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In 2018, a new governance law ("Ustawa 2.0") modernised the institutional governance of Polish public higher education institutions. This article investigates the governance changes from the cultural perspective of higher education governance through a survey administered to all Polish rectors. Responses were analysed by splitting higher education institutions into three categories (traditional academic [comprehensive], specialised, and applied sciences) to explore whether distinct institutional environments/subfields influence the perception of the new governance model. This article provides several research contributions: it is the first to adopt a cultural perspective to analyse higher education governance reforms in a Central and Eastern European country; it addresses specialised universities and universities of applied sciences, which are usually overlooked in higher education governance studies; and it extends the knowledge of the recent Polish higher education reform by highlighting divergent interpretations of the same governance framework across distinct institutional subfields within the same higher education system.

There is growing interest in the underlying mechanisms affecting female leaders in Higher Education (HE). This article compares four countries -- Germany, Norway, Poland and Sweden to identify key structural conditions (enablers and barriers) for female representation in academia by studying the regulative framework of government policy. Two research questions are guiding the analysis: first, what (if any) policy instruments are chosen to increase the number of female leaders in HE? Second, to what extent does this choice of instruments mirror either sectorial logic (HE) or national policy styles? The empirical results of the article show that while processes of policy diffusion are observable at the sectoral level, gender equality policies and instrument choice differ considerably in the four countries under consideration. The article thus concludes that national policy styles need to be understood as enabling and disabling policy factors for gender equality in HE shaping the process of translating diffused models decisively.