australia is being subject to pressures of market forces, internationalisation and financial constraints. This had led to both systems experiencing significant crisis and change over the past 20 years. In this paper, frame analysis is used to compare the changing policies in each nation and examine the extent to…