Shifting fundaments of European higher education governance: competition,ranking, autonomy and accountability

In the present study we provide an interpretation of a general narrative of transnational governance of higher education. All the elements of the narrative – competition, ranking autonomy and accountability – are visibly present in contemporary higher education policy agenda. We examine these not as separate ideas and practices but as an interlinked whole, bringing an amount of coherence to transnational governance of higher education in Europe. All the elements, as they are currently represented in policy statements by the European higher education establishment, are premised on social atomist ontology and ideology of competition. Consequently, drawing on textual evidence we argue that the recent trend for increasing universities' institutional autonomy and accountability has been justified by reference to competitive logic, which, in turn, has been strengthened by the practice of comparative ranking. The article contributes to diagnosing potential misconceptions that frame the current higher education policy-making in Europe.     

The legitimation of OECD's global educational governance: examining PISA and AHELO test production

Although international student assessments and the role of international organisations (IOs) in governing education via an evidence-based educational policy discourse are of growing interest to educational researchers, few have explored the complex ways in which an IO, such as the OECD, gains considerable influence in governing education during the early stages of test production. Drawing on a comparative analysis of the production of two international tests – the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) – we show how the OECD legitimises its power, and expertise, and defines ‘what counts’ in education. The OECD deploys three mechanisms of educational governance: (1) building on past OECD successes; (2) assembling knowledge capacity; and (3) deploying bureaucratic resources. We argue that the early stages of test production by IOs are significant sites in which the global governance of education is legitimated and enacted.     

Fifteen years of research on PISA effects on education governance: A critical review

This article provides a literature review on the effects of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on education governance and policy process across participating countries. This review seemed necessary because there has been a growing body of literature on this topic since 2003, especially since 2010, because this literature is not always well‐known and because the discourse on the so‐called ‘PISA shock’ remains important, even if it is more of a metaphor than a concept and may be politically partial. The article exploits a dataset of 87 references which show that PISA introduced major changes in the governance of education worldwide. Driven by soft power strategies and new policy transfers, this governance is based on data and measurement tools which redefine the scales of education policies. It also shows that PISA has a strong influence on a variety of national reforms, as illustrated in many case studies. However, this influence strongly depends on domestic policy contexts that scholars intended to capture through different theoretical frameworks. Nonetheless, few propose overarching theorisations of the political meaning of PISA effects on education governance and policy processes. The article concludes by stressing three main challenges for the subsequent studies on these PISA effects: better conceptualising these effects, preserving an epistemology of uncertainty in order to avoid taken for granted views and normalising the research on PISA effects not to perpetually and artificially rediscover its so‐called novelty.     

The reconstruction of Palestinian education: between history,policy politics andpolicy making

This paper reflects on the key actors in education policy making in Zimbabwe. It looks at the contextual complexities that characterized policy-making in this country to make sense of the contestations that the state had to confront and accommodate. The policy network approach is employed as an analytical framework to clarify how, in particular non-state actors, have had an impact (or not) on educational governance through influences on policy. Policy documents, research reports and the reactions of non-state actors to these aspects are examined to explore the impact of the latter on policy making. The significant roles of the various policy networks are also given attention to establish how they have affected the reconfiguration of the state. The argument developed is that in spite of the ostensibly strong state, education policy formulation has been a product of compromise between policy networks and the predilections of those in office. As a political and contested enterprise it had to accommodate both local and international concerns.     

Psychodata: disassembling the psychological,economic, and statistical infrastructure of ‘social-emotional learning’

ABSTRACT

Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students’ ‘noncognitive’ skills, SEL consists of a ‘psycho-economic’ combination of psychometrics with economic analysis, and is producing novel forms of statistical ‘psychodata’ about students. Constituted by an expanding infrastructure of technologies, metrics, people, money and policies, SEL has travelled transnationally through the advocacy of psychologists, economists, and behavioural scientists, with support from think tank coalitions, philanthropies, software companies, investment schemes, and international organizations. The article examines the emerging SEL infrastructure, identifying how psychological and economics experts are producing policy-relevant scientific knowledge and statistical psychodata to influence the direction of SEL policies. It examines how the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills, a large-scale computer-based assessment, makes ‘personality’ an international focus for policy intervention and ‘human capital’ formation, thereby translating measurable socio-emotional indicators into predicted socio-economic outcomes. The SEL measurement infrastructure instantiates psychological governance within education, one underpinned by a political rationality in which society is measured effectively through scientific fact-finding and subjects are managed affectively through psychological intervention.     

