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The European Union (EU) has repeatedly underlined the importance of higher education, research and innovation as drivers in the further development of Europe-economically, socially and culturally. One of the latest policy initiatives by the European Commission (EC) intended to promote this agenda is the European Universities Initiative (EUI) where alliances between universities across national borders are to identify new approaches for boosting European scientific cooperation. It might be argued that this development represents an attempt to find an organizational solution to the European policy ambitions in higher education, research and innovation. This article presents a framework for analysing European university alliances. Based on interviews with persons occupying key leadership and management roles in ten alliances, the article analyses the potential gains and perils alliances might face along four dimensions: their internal coordination, their ways of resolving conflicts, the commitment of member universities and the cultural characteristics of the alliances., Author(s): Peter Maassen [sup.1] , Bjørn Stensaker [sup.1] , Arianna Rosso [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) https://ror.org/01xtthb56, grid.5510.1, 0000 0004 1936 8921, Department of Education, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of [...]

Despite its seemingly subjective and ambiguous nature, the notion of a World Class University (WCU) appears both established and widely discussed in higher education discourses over the last decade. At the same time, some scholars have argued that the notion does not fit or refer to universities in Africa. In the year 2010, the University of Ghana which is the largest university in the country, agreed upon a strategic vision for the university emphasizing the notion of WCU. In this regard the question emerges, what this WCU vision at the University of Ghana actually means in practice, since it is not prescribed by the university's leadership but left open for interpretation, operationalization and further implementation by all members of the organization. Using an interdependency management perspective, this paper examines how university leadership and academic staff interpret the WCU strategic vision at the University of Ghana and to what extent organizational change processes are the result of the implementation of the university's WCU strategy.

The concept of student partnership has attracted increased attention during the last decade, often due to an assumption that it can mitigate neo-liberal agendas and practices in teaching and learning. A review of definitions and understandings of student partnership models shows that most of the research conducted on this topic has been based on normative assumptions, with less focus on how partnership practices play out in different contexts. In this article an analytical framework for analysing student partnership is introduced and tested through an empirical analysis of collaborative practices in centres for teaching excellence in Norwegian higher education. The key findings are that the diversity and dynamics of student partnership depend on the context in which they operate, but more importantly how different practices of partnership play out in parallel in those educational contexts. The result is often a mix of hybrid practices related to different conceptualizations of student partnership.

Through analysis of the strategic ambitions of China's top universities, this article studies the relationship between governance structures at the system level and strategic institutional adaptations. In China, some top universities are governed directly by the national authorities while others have regional affiliations. By analyzing the strategic plans of a sample of universities in both categories the article examines how these differences in governance modes may impact the formal ambitions and objectives of the universities and discuss the potential system implications of these different governance modes, especially related to issues of excellence and diversity. The article find that differences in governance modes do affect the strategic positioning of Chinese universities, and different ways in which governance arrangements can be used to foster both excellence and diversity in a system perspective are discussed.

With regard to the governance structures of European universities, changes have been proposed aimed at their democratic nature, the composition of governing bodies, the degree of centralisation in decision-making and redirecting the balance between collective and individual governing responsibilities. In this article, we address the effects of such governance reforms in public, comprehensive universities in Norway and the Netherlands. Differences across countries, even within a relatively homogeneous region such as Northwestern Europe, can be traced back to differences in underlying political visions towards university governance. After an overview of the main features of university governance structures in the two countries, we argue that a specific regional university governance practice has emerged with different combinations of executive and democratic elements.

Based on key governance and organisational characteristics from the 1970s universities have been conceptualised as organised anarchies and loosely coupled systems. More recently, a number of studies have argued that universities have been changing their internal governance and organisational structures leading to tighter vertical steering and the emergence of more integrated organisations. In this article, it is argued that while tighter vertical integration indeed might be observed, this does not necessarily imply greater horizontal integration in university organising as well. By drawing on case studies of five research-intensive universities in five different countries, we discuss how strengthened hierarchical governance is driving increased organisational specialisation and professionalisation, but that this also may result in horizontal de-coupling within universities. The article ends by a discussion of the positive and negative implications of coupled, de-coupled and loosely coupled organisations.

