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This article offers a critical overview of Swedish anthropology as it was prior to 1960, mostly under the label “general and comparative ethnography,” together with some comments on relevant parts of the surrounding academic landscape, and on popular writings about distant peoples and countries. Major scholars are identified, and certain more important publications are briefly discussed. There is a certain emphasis on the weakness of contacts within and between academic centers. Some particular challenges for further research are noted.

Background: The outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) caused a pandemic in most countries, and how to face the pandemic is a major issue that needs to be addressed worldwide. Objectives: The current study aimed at determining the competitive advantage and scientific strength of medical sciences universities to face this pandemic. Methods: A mixed-methods was employed to conduct the current study from May to April 2020 in three steps: a) identifying the academic departments with the most exposure to this pandemic; b) designing the protocol to calculate the scientific strength and competitive advantage, c) allocating the mission to academic departments. Result: The scientific strength and competitive advantage were calculated for clinical and non-clinical departments in all medical sciences universities. The obtained results indicated that some universities, for instance, Tehran, Shahid Beheshti, Iran, Isfahan, Mazandaran, Shiraz, Kerman, and Mashhad, had the most competitive advantage that would increase their responsibility to face this pandemic. Conclusion: Policy-makers that clearly identify the mission and objectives of their institutions and define the relevant tasks may have better performance based on the capacities and abilities of the medical sciences universities.

Background and Objective: Assessment and evaluation of quality of education and performance of academic departments at universities are highly important. A common model to evaluate performance of an organization and its branches is Balanced Score Card. This study aimed to develop a model based on Balanced Score Card and Analytic Hierarchical Process in order to assess the performance of academic departments of Zanjan School of Pharmacy. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, 24 academic members of six departments of Zanjan Pharmacy School and 100 pharmacy students were surveyed. Data was gathered through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Collected data was organized by Excel and then weighted and analyzed using Expert Choice software version11 and SPSS 16. Results: According to results, in the learning environment, growth and development dimension with weighted score of 0.377, customer (0.345), process (0.158) and financial perspective (0.121) were ranked respectively. Pharmaceutics and food and drug control departments achieved highest performance respectively. Conclusion: Findings of this research could be used to provide and develop an appropriate combination of BSC and AHP techniques to give an image of four perspectives application of BSC in educational environment and in addition it can be used in planning and promoting the performance of similar educational systems by improving the quality of performance assessment and ranking.

The academic department remains understudied as a context of faculty work, particularly in institutional settings beyond the research university. In this article, we report findings from a study of faculty experiences within academic departments in liberal arts colleges, through analysis of interviews with 55 faculty members representing a 13-member consortium of liberal arts institutions in the mid-western U.S. Through inductive analysis and deductive coding from existing models, we identified five functions of departments in liberal arts colleges, including: (a) faculty hiring, retention, and promotion; (b) new faculty socialization; (c) informal interactions, mentoring, and network-building; (d) establishing and communicating institutional and departmental policies, practices, and procedures; and (e) the structuring of academic work. Findings suggest that departmental functions in liberal arts colleges are generally the same as those in other institution types, but play out differently and thus have different consequences for academic careers. Across functions, liberal arts colleges seem to be undergoing an evolution, or perhaps revolution, that has implications for academic work in such contexts.

Efficiency in the higher education system has become important as regards the sizing and shaping of the inputs according the the outputs to be achieved. At institutional level, the university is interested mostly in the efficiency of its organizational structures: faculties and the academic departments. This study is using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) – a management tool, to identify the relative technical efficiency of academic departments at Transilvania University during the academic year 2014-2015. Two types of software offer the same results, yet differently presented. The ranking of the most efficient departments allow identification of the well organized departments and faculties of the University. New input and new output variables are used to evaluate technical efficiency of academic departments face to the already used variables in all the previous published studies. The input and output variables were selected in order to characterize the two directions: academic and scientific research. The results of DEA model offer useful basis, for university leading staff, in the action of improving the efficiency of academic management.