The internationalization of Canadian university research: a global higher education matrix analysis of multi-level governance

To date, much of the research on internationalization and globalization of higher education has focused on the institution or higher education system as the unit of analysis. Institution based studies have focused on the analysis of institutional practices and policies designed to further internationalization. System-level studies focus on state policy initiatives or approaches. In this paper we explore the inter-relationships among multiple levels of authority within a higher education system through an analysis of research policies and activities related to internationalization. While we are interested in the internationalization of university research, our primary objective is to explore the relationships between policy initiatives and approaches at different levels. Using the “Global Higher Education Matrix” as a framework, we discuss the policy emphasis on the internationalization of research at the federal, provincial (Ontario), and institutional levels of authority, as well as the international research activities associated with two large professional schools operating at the understructure level. By focusing on the inter-relationships among initiatives at different levels of authority, this study explores the complexity of policy perspectives within the internationalization of research in the context of multi-level governance.     

The governance of families in India: education,rights and responsibility

This paper examines the shifting relations between the family and the state in Indian education policy. It charts how family resources, responsibility, and participation have been variously called upon by the state across three historical conjunctures of education reform: the decades of post-independence planning for school expansion and nation-building after 1947; the global development era of economic liberalisation and decentralisation in the 1990s and early 2000s; and the present turn to a rights-based approach in the context of intensified educational marketisation, as marked by the 2009 Right to Education Act (RTE). Across these periods, we identify an enduring paternalism of welfare governance alongside strategies for devolving state responsibility in matters of school education. The analysis situates the conditions of family responsibility for education under the contemporary RTE, in which parents are expected to be ‘morally’ compelled to meet the state's education goals. Through this analysis, we bring to the fore the politics of family governance in education policy, a politics that is largely overlooked by, despite being central to, research on education and international development.     

全球治理与教育变革:跨国与国际教育政策过程研究的重要性

大多数教育政策研究仍然把教育政策主要放在国内政治而非国际政治的舞台中进行研究。本文吸收了政治科学、国际关系和公共管理领域最近的研究成果,指出国际的、地区的和跨国的行为主体及其政策过程的影响力正在增长,理应得到教育政策研究界的高度重视。政治科学中的全球治理研究或许能为关于跨国和国际的行为主体及其政策过程的教育政策研究提供新的方法,同时,提醒我们更多地关注新的国际行为体和新的组织与协调方式,更加深入地思考规范化的过程在多大程度上塑造了民族国家对教育中的共同国际利益的认同方式。     

Globalization and educational change: bringing about the reshaping and re‐norming of practice

The tendency in education writing on globalization has been to examine the congruence of educational policies in western societies and the international effects of global governance of education by powerful transnational institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union. The authors tend to identify massive changes in approaches to educational governance, including the establishment of a broadly common policy and management agenda that is characterized by ‘new managerialism’, devolution, and rigid accountability structures, entrepreneurialism, and school effectiveness, that have been imposed largely as a result of globalization. These measures are often seen as being directly related to the ‘hollowing out’ of the state, and the emergence of neo‐liberalism as the informing ideology of both international capitalism and residual nation‐states. There are few studies, however, of the dynamics of educational life and micro‐political activities that enable or challenge or bring about the kinds of educational reshaping and renorming that are typically associated with globalization. This study attempts to analyse such micro‐shaping, which, through reporting an ethnographic study in a site of educational practice, examines how school managers and teachers dealt with government policy intervention and, in the process, both willingly and unwillingly implemented significant educational change.     

Cybernetic institutional management theory and practice: A system of flexible workload for university teachers

In the past three decades, higher education reforms have taken place almost everywhere in the world, and governance or the way that higher education is or should be coordinated has become a global topic. The governance reform in Chinese higher education emerged against such a background. The current studies on Chinese higher education reforms mainly tackle the reform processes and treat the Chinese government as the driver of the reforms, whereas how the Chinese government is susceptible to international pressures has remained under‐researched. This article examines the mechanisms that facilitate the spread of global governance reform ideologies in Chinese higher education through the Chinese government, drawing on the concept of institutional isomorphism. Based on analysing recent literature and documents, it concludes that the Chinese government is affected by the global reform ideas and practices that have been legitimatised through international organisations' rhetoric and other countries' successful experiences.     

