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Beginning in the mid-1980s, European governments have increasingly implemented performance-based funding systems for higher education. While a focus on the transnational pressures that contributed to the widespread adoption of performance-based funding in Europe accounts for the impetus for performance-based funding policies, it fails to address how and why the resultant performance-based funding policies are as distinct and different as they are. In this paper, I argue that an institutional logics perspective offers a theoretical account of the performance-based funding policy formation process. I use the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, and France as case studies. I contend that in these three cases, different local logics drove the performance-based funding policy formation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relation of professional identity and resistance in organizations. While prior literature points out that protecting identities from managerialistic changes is an end for which resistance is a means, this study focuses on how identity can also serve as a discursive means for resistance. We present the findings of a qualitative research project about the impact of the implementation of quality management in German higher education. The findings of our study show that academics, especially full professors, counter quality management with a repertoire of discursive resistance, often drawing on identity claims. We identify three main types of identity claims that are used as resources for discursive forms of micro-resistance: professional autonomy, expertise for teaching quality and specificities of academic disciplines. These findings add to the debate about the dynamics of identity during organizational and institutional changes in higher education by empirically illustrating how identity can be mobilized as a means to resist. Our study has the implication for quality management that its relations to academic identities are decisive for the everyday discourses and micro-practices of resistance it provokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities play a crucial role in promoting sustainable development. Accordingly, the project “Sustainability at Higher Education Institutions: develop — network — report (HOCHN)” (2016-2018) aims to facilitate sustainable development at universities in Germany. One of the project’s research focuses is sustainability governance. It investigates the variety of different protagonists and structures that are involved in the processes of developing and managing sustainability. To this end, a heuristic technique referred to as the “governance equalizer” is applied. It covers five dimensions that have been adapted for this research: politics, profession, organisation, knowledge and visibility. This paper introduces the concept of the governance equalizer and locates it in the context of sustainability in higher education institutions. Against this backdrop, it presents and discusses findings from preparatory expert interviews on sustainability governance, with the aim of validating the governance equalizer and identifying focal points for subsequent stakeholder interviews in German universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the accreditation criteria in German higher education, the internal and external legitimacy of German higher education accreditation regime, and quality assurance reforms.

Since the late 1990s, many European countries have adapted their traditional one-cycle curriculum structure in higher education to the two-cycle structure employed in the Anglo-American world. In the large social science literature dealing with this reform phenomenon, the Bologna Process - starting with the 1999 Declaration of Bologna - is identified as the major force of change. Illustrated by the German case, this paper argues that the soft-governance mechanism 'Bologna' certainly constitutes an important driver and explanatory factor but cannot fully explain curriculum reform success. It is demonstrated that German state governments used classic tools of government - hard governance via rules and bans - to force higher education institutions to substitute traditional programmes with new Bachelor/Master programmes. This case study might stimulate further research investigating whether this 'governance by coercion', which has been neglected in previous research, also played an important role in other Bologna countries in which similar curricular reforms occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the debated legitimacy of formal accreditation procedures in Germany and give reasons for why accreditation as compared to other higher education reforms has not gained legitimacy over time. Conceptually, we combine two perspectives that put the issue of legitimacy at the forefront of analysis: sociology's new institutionalism and Luhmann's work on the legitimacy of procedures. Using the first approach, it is clear that in particular the external, macro-legitimacy is debated. Following Luhmann, it becomes obvious that the requirements for legitimacy of procedures at the internal, micro-level requirements are hardly met. For the two approaches, we give reasons why this is the case. After a brief overview of the German accreditation system, we illustrate the contested legitimacy by reconstructing the perspectives of professors who are members of the academic profession and central individual actors in the accreditation system. Empirically, we draw on collective statements in the broader accreditation discourse, participant observations of different procedures, expert interviews with professors and a survey with more than 1900 professors who acted as peers in accreditation processes. We finally assume that the reasons for the debated legitimacy are manifold and not limited to the inherent properties of the accreditation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the normative roots of criteria used for the accreditation of study programs in German higher education based on the orders of worth framework by Boltanski and Thévenot (On justification. Economies of worth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006). From 1999 to 2017, the criteria have been subject to continuous efforts of legitimation, especially by the German Länder, which are in charge of public higher education in Germany. The empirical analysis shows that industrial (e.g., 'standardization'), civic (e.g., 'gender justice and equal opportunities'), and civic-industrial (e.g., 'employability') codings are the core of accreditation criteria. The normativity of these criteria constitutes accreditation as a technical arrangement running (a) a structural program (e.g., qualifications of academic teachers, modularization of study programs, and quality management) and (b) a political program (e.g., diversity of students and system of studies). Based on the empirical analysis, it is concluded that X does not stand for the accreditation of quality X. X stands for the accreditation of X qualities for specific normative purposes via the higher education accreditation regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]