Responsibility accounting is an administrative accounting method that measures the results of each responsibility centre. The concept of responsibility accounting is vested in costs and revenues performance. Managers are evaluated based on what is under their control. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine if responsibility accounting matters in Ugandan public universities. The paper adopted a cross-sectional survey that included both quantitative and qualitative approaches to find out if responsibility accounting matters. The qualitative data supplement quantitative data. The findings indicate that there is a system of responsibility accounting. Costs and revenues are managed at respective departments. Heads of department have authority to manage their budget-allocated estimates. They are responsible for their decisions against their budgets or votes. Costs and/or revenues are accumulated and reported upward from departments and faculties to university authorities. This study signifies that responsibility accounting follows hierarchical patterns in public universities.

Universities play an active and important role in the development of a country. They are centers for generating ideas and knowledge which relates to the development of a country's economy as well as the quality life of its citizens. For public universities, their funds come from the taxpayers contributions; hence the accountability generally must always be assured. The question on how efficient the resources are utilized in a public university then has become an important issue. However, it is a challenging task to measure relative efficiency of universities due to the fact that universities are complex organizations that utilize multiple inputs to produce multiple outputs. This paper illustrates the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure relative efficiency of twenty two academic departments of a public university in Malaysia using data collected for the year 2011. The input and output variables used in this study are those contributing to teaching/learning and research performance. The input variables considered are number of academic staff, number of non-academic staff and yearly operating expenses while the output variables are number of graduates for the year, total amount of research grant received for that year and number of academic publications by faculty members. To investigate the performance of departments with different dimensions, four models with different input-output combinations are defined. Sensitivity analysis performed suggests that different combinations of input-output yield different efficiency scores. Furthermore, when all outputs are included, the social science based departments on average perform better than the science based departments.

In this paper, we analyze the effects of research collaborations on the scientific output of academic institutions, drawing on data from the first official Italian research assessment exercise. We measure the scientific performance of a research unit as the number of publications that received an excellent grade in the evaluation process. Different aspects of scientific collaboration are taken into account, such as the degree of openness of a research team towards other institutions and/or countries, the frequency of co-authorships, and the average size of co-authoring teams. Using econometric models for count data, we find that greater and more frequent knowledge exchange resulting from collaboration with external or foreign colleagues increase researchers’ productivity.

In this paper, we analyse the effects of research collaborations on the scientific output of academic institutions, drawing on data from the first official Italian research assessment exercise. We measure the scientific performance of a research unit as the number of publications that received an excellent grade in the evaluation process. Different aspects of scientific collaboration are taken into account, such as the degree of openness of a research team towards other institutions and/or other countries, the frequency of co-authorships, and the average size of a collaborating team. Using econometric models for count data, we find that collaborations are more effective when they imply knowledge exchange resulting from collaboration with external or foreign colleagues, are very frequent, and the collaborating teams have a small size.

Communicating in a common language can function as a general frame of reference in culturally diverse organizations, providing that the status of the language permits its use. Based on a large-scale survey of 489 academic members of sixteen culturally diverse science departments at three universities, results showed that English fluency had a positive association with inter-individual communication and management communication, both in English, while linguistic distance only had a positive relationship with inter-individual communication in English. Implications of these findings are discussed in detail.

This article describes the implementation of the balanced scorecard (BSC) strategy map in a university department. The department is a good example of a complex public sector service organization—therefore the article has relevance beyond universities. The strategy map was found to be an extremely good way of measuring performance. In addition, the BSC/strategy map helps in monitoring and building departmental mission and goals and the authors recommend wider use.

