The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss the possible uses of higher education journal rankings, and the associated advantages and disadvantages of using them. The research involved 40 individuals--lecturers, university managers, journal editors and publishers--who represented a range of stakeholders involved with research into…

In 2010, a comprehensive reform required Italian state universities to restructure their institutional governance by revising their statutes. This interpretative paper aims to evaluate whether the Italian reform is congruent with its declarations, examine the variations in the implementation within the same country of a unitary national regulation…

The national strategy for higher education of the Albanian government (2008--2013) stated the urgent need for universities to increase their role in the social and economic development of the local and regional environment. In order to achieve this goal, the main action proposed by the strategy was the setting up of regional development centres by…

The purpose of this study is to develop a stakeholder map to describe the most important stakeholders and the process of stakeholder relationships in higher education. According to the perspective of the balanced scorecard, the classification of stakeholders integrates stakeholders into strategic management. Stakeholder maps are essential in…

Strategic planning is a common practice at higher education institutions. Furthermore, it is assumed that identifying organizational values is an essential part of the planning process. Values are often construed as foundational elements of strategic thinking that serve to "drive the plan". However, there is little conceptual or applied…

In this study, four recent self-initiated educational quality projects at Swedish universities are compared and analyzed. The article focuses on how the universities have handled the tension between external demands and internal norms. The aim is to contribute to an improved understanding of quality management in contemporary universities. On the…

In the last few years, foreign institutions have increasingly sought to establish partnerships with African universities. Likewise, African universities have increasingly sought to establish linkages with foreign institutions. Different factors suggest that these partnerships will continue to be a major focus in the future. This study draws from a…

In many quarters, attempts are underway to identify learning outcomes in higher education which are context-neutral or "generic"; such measures could provide new ways to assess and compare outputs from higher education. This paper considers potential challenges in using such broad learning outcomes across contrasting disciplinary and…

Portuguese public higher education institutions have been undergoing a major reform process since 2007. The most noticeable changes were introduced by Law 62/2007, which gave higher education institutions the option to choose between two different institutional models (foundational and public institute), and allowed the implementation of new…

The main goal of this paper, based on a content analysis of the literature about models of inter-institutional collaboration between higher education institutions, is to establish the characteristics that set them apart, contextualize each of these models in terms of the features of the setting in which they are implemented, and ascertain their…

This paper draws on research conducted across an English higher education partnership to investigate the ways in which student voice was engaged in further education colleges offering university awards through partnership arrangements. Such collaborations are characterised by the marginal presence of higher education students in an environment…

This study compares the explanatory power of two models of academic governance: dual and managerial control. The research is based on characterizations by chief academic officers of the primary decision-makers involved in 13 types of recurrent academic decisions. We examine change between responses to surveys fielded to US four-year colleges and…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss student satisfaction with Portuguese higher education institutions, and to analyse how this varies for different types of students. A survey instrument was used to collect data on students' perceptions and expectations regarding different aspects of service provision. Based on the gap model of…

Accountability and quality assurance have become central discourses in higher education policy throughout the world. However, accountability and quality assurance involve power and control. Practices and ideas about quality developed in the Global North are spreading rapidly across the Global South, leading to increased uniformity in the…

This article focuses on the understudied role of research groups contributing to develop the knowledge base of developing universities in regions lagging behind in human, financial and scientific resources. We analyse the evolution of a research group that, in less than 10 years, achieved worldwide recognition in the field of microelectronics,…