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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 development to explore potential coping strategies. The RBV has not previously been applied to HEIs, partly because of limited relevant strategic data. The paper explores whether or not universities possess sustainable competitive advantages and concludes that they do, particularly knowledge-based, reputational, innovative and architectural related advantages. Further research is proposed into the competitive advantages of individual HEIs. The paper argues that a resource-based perspective could provide new and valuable insights for strategy development at UK universities and that these same principles can be applied in other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses two questions relating to research: (1) what is the best environment in which to carry out research and (2) what is the best way to manage employment in order to maintain this environment? It focuses on research management in UK higher education, but attempts to generalise beyond a specifically national context. The article discusses how existing practice has evolved and highlights several problems that have arisen. It draws on the experiences of researchers at the University of Sheffield to explore the consequences of current practice and to make recommendations for research management in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments now expect universities to behave entrepreneurially generating revenues from the commercial exploitation of their intellectual assets (‘third stream’ income). This study questions whether this is possible for all universities in the UK and for all disciplines, or whether there are differences between institutions, between disciplines and even between disciplines in a single institution. Using research income from industry, charity and government departments for the period 1996–2000 as a proxy measure for third stream income, the performance of 16 UK institutions in four different disciplines (physics, engineering, history and education) was compared. Income from third stream sources varied significantly by institution and by discipline. There was also a significant disciplines × institution interaction, so that potential for generating third stream income cannot be predicted from either discipline or institution alone. A number of explanatory factors for this are considered, and the implications for university decision‐making, strategy development and collegiality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much recent debate, both in the media and in academic journals, as to the meaning of the term university. This article explores the legal meaning of the term, and the historical contingencies which have surrounded various understandings of the term. It compares the structure of the Eleemosynary Corporation—the individual colleges in Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, from which many of our conceptions of a “real” university arise—with the realities of the statutory university in the United Kingdom and Australia. It concludes that the term, although with a loaded legal and institutional meaning, is bereft of any inherent meaning conveying function, and that a debate on the role and independence of the university must be policy‐oriented but not reliant on the historical meaning of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]