Matching what industry wants with what applicants want is a major problem for any IT academic department is matching what the jobs market requires to the types of courses which appeal to applicants. At the current time there is massive demand in the industry for software and embedded engineers, but IT academic departments have generally struggled to recruit candidates to these types of courses. At present courses focused on gaming, computer security, digital forensics, cybercrime, and digital design, are seeing a fast growth in applications. These hotspots, though, can create considerable problems for departments, especially as popular courses are often initially starved in terms teaching resources, because the staff cannot, or do not want to, move quickly enough into the new areas. Overall this tends to be the problem for the head of school who must judge whether something is a short-term ‘flash in the pan’ or a long-term trend. A few good examples of courses which had a peak and then settled down well to good amounts of long-term recruitment have been in software engineering, computer networking, and multimedia, all of which had a significant peak, and then have encountered glitches in recruitment, but have generally settled down to providing solid student recruitment. A major problem is thus in creating courses which are appealing to applicants and any existing student base, but which might not match to the requirements of industry. The way that academia often deals with this is to focus a great deal of attention on the programme title, so that it is attractive to candidates, while also being useful in defining the scope of the programme to recruiters. Buried within the programme, though, are the areas of study which are the key things that industry actually needs. This is why many IT programmes often do not mention the words software development, business studies, project management, and ethics within the programme title, but still teach them. Useful within the title would be things such as media design, digital forensics, and gaming, as these are likely to attract candidates. Employers thus often need to avoid looking at the programme title, and look in more detail at the actual modules which are used in the programme, to see the scope of any software development and business integration. Within many programmes in IT there can be a marginalisation of the subject area due to the demands of students currently on these courses. This has been seen with computer networks, where programmes were created with a wide range of modules, in areas such as business studies and software development, which generally enrich the scope of the programme. Over the year, though, students often demand more modules in their focus, which can be to their disadvantage when they join the jobs market. The push of the major vendors In the IT industry one of the major moves over the last few years has been from vendors such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Juniper, providing a wide range of professional certification, intended to match training to the actual needs of industry. Academia then has a difficulty in whether to adopt and integrate the professional certification into their programmes, or to continue to focus on core academic skills development. Applicants, though, are now becoming generally savvy in spotting where this type of infrastructure has been created, which makes programmes which integrate the material more attractive in future job potentials. Thus many programmes now highlight the integration with Microsoft and Cisco Systems, in providing relevant professional skills. A major worry for many though is that academic programmes are far too focused on material produced by the major vendors, which limits the scope of knowledge that students can gain. While there has been a reduction in the focus of vendor derived material on their own product range, there still seems to be a lack of strong academic underpinning in much vendor-produced material. A good academic department will understand the importance of following parts of the vendor certification, but giving a wide coverage of the key academic principles behind any topic. Along with this it is important that academic departments encourage their students into continual professional study, to gain advantage in the jobs market. Differing departmental profiles One thing for sure is that every IT academic department has a different profile in terms of its focus, and it is often this focus which can define how innovative a department is, and how much they need to be. In traditional research areas, there are many distinguished seats of learning, which have long track records for excellence and innovation in research and teaching. Medical and Business Schools, for example, have generally built up their expertise over many decades, and continue to be known for their lead in their domain. Computing and IT, though, is ever-changing, and each department has the opportunity to gain a lead over others by gaining a first-mover advantage. Over the past few decades this has happened with digital electronics, signal processing, microprocessor design, and so on. Each new technology brings opportunities to move and gain an advantage. Often this movement can fit into various profiles: • Old School, Slow Mover. Often a traditional learning institution, which does not require to adopt to new teaching environments and subjects, as it can easily recruit without showing new innovations. Over time it will generally adopt new subject areas depending on their factors such as their research profile. • New School, Fast Mover. This is a department which bases its growth on identifying new and exciting areas, and has key innovators who can move quickly and change their environments and subjects to match. If they move fast enough they can gain a significant lead on the rest of academia, and gain a significant reputation, especially if they can support the development of a research infrastructure with the development of the newly developed teaching area. This profile can be further split into ones which pick the right things, and then move in resources to expand the area, and ones which fail to sustain the investment, and lose out in the long term as the resources do not follow the initial lead. Some new subject areas can be slow burners, where a significant growth in applications is not seen for a year or two, while other can sparkle for a short time, and then fail in the medium term. • Old School, Late Mover. This is a department which generally does not innovate, but watches how other departments are performing in terms of recruitment, and adopts ideas that have been proven to be successful. There is generally less risk, but it can suffer from general down-turns in recruitment in the short-term, as there are no programmes giving a recruitment spike to overcome the general downturn. IT has been shown to be ever-changing, with new technologies springing up on a regular basis. This often leaves great opportunities for first movers, which could prove a winner in gaining a reputation in certain technological areas. The University of Abertay with Computer Games, and the University of Glamorgan with Computer Forensics, are good examples of how leadership can be gained with departments which move quickly and focus their resources into appealing areas. Without a sustained investment in research and knowledge transfer the first mover advantage can often lead to very little overall advantage, but the benefits can be great, in terms of the long-term sustainability of the whole department. Often, subjects which do not recruit well need the new areas to be able to justify their long-term base. Any department needs bright sparks, the people who are willing to move into new areas and take risks. Thus it is likely that new blood needs to be brought in on a regular basis, as departments can often stagnate around their existing expertise, leading to a long-term decline. Generally it is unusual to see new programmes filled with completely new modules. The most common is to see one or two new modules, often in the later years of courses, which start to show some appeal to existing students or to industry. This appeal is then often used to justify the development of a programme of study, in which the department needs to decide whether it can be sustained, given a few years to prove itself. Academia in the UK has often seen the creation of programmes which have failed due to a lack of market demand. A major problem is that it is often difficult to get real-life market assessments, and most departments will typically try an idea, and see if it attracts students. If it does, the resources will generally follow. Cloud-based Teaching A major problem in academia is to try and keep up-to-date with subjects and technologies, so that it often lags industry. The use of virtualised and cloud-based environments, though, provides an excellent opportunity to enhance learning and to provide students with skills which exactly match the requirements of industry, along with integrating with professional certification. At Edinburgh Napier University, a VMware vCenter Cloud infrastructure has been created to teach computer security and digital forensics, where students can learn on an enhanced infrastructure which would not have been possible before the extensive development of virtualised and cloud-based infrastructures. For enhanced methods used within computer security, a private cloud can be used, and for more general teaching, such as in databases and operating systems, a public cloud can be used to support this. This then provides exposure to a wide range of environments which are pre-build, or which are built-up throughout the module, and thus supports the students within a safe environment in which they can learn without any danger, and where errors can be easily undone. The environments can thus be created to use industry-standard tools and infrastructure, and these can be joined together to create collaborative work, along with the continuation of work after the practical lab work has been done. In fact virtualisation offers academia the opportunity to create infrastructures that would be difficult within a real-world, and also match-up with the requirements of professional certification, as illustrated in Figure 1. http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1toxn/VitALMagazineSeptemb/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F394350%2FVitAL-Magazine-September-2011

