Britain's higher education institutions (HEIs) face fundamental and unprecedented competitive pressures due to lower government funding (Cm 5735, "The Future of Higher Education," Department for Education and Skills, 2003) and a government agenda focused on a "widening participation agenda". We employ the resource-based view (RBV) of strategy…

In building capacity in research commercialisation and science-based entrepreneurship, Australia has adopted neither the Swedish top-down approach depending on government initiative, nor the American bottom-up approach depending on incentive systems related to university ownership of intellectual property and a highly competitive and…

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of internationalisation on academic work within a department of management in a large Australian university. It has been argued elsewhere that internationalisation strategies have transformed the nature and demands of academic work through the massification and commodification of educational…

Accreditation in higher education is examined by drawing on the experiences of academics and managers in Britain, the United States and Canada. The qualitative comments are used to deconstruct the notion of accreditation. Accreditation processes, it is argued, are not benign or apolitical but represent a power struggle that impinges on academic…

There is no lack of critical literature dealing with cyber-plagiarism and the implications for assessment in higher education. The practice of the selling of academic papers through the Internet is generally included under the category of plagiarism, although it is suggested that this ought to be considered under the separate category of…

Over the past fifteen years the rationale, organisational infrastructure and delivery of social policy in Britain have undergone radical transformation. Whereas efficiency was the key word of the 1980s, quality was the touchstone of the 1990s and quality control with accountability has become the management philosophy of the new millennium.…

This article contends that international education in Australian universities has been characterised by two waves. The first one was motivated by socio-political rationales of aid or assistance and followed Australia's participation in the Colombo Plan in 1951. The second and most recent wave occurred after the introduction of the Overseas Student…

The roles of universities have evolved over the last twenty years. Universities were once regarded as focusing on two key roles--teaching and research--which were exogenous to, and independent from, specific economic and social development imperatives. Today, it is increasingly recognised that universities perform important roles as enablers, even…

This paper argues that research assessment is of increasing importance as an instrument of New Public Management and within the context of efforts to establish a European Research Area. Specifically, it compares the procedures of research assessment in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany in an attempt to distil basic design…

This paper proposes a model of leadership within tertiary education based on research into expertise and institutional distinctiveness. It builds on two contrasting styles of institutional development. Firstly, in the traditional university (higher education) sector, promotion to senior management positions has tended to be based on academic…

This paper considers the idea of a university as it exists and is discussed in Australia at the beginning of the 21st century. Australia's history and partly derivative culture provide the relatively unintellectual context for sceptical utilitarianism in relation to a system which has expanded rapidly and is frequently described as being in…

Many constituencies external to higher education have begun promoting greater accountability. This view advocates a closer focus on the bottom line and that universities should utilise a more business-like model. One major outgrowth of this paradigm shift has been the seemingly recent emergence of outsourcing in higher education. Higher education…

This paper develops a statistical model over the 1992 to 2002 period to measure the forces that lead colleges and universities to price discriminate. Identifying those forces makes it possible to determine the kinds of schools that are better or less able to effectively price discriminate. The empirical findings strongly suggest that schools with…

This paper describes our experience of managing a two-year research project that involved University staff from two different disciplines and three industry partners. It describes the benefits we gained from the involvement of multiple parties, such as the ability to call upon diverse expertise, the capacity to study a complex issue and the…

There has been enormous growth globally in the number of both MBA providers and students over the past few decades. While inclusion in national and international MBA league-tables is part of the marketing arsenal of every MBA supplier that appears in them, identifying the determinants of success in this ever more crowded marketplace is a far less…