End of the English (British?) Empire? Or Something Else?

The paper analyzes best-seller lists in seven major European book markets between April 2008 and March 2009. The paper’s authors introduce the concept of an impact factor for best-selling authors that shows how influential an author is in a given market and across the analyzed markets overall. The paper’s authors discovered that a new generation of European best-selling authors appeared in major book markets of Europe such that those not writing in English have an impact of almost twice that of the English writers. Furthermore, the authors have discovered that only veteran English or American best-selling authors tend to be published by big media conglomerates; the majority of the European best-selling authors were published by a surprising mix of big and small, independent and international publishing houses. It is striking that English as the most popular second language in the world did not play a stronger role as an intermediary language in the transmission of books from one European culture to another, as European publishers in major markets still employ editors who read a variety of languages and thus play the role of intermediaries in how books travel from one culture to another.     

Political preferences and public funding of tertiary education during the economic crisis

This article analyses how political preferences, which are co-determined by the beliefs of decision-makers and influences of interest groups and the general public, affect the decisions to maintain or cut public funding for tertiary education during the economic crisis. Our sample included 29 European countries which we divided into two groups depending on the level of public funding for tertiary education before the crisis, which we used as a measure of revealed political preferences. We then observed the differences in changes in public tertiary education funding during the crisis between these two groups of countries using five different indicators. Three of the five indicators show that countries with a stronger political preference for tertiary education public funding cut their spending on tertiary education to a lesser extent (or even increased spending) during the economic crisis.     

The Labour Market,Graduate Competences and Study Programme Development: A Case Study

Developments in higher education are taking place in the wider context of globalisation, the Lisbon strategy and within the framework of the Bologna Process. Designing and developing Bologna programmes by taking into account the needs of the economy is a tool for successful quality assurance in higher education and for close cooperation with the environment. Our contribution aims to present the process of first cycle study programme formation and is based on a case study. By studying three groups of stakeholders, involved in the renewal of the study programme (teachers, students and employers), competences were thoroughly researched. It was found that graduate competences included in the questionnaire are of utmost importance and that they do not differ substantially from the competences of graduates in business studies presented in similar research (e.g. The Tuning Project of the European Commission, and the work carried out by the EFMD – the European Foundation for Management Development).     

2003年以来国外图书出版产业研究述评

由于目前国内有关国外出版产业研究的最新动态及成果介绍的相关文献非常缺乏,因此本文就2003年以来对国外图书出版产业产生重大影响的三本著作以及发表在Publishing Research Quarterly上的文献作为主要依据,对国外图书出版产业的四大研究阵营作一开创性梳理。     

Reading the Texts on Book Publishing: A New Body of Knowledge about an Old Body of Knowledge

The paper analyzes the role of publishing education in academia. The main question it asks is whether the publishing education remains to be focused on vocational training and as such resembles classical polytechnics, or is it gaining research component after it became part of European and American universities. The paper looks for answers to these questions in the body of texts that were published on book publishing in scientific and professional journals and monographs between 2003 and 2006.