This was born digital., The Faculty Fellow for International Programs asks for faculty members to submit proposals for international curricular summer grants aimed at promoting study abroad and the internationalization of the Rhodes curriculum.

A citation study was carried out to predict the outcome of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The correlation between scores achieved by academic departments in the UK in the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise, and the number of citations received by academics in those departments for articles published in the period 1994-2000, using the Institute for Scientific Information’s citation databases, was assessed. A citation study was carried out on all three hundred and thirty eight academics that teach in the UK library and information science schools. These authors between them received two thousand three hundred and one citations for articles they had published between 1994 and the present. The results were ranked by Department, and compared to the ratings awarded to the departments in the 1996 Higher Education Funding Council Research Assessment Exercise. On the assumption that RAE scores and citation counts are correlated, predictions were made for the likely RAE scores in the 2001 RAE. Comments were also made on the impact of staff movements from one Higher Education Institution to another.

This paper is concerned with the reorganization of biology at Berkeley, begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and now well along. Key to the initiation of change was the appointment of a Chancellor and Vice-chancellor who were committed to the changes, and the enlistment of outstanding biologists already at Berkeley to design the reform and carry it through. The paper raises the following questions: what led to the momentous changes in this leading research university; what actually happened as a result of the reform; what the key forces were that made the reform possible; and what, if anything, are the implications of the reform for other universities in the United States and in other countries.