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In pursuit of enhanced employability of university graduates, along with their increased mobility in a rapidly globalizing economy, colleges and universities in the world today participate in regional alliances and partnerships in which shared targets with mutually recognized degrees and curricula are sought across boundaries through transnational higher education policies. The Bologna Process is certainly exemplified as one of the most important multilateral efforts in the recent history of higher education, in establishing such a system of quality assurance within the European Higher Education Area. Although the member states of the Bologna Process endeavor to meet the common benchmarks on the preset assessment criteria, the speed of policy implementation is found to widely vary across the participating countries. This paper attempts to identify the sources of discrepancies in achieving the common policy targets among the member states and explore in particular the extent to which varying stages of socio-economic as well as political development, along with indigenous ethnic and linguistic complexities, affect the robust progress of implementing multilateral higher education policies. Our findings generally suggest significant impacts of these indigenous factors.

The increasingly competitive and globalizing environment of today's higher education market has compelled many colleges and universities around the world to revamp their academic programs and organizational structures by responsively addressing various contemporary issues raised by internal as well as external stakeholders. It is no exception that Japanese colleges and universities have gone through a period of dramatic transition over the last decade under considerable pressure and influence of the central government's stringent policy mandates. Although the government-led reforms have intended to support the domestic institutions of higher education in gaining a competitive edge and assuring the quality of teaching and research, a series of reform attempts are documented to have increased the workload of Japanese professors tremendously, while shifting their work balance from teaching- and research-oriented activities towards more administrative or service-related tasks. It is a shared concern that the excessive workload of administrative responsibilities on professors deteriorates the quality of student instruction and research productivity delivered by the academic staff. This study focuses on the amount of time spent by the faculty on administrative tasks and examines how their workload is influenced by the organizational scale and composition of supporting staff members as well as faculty colleagues. Our finding suggests that a mere increase of support staff would not necessarily reduce the faculty time spent on administrative or service-related tasks in Japanese universities. An increase in employment of part-time administrative assistants per se could indeed add heavier burdens on professors, due to their growing responsibilities in managing the larger scale of their organizations. Further simulation results demonstrate that the faculty workload in administrative tasks would most effectively be alleviated with the support from research assistants, provided that the same budgetary constraint is assigned to the organizational unit.