Understanding Academic Drift: On the Institutional Dynamics of Higher Technical and Professional Education

‘Academic drift’ is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in several countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Understanding drift is obviously important, both to practitioners concerned that higher education should be relevant to practice, but also to historians who seek to make sense of long-term trends in knowledge-production. It is surprising, therefore, that although the existence of drift has been widely documented, remarkably little attention has been given so far to explaining it. In this paper I argue that drift is not an invariant universal tendency but a historically specific one which arises under particular circumstances. I outline a model of institutional dynamics which seeks to explain why drift has occurred at some institutions but not others. In the second section I explore the implications of the model for educationists and policy-makers concerned with the reform of higher education in these areas.     

Why New Hybrid Organizations are Formed: Historical Perspectives on Epistemic and Academic Drift

By comparing three types of hybrid organizations—18th-century scientific academies, 19th-century institutions of higher vocational education, and 20th-century industrial research institutes—it is the purpose here to answer the question of why new hybrid organizations are continuously formed. Traditionally, and often implicitly, it is often assumed that emerging groups of potential knowledge users have their own organizational preferences and demands influencing the setup of new hybrid organizations. By applying the concepts epistemic and academic drift, it will be argued here, however, that internal organizational dynamics are just as important as changing historical conjunctures in the uses of science when understanding why new hybrid organizations are formed. Only seldom have older hybrid organizations sought to make themselves relevant to new categories of knowledge users as the original ones have been marginalized. Instead, they have tended to accede to ideals supported by traditional academic organizations with higher status in terms of knowledge management, primarily universities. Through this process, demand has been generated for the founding of new hybrid organizations rather than the transformation of existing ones. Although this study focuses on Swedish cases, it is argued that since Sweden strove consistently to implement existing international policy trends during the periods in question, the observations may be generalized to apply to other national and transnational contexts.     

Academic Habitus and Institutional Change: Comparing Two Generations of German Scholars

Minerva - Since the 1980s scholars have been increasingly confronted with expectations to orient themselves toward societal and economic priorities. This normative demand for societal...     

Two Worlds of Academic Publishing: Chemistry and German Sociology in Comparison

The communication infrastructure of modern science is provided by profit-oriented business firms: the publishing houses which print and distribute academic books and journals. Surprisingly, beyond some rather superficial impressions, in science studies little is known about how academic publishers work—in particular, how markets for books and journals look like, how publication decisions are taken, and how the interplay with the scientific community is arranged. We address these questions with a focus on the relation between economic considerations of publishers, on the one hand, and the requirements of scientific communication, on the other. Our contrasting case studies are a very large worldwide operating publisher with regard to chemistry publications and a national publishing house of German sociology. At first, we show how the rather different business approaches of the two types of academic publishing houses look like. Both approaches could reach stability for some time which means not only that publishers earned money according to their profit aspirations but also that the communication requirements of science were sufficiently met. Afterwards, we point out the instabilities that have begun to arise in both fields and may sooner or later erode the former fit of profit-making and scientific communication.     

Institutional Struggles for Recognition in the Academic Field: The Case of University Departments in German Chemistry

This paper demonstrates how the application of New Public Management (NPM) and the accompanying rise of academic capitalism in allocating research funds in the German academic field have interacted with a change from federal pluralism to a more stratified system of universities and departments. From this change, a tendency to build cartel-like structures of allocating symbolic capital resulting in oligopolistic structures of appropriating research funds has emerged. This macro level structure is complemented by the strengthening of the traditional oligarchic structures of research, carried out by an increasing number of assistants under the direction of a professor on the meso level. The outcome of this institutional setting is a significant gap between the appropriation of research funds according to the allocation of symbolic capital and the production of knowledge in publications. The application of NPM therefore needs to be explained more as a result of the normative pressure of a globally established model of “rational” administration, and less as a result of its functional effectiveness. This is demonstrated by an empirical analysis with simple and multiple regressions using data on the allocation of research grants and publication records of German chemistry departments.     

The Academic Profession in a Rentier State: The Professoriate In Saudi Arabia

This paper describes the academic profession in Saudi Arabia, a state dependent upon oil exports, and explores how different social groups are accommodated within the higher education system. The discussion examines the relationship between political power and academic labour, and seeks to explain how local policies and practices are negotiating the converging effects of globalization on higher education.     

Estimating R&;D Expenditures In The Higher Education Sector

The accurate measurement of the time spent by academics on research and development activities is of great importance to universities and government. This essay outlines the ways in which different countries estimate these factors, and suggests ways of producing more reliable estimates.     

学术信息

哲 1儒学普世化的基本路向●蒋国保　苏州大学哲学系●《中国哲学史》2 0 0 3(3) ,第 5 - 1 2页儒学在现代遭遇了极大的生存困境 ,原因不在于它失去了制度保护或民众对它缺乏正确理解 ,而在于民众在情感上对它的排斥 ,具体表现为冷漠、淡漠和疏离的态度。既然如此 ,儒学要发挥现代作用、实现现代意义 ,必须经由世俗化的途径以实现普世化。要做到这一点 ,不能像新儒学所主张的那样 ,走宋明道学家的道路 ,淡化儒学思想的世俗性而突出其超越性 (宗教性 ) ;而应该抛弃轻视民众世俗价值的精神贵族化倾向 ,越过宋明道学 ,回归原始儒学的人文主义精…     

在杭州,感受德国的味道简

2013年深秋,在杭州的吴山广场西侧,搭起了一个巨大的白色帐篷,里面一场“洋气”的盛会正在上演。 这场节庆名叫“2013杭州德国周”：杭州与全球第二大狂欢节的科隆狂欢节携手举办文化演出;选出代表中国形象的“中国公主”;