Purpose: In recent decades, higher education institutions have been encouraged to develop their own internal management systems as a response to perceived quality challenges in the sector. These quality management (QM) systems have often been found to mainly reflect external accountability requirements, with less focus on coherent study programme development. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between QM practices and study programme delivery in Norwegian higher education institutions. Design/methodology/approach: The study examined how coordination and control of quality work with respect to educational activities take place, using data from a survey to study programme leaders in a large sample of Norwegian higher education institutions. Findings: The main findings show that a majority of institutions have established formal advisory bodies with a QM mandate, contributing to more coherent thinking, even though the division of labour between these bodies and formal decision-making structures often is unclear. The study also shows a high level of diversity in the collaboration practices among different actors involved in QM work, indicating that QM practices are adapted to local needs. Originality/value: The paper provides new knowledge as to how QM is conducted in practice at the local level. It nuances earlier studies by showing the involvement of collegial bodies in QM although such bodies may have unclear mandates and, thus, an unclear role in the QM process.

Balancing excellence and diversity effectively in the higher education sector is one of the most challenging tasks for national governments. While a number of countries around the world have initiated university excellence schemes, it is more difficult to identify policy initiatives that also take into account how institutional diversity is to be enhanced simultaneously. By an in-depth analysis of the voluntary, and later mandatory, first-level discipline evaluation scheme in China from 2003 to 2016, the article discusses possible long-term impacts of this scheme both regarding excellence and diversity in the higher education landscape in the country. In conclusion, it is argued that decentralized decision-making within a centralized evaluation scheme is an interesting governance approach for trying to balance excellence and diversity in higher education. However, institutional diversity is not necessarily positively correlated to disciplinary diversity.

This article discusses changes with respect to university governance structures in six comprehensive universities in Europe. We present an analytical framework on the basis of which we conduct a comparative analysis of the university governance structures along four different dimensions: (a) the internal democratic nature of the governance structure, (b) the external involvement in university governance, (c) the level of centralisation of decision-making authority in the university and (d) the concentration of authority in an individual leadership position versus authority in a collective body or spread over various collective bodies.

Research-intensive universities are operating in an environment of conflicting goals and priorities. Their status in research as well as education is dependent on their performance in various global arenas where performance can be measured with relatively clear indicators. However, success in operations outside the primary tasks of the academic community, such as universities' societal relevance, is more difficult to identify. Tasks outside the core of academic work are subject to requirements that are less well defined and are more abstract. This article seeks to define these noncore requirements as external contingencies and to analyse them by means of a contingency approach.

One can observe a growing external pressure on universities to become more responsive to society through proactively engaging in various types of competition--competing for students, staff, external funding, and for academic prestige and status. The ensuing reform agendas aim at changing the intra-university governance structures for stimulating the intended university responsiveness. This article discusses how intra-university governance has developed over time with a changing internal and external dynamics. It will be argued that in the university governance practice a paradox has emerged: the more university leaders take on and operate in line with the reform agenda's ideologies, the less effective they appear to be in realising some of the reform intentions. How can such a paradox be accounted for? Building on three general theories of governance, this paradox is analysed as arising from the neglect of the interplay of historical university traditions and formal organisational-structural features of the university. The importance of this interplay will be discussed from the perspective of the prestige economy.

In this article we discuss recent university reforms aimed at enhancing university autonomy, highlighting various tensions in the underlying reform ideologies. We examine how the traditional interpretation of university autonomy has been expanded in the reform rationales. An analytical framework for studying how autonomy is interpreted and used inside the university is presented, which allows us to highlight that in order to understand the implications of enhanced university autonomy, we have to go beyond the scrutiny of formal arrangements and analyse practices of autonomy within the university which we refer to as the university's living autonomy. Finally we introduce ideas for further research on the living autonomy with the use of our analytical framework.

The article introduces this special issue of Higher Education Quarterly in which results of a research project on "European Flagship Universities: Balancing Academic Excellence and Socio-economic Relevance" are presented and discussed. The Flagship project aimed at contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between university reform agendas, with their underlying ideologies, and university practices, especially at the departmental level. The project focused on how selected Flagship universities in continental Europe interpret and use their institutional autonomy in two areas, research management and personnel policies. For this purpose an analytical framework was developed for studying how autonomy is interpreted and used inside the university.

While external quality assurance in higher education was originally developed to cater for various domestic needs, recent decades have seen various attempts in the use of quality assurance also as a mechanism for creating more trust in cross-national higher education activities. In this article, a conceptual framework for analysing available trust-building mechanisms in higher education is presented, and it is discussed how the different mechanisms identified impact the current development in international quality assurance. The article further discusses how the current dynamics in the international quality assurance area could be interpreted and concludes by pointing to future pathways for building trust in this area.