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This article aims to explore processes of policy implementation with respect to an ongoing empirical study in three very different sites: (1) Denmark; (2) Nepal; and (3) China. Rather than treat these investigations in the traditional manner of separate and contained national case studies, the author attempts to create a "policyscape" around processes of what Roger Dale has called hyperliberalism in education, and he does so by working across different levels of the education systems within these three countries. His argument is that nation-state and system studies of education must be informed by understandings of the nature of globalization and especially the new imaginative regimes that it makes possible. Educational phenomena in one country case must thus be understood in "ongoing" relation to other such cases. In this sense, the author attempts to operationalize as a research program a new approach to comparison, one that has been alluded to in the literature but only conceptually. (Contains 7 footnotes.)

Within an overall policy script aimed at creating fewer "world-class" institutions, Danish universities are currently being remade to better serve the world of work and employment, the demands of high-technology industry, and the needs of society, which are increasingly described and defined in terms of appeals to "relevance to the economy/working life," "value" and "efficiency." This partially replaces what is identified as a "democracy" discourse appealing to notions of "participation," "relevance for the people/society" and so forth. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, the article explores the implications of these policy shifts in terms of the ways that academic workers negotiate competing discourses about the "university." Here, a number of "closures" are identified that suggest limits to how actors can think and operate within the new policy environment as it is being embedded within various gradually changing university contexts. However, the complexity of the reform creates a range of new "openings" in which alternative, often contradictory, identities are being legitimated. The complex interplay of openings and closures suggests that we resist simplistic understandings of contemporary universities as the victims of imposed policy violence.

This article reports the findings of a Danish research council-funded project aimed at exploring a comprehensive package of management reforms in higher education instituted in Denmark since 2003. The reforms attempt to change not only the way institutions are governed but the very notion of democracy and engagement in higher education. In short, a long-established tradition for university governance based on the internal election of staff and students has been replaced by the formation of university boards comprising a majority of members external to the university. In most cases the leadership of these boards has fallen to senior executives from the commercial sector with a mandate to reform decision-making processes, to encourage the reorientation of educational programmes to the labour market, and to make research more accessible to industry and commerce. Whilst boards are responsible for the university's development agenda (and formal development contract with the government), university rectors (vice-chancellors) and their senior management teams are given greatly increased powers to "run" "their" institutions. Whilst Danish universities have maintained some degree of continuity with earlier democratic/administrative forms of governance based on internal elected representation, these non-executive bodies are in the process of being marginalised by new hierarchical models of "executive" governance. In the process, "democracy", understood by internal stakeholders as a parliamentary political discourse based upon proportional representation, becomes an attachment to rather than a defining element of the university, posing fundamental questions about the role of such institutions in late modern society, and the place of academic staff within them. (Contains 4 notes.)

Studied teachers' development in a large English "comprehensive" school during a period of intense educational reform, focusing on eight experienced teachers. Findings highlight a range of factors that appeared to constrain teachers' professional development. Considers the implications for recent Danish policy related to school-focused teacher education. (SLD)

Denmark is experiencing a comprehensive package of educational reform aimed at enabling that country to recalibrate itself to the demands of the so-called ‘global knowledge economy’. In relation to the higher education sector, a new system of university governance is being implemented where boards are appointed (ultimately) by the State and comprised of a majority of members external to the institution. To further shape (if not direct) the work of universities, the new University Law requires that institutions prepare a ‘development contract’ with the Ministry, and that this is used as a framework within which universities direct their activities. To facilitate this process a new conception of leadership is invoked. Whilst university leaders (‘rektors’ in the Danish context) were previously elected by the academic staff of the institution, the new arrangements require that they be appointed by the board which looks to the rector to ‘run’ the institution and fulfil the demands of the development contract on their behalf. The study reported here utilises ethnographic method to explore such issues at a time of unprecedented change in Denmark. Notions of the leader as ‘hero’—common in contemporary universities despite the general shift in the business world to notions of transformational and distributed leadership—appear not only difficult to eradicate but positively emboldened by the current reform movement. The paper explores different understandings of leadership, both in the literature and ‘in action’ via the perspectives of university leaders and decision-makers in the Danish case, before considering whether the current reforms make necessary such models of control and if the scope of action of such leaders is seriously curtailed by contemporary education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]