A comparative perspective on Finnish higher education policy

The last decades have offered social scientists an abundance of material for studies of governmental reform policy in the area of higher education. Reforms of educational politics have been legion in great parts of the world, probably in a particulary high degree in Europe. My purpose is to describe Finnish higher education policy during the last two decades in the four policy areas of (1) quantitative planning and regionalization, (2) social recruitment, (3) governance, and (4) teaching and studies as compared to the development of Western Europe. In the second part of this paper the implementation of the Finnish higher education reforms is analyzed. The third part analyzes the development of the Finnish higher education system and focuses on the various alternatives not chosen by the government. In the final part I discuss the recent trends in Finnish higher education in respect to consistency and change.     

法国提升高等教育国际吸引力的政策措施及逻辑要义

面对欧洲高等教育一体化和全球高等教育的激烈竞争,法国围绕"欢迎来法国"战略,从优先促进科研国际化、变革高等教育组织、制定留学优惠政策、加强语言学习和使用的灵活性,以及完善接待能力认证机制五个方面增强高等教育国际吸引力。改革反映出法国在留学生教育"引进来"方面以巩固国际地位为战略引导、以促进经济收益为发展动力、以保证学术质量为核心旨归、以提高治理效率为路径支撑的价值逻辑。我国在某种程度上与法国面临相似的挑战,其经验对我国优化来华留学生教育有一定的启发意义。     

Higher education learning outcomes – Ambiguity and change in higher education

The emerging interdependent world order poses new challenges for States and citizens alike. For States, interdependence has meant a new concern with integration, whilst for citizens and authorities alike, greater mobility has raised new concerns about recognition of competences, qualifications, quality and transparency. The introduction of learning outcomes is one of the principal instruments to achieve this in higher education. This article analyses how the implementation of higher education learning outcomes (HELOs) can be seen as ambiguous governance and management tools, manifested as parts of international policy development and policy trends. These ambiguous tools intertwine with different disciplinary and stakeholder networks. The desire to implement HELOs in a more or less uniform way across as diverse contexts (countries, disciplines, institutions) as possible has led to a design strategy that favours generic definitions of learning outcomes. In the implementation process, these generic HELOs are experienced as ambiguous, meaning that they are characterised by an openness to different interpretations. This opens up a space of discretionary and interpretational latitude, either because HELOs are assimilated to traditional path dependencies, or because they allow institutional agents (such as institutional leaders and others) the space to introduce change. The ambiguity of HELOs simultaneously provides the flexibility for contextually‐diverse implementation, ensures less comparability than initially envisaged, and opens up the possibility for change, although change is contingent on structures and processes that are external to the policy process itself. HELOs are thus a paradigm case of the centrality of context in policy implementation studies.     

The rule of mimetic desire in higher education: governing through naming,shaming and faming

The initiation of the Bologna Process was accompanied by a radical transition of governance in higher education throughout Europe from government to governance. This article argues that this shift in the design of governing was connected to the need to subtly bypass the European Union (EU) subsidiarity principle that kept education out of the EU’s legislative reach. The new mode of governing is orchestrated through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), which constitutes the policy ontology of the Bologna Process. The OMC presents the ambition to harmonise education systems through standardisation as a main technology to govern performance. This article argues that the Bologna mode of governance is powered through the follow-up mechanisms that work as a material-affective infrastructure of the policy ontology. These monitoring techniques are affectively wired. They produce an affective politics of naming, shaming and faming that ignites a competitive, mimetic desire making the Bologna mode of governance feasible.     

Policy internationalization,national variety and governance: global models and network power in higher education states

This article analyzes policy convergence and the adoption of globalizing models by higher education states, a process we describe, following Thatcher (2007), as policy internationalization. This refers to processes found in many policy domains and which increasingly are exemplified in tertiary education systems too. The focus is on governmental policymakers, their transnational networks, and the dilemmas they face in responding to the increasing global diffusion of governance models, such as the new public management. The notion of structuration is introduced to convey the inextricability of autonomy and structural constraint for decisionmakers in globally-situated higher education states. Primary aims are to understand the forces that drive policy internationalization, not least those associated with network power, as well as those factors that generate the basis for continuing forms of localism. It is suggested national policy ‘divergences’ may aid the worldwide diffusion of governance models rather than necessarily act as impediments.     

