Reaching for different ends through tenure track—institutional logics in university career systems

Higher Education - In this study, we used the institutional logics perspective to identify the logics underpinning the tenure track career system, how the logics manifest themselves in recruitment...     

Implementing the Triple Helix Model: Means-Ends Decoupling at the State Level?

The Triple Helix is a global model originating in developed economies but less developed countries have also made attempts to implement it into their national contexts. Meanwhile, the national context can be characterised by means-ends decoupling at the state level which implies that policies and practices of the state are disconnected from its core goal of creating public welfare. It refers to the oligarchic economies in which the state is captured by exploitative, rent-seeking oligarchies in business and politics. Ukraine is an example of such a country. Thus, the research question is: how did means-ends decoupling at the state level affect the implementation of the Triple Helix model in Ukraine? To answer this question, we employed both rational choice institutionalism and sociological institutionalism. The data emanate from interviews with the senior managers of four universities and science parks established within them. The findings reveal that means-ends decoupling at the state level, caused by the rent-seeking behaviour of business and political oligarchies, led to the implementation of the Triple Helix model in Ukraine also reflecting a case of means-ends decoupling. The greater the institutional complexity experienced by the science park and the more the senior managers of the university and the science park maintain a logic of confidence in practices that deviate from the Triple Helix model, the greater rent-seeking and means-ends decoupling at the organisational level. Both rent-seeking and means-ends decoupling were found to not only hinder economic growth but also result in a diversion of human intellectual capital.

     

Students,parents, educators: An approach to conflict of rights

Summary The two main approaches available for conflict resolution — in education as elsewhere — suffer from serious defects. The fundamental rights approach, popular with groups advocating certain real or fancied rights, presupposes that each individual or class of individuals has basic, over-riding entitlements. In the absence of an arbitrary or compelling consideration, however, this approach is torn and immobilized by inflexible, absolutistic claims. Our analysis in this paper shows no justification in the rhetoric of children/student rights' advocates, parent power movements, or beleaguered educators that their respective rights should be regarded as pre-eminent in educational conflicts. The second approach, intended to balance competing interests, either capriciously gives undue weight to one competing claim or leads to uncritical decisions based on unarticulated value presuppositions. Hopefully, a third approach could remedy these difficulties. The reconstructed Millian-Utilitarian approach suggested in this paper combines the use of balancing and of substantive principles based on defensible utilitarian values and pre-suppositions. In making this suggestion, the paper hopes to highlight the necessity for justices and decision-makers to deliberate more consciously, adequately, and rigorously on the values that undergird educational and social policies.