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Purpose This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated – or mainstreamed - in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization. Design/methodology/approach Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired processes, whose aims included ensuring that sustainability was integrated into the educational process. Findings By following two audit-inspired processes, the authors show how teachers were asked to respond to open-ended survey questions and by doing so emerged as responsibilized subjects. Although the teachers were given lots of space to interpret the concept of sustainability and show how it was translated into the programs and courses offered, the teachers were made accountable as established organizational hierarchies were reproduced when responsibilization was formalized through techniques of accountabilization. Research limitations/implications The analysis moves beyond the instrumental epistemologies characterizing much of the positivist-oriented research in higher education. As with all studies, the authors study also has methodological limitations, such as involving a single higher education institution. There is a general need for more empirical research in this area in order to build theory and to understand whether the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization can also be applied in other higher education contexts. Practical implications The study shows that higher education administrators engage in processes of responsibilization and accountabilization through formalized processes of interpellation, as documents and self-assessment exercises tie teachers to organizational contexts. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that introduces the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization as social relationships in higher education governance.

Drawing upon earlier studies of reforms and institutional changes in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to trace how the understanding of accountability has changed over the past twenty years and how it is understood to have impacted on higher education institutions. We do so by reviewing more than 350 papers and by asking three questions: Who answers to whom? For what are they answering? And how to assess those accountability arrangements? With these three questions as guides, our results indicate that higher education institutions have been undergoing processes of what we term accountabilization. These results contribute to the scholarship on higher education governance by conceptualizing the processes of accountabilization.

This study examines how university teachers in two Swedish higher education institutions grapple with the challenge of connecting research and teaching. With the increasing pressure in higher education to improve graduate employability, teaching is expected to include skills-oriented, vocational training which may (or may not) conflict with the more traditional Humboldtian ideal, in which teaching is built on research. Drawing on the rich bodies of literatures on employability and the teaching–research relationship, the authors find that university teachers practice the relationship in four ways: by using scientific articles in the curriculum; by teaching students a critical research attitude; by lecturing about their own research results; and by relying on the formal skills of fellow teachers. These practices of establishing a close connection between teaching and research are, this study suggests, met with resistance from colleagues, who are perceived to favor vocational training and emphasize employability; from students, who are also perceived to worry about employability; and finally from other policies that target partially conflicting objectives, including those for employability.

This article develops and implements an agile management approach in higher education. Such an approach follows core practices, such as project plans. The project manager has to identify the agility drivers that represent changes and pressures; prioritize agility capabilities to take advantage of changes; identify agility providers to obtain agility capabilities; and make managerial choices to manage the project. The object of the study is a department at a public university; it must follow the institutional framework and laws, and the university and faculty decisions, strategies and policies. The article discusses how agility can be created in such circumstances.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how university teachers’ professionalism shapes the coordination processes in higher education institutions (HEIs). By developing an innovative framework, ...

This article focuses on coordination between governance actors in higher education. The object of the study is a department at a public university, seen as a multi-project environment. The purpose of this article is to illustrate and analyze project governance as a tool that allows departmental management to coordinate with the authorities, the board and the management at different levels at the university. The importance of project governance as a coordination tool relates to the expected function of project governance to coordinate with governance actors and to project governance implementation, which affects relationships between actors. Another finding of the case study is the importance of accountability both for functionality and for the implementation of project governance, and, by extension, for coordination with governance actors.

The starting point of this article is the relation between teaching quality and expectations by different governance actors in higher education. Managing a department in a public university is, to a large extent, about the coordination of governance actors, involving government authorities as well as the university and the faculty. Internally, the departmental management has to act strategically to achieve this coordination, especially in relation to teachers who expect resource allocation to ensure teaching quality, expressed in terms of academic requirements. To explore this, the concept of proximity is introduced. The study points out the importance of organizing teaching activities to create proximity, as well as that the context and conditions for creating proximity are important for teaching quality, thus achieving coordination with governance actors.

This article focuses on coordination between governance actors in a public university. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and analyze policy documents as governance tools that allow departmental management to coordinate with the authorities, the board, and the management at different university levels. A central finding is that the importance of policy documents as governance tools takes expression in two different ways that reinforce and complete each other. One way is connected to the authority role and is manifested by the documentation of certain functions to coordinate the different roles the actors are expected to fulfill. The other is connected to the implementation of a policy document, which is manifested through the policy document, and thus becomes part of the organization’s social life.

The starting point of this paper asserts that managers who elicit and select projects have a moral responsibility. Correspondingly, its purpose is to provide a means for project selectors to appreciate this responsibility so that it can be put into practice. A model of the moral responsibility involved in project selection is presented. This model combines a) an explication of responsibility into attributability—what choices the project manager can ultimately be praised or blamed for, and accountability—the necessity of being prepared to answer for one’s choices; with b) an explication of the project selection process into an initialisation phase, an appraisal phase, and a decision phase. Various moral philosophers are called upon to make explicit the moral issues that are at stake for each of these two dimensions of responsibility at each stage of the project selection process. Concluding remarks point to the need for project selectors to contextualise their use of the model.