Transnational academic capitalism in the Arab Gulf: balancing global and local,and public and private,capitals

This article contributes to the emerging theoretical construct of what has been called ‘transnational academic capitalism’, characterised by the blurring of traditional boundaries between public, private, local, regional and international, and between market-driven and critically transformative higher education visions. Here we examine how these issues are reflected in higher education policy in the Arab Gulf, asking: what kinds of capital are being constructed and traded? By and for whom? What is the relationship between higher education competition, governance and the public good? We find contradictory trends, which we see as strategic ambivalence pointing to country-specific readings of similar regional markets and attempts to hedge bets between rival forms of apparent capital. The exploration offers a counterpoint to more widely cited examples, hereby helping to shape new paradigmatic ‘glocalised’ understandings of this field.     

The governance of the South African higher education system: balancing state control and state supervision in co-operative governance?

The publication of the National Commission for Higher Education (NCHE) in 1996 was hailed as the first systematic attempt to map out a policy terrain for higher education in South Africa since the elections of April 1994. Its recommendations, particularly on the governance of higher education, elicited much discussion and debate. The debate continued (and continues) with the publication of the Green and White Papers, the Bill on Higher Education, and the Higher Education Act (HEA) in late 1997.This paper explores and seeks to clarify the emerging model of educational governance that has been accepted by the Ministry of Education in South Africa as the basis for managing and transforming the inherited system of higher education. Specifically, the paper considers the philosophy of “co-operative governance” and the governance recommendations of the NCHE Report and the HEA. These documents are examined in relation to state control and state supervision models of higher education governance. The paper concludes by considering the politics of policy development in the transformation of the South African higher education governance system.     

我国高等职业教育考试招生制度 现状、问题与展望

党的十八大以来,职业教育进入改革发展新时期。2013年高职分类考试政策推行后虽然成效显著,但仍存在考试制度不能体现职业教育类型特点、招生制度未能凸显职业教育功能地位等问题,表现为相关利益方缺失、改革要求与现行政策尚有差距、考试环节缺乏有效技能测试。通过梳理高等职业教育考试招生制度的发展历程和各地实践,从多元治理视角提出政策建议,即在加强优质资源供给的基础上,建立考试招生环节的集权与适度分权的多主体治理框架,构建与职业教育类型相适应的考试招生制度,组建技能评价专业机构,完善具有职业教育特点的“文化素质+职业技能”评价体系。     

No time to think: policy,pedagogy and professional learning

In this study, we seek to illuminate the effects of the global policy convergence in education through a close study of its enactment within an Australian Teacher Education course. Building on an examination of the changing priorities of a cohort of pre-service teachers over a short space of time, we argue that the enactment of New Public Management approaches to the governance of teaching in Australia is having adverse effects on the professional learning of new teachers, defeating the policy goals. Previous studies have investigated the affective impact of current global policy formations on teachers. Building on that work, this study considers the impacts that the teacher policy emphasis on ‘performance’ has had on professional learning processes, which are understood with reference to Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory. The study is undertaken using an interpretative phenomenographic approach and informed by the related methods of discursive psychology, which positions discourse as a discursive practice to achieve specific goals in specific contexts.     

New public management in korean higher education: Is it reality or another fad?

The purpose of this study is to analyze changing patterns of governance in Korean higher education through the window of the NPM, so as to compare policy developments in Korea to wider international trends. Building upon Braun & Merrien (1999)’s earlier analytical framework on university governance, the study focuses on the following dimensions in analyzing the Korean case: (1) the belief system of the government regarding the role of universities; (2) the university-state relationship in terms of both ‘procedural’ and ‘substantive’ autonomy; and (3) the distribution of power and authority within individual universities. The results of the analysis suggest that, although some typical elements of the NPM governance model can be found, the NPM principles have yet to be firmly incorporated into Korean higher education. The study argues that the main reasons for this retardation in the implementation of the NPM driven reforms in Korea would be: (1) the general cynical attitude of professors towards the NPM governance model which was considered as the legacy of the former military regime and (2) the lack of a necessary coherence of government policies over the past two decades (i.e., the heavy emphasis on accountability without an accompanying increase in institutional autonomy). The study recommends, as a conclusion, that a more systematic and integrated implementation strategy would be needed so as to create the necessary preconditions for the NPM principles to be able to work properly in Korean higher education.