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University Governance - Western European Comparative Perspectives (Paperback, Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2009)
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University Governance - Western European Comparative Perspectives (Paperback, Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2009)
Series: Higher Education Dynamics, 25
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Higher education reforms have been on the agenda of Western
European countries for 25 years, trying to deal with self governed
professional bureaucracies politically weakened by massification
when an emerging common understanding enhanced their role as major
actors in knowledge based economies. While university systems are
deeply embedded in national settings, the ex post rationale of
still on-going reforms is surprisingly uniform and
"de-nationalized". They promote (1) the "organizational turn" of
universities, to varying extent substituting collegial loosely
coupled entities by "integrated, goal-oriented entities
deliberately choosing their own actions (and therefore open to
differentiation), that can thus be held responsible for what they
do" (2) the diversification of stakeholders, supposedly offering
solutions to problems as various as the democratisation of
universities, the shrinking of State budget resources and the
diversification of university missions offering answers to changes
in the making and in the use of science. When it comes to
accounting for these reforms, two grand narratives of public
management share the floor. NPM implies a strengthening of the
capacity of the core State to direct public services organizations
through management by objectives and results or contractualization,
assessment, evaluation and. "Governance" focuses on "network-based"
governance systems, where coordinating power and control are
collectively shared between the major 'social actors or partners'
at all levels of the decision-making system. Our results suggest
that all higher education systems under study were more or less
transformed according to both these narratives. It is therefore
needed to understand how they combine or create contradictions.
This leads us to test a third neo-weberian model. This model
reaffirms the role of the State, of representative democracy,
(central, regional and local), of public law (suitably modernized),
preserves the idea of a public service with a distinctive status,
culture and terms and conditions. It shifts from an internal
orientation to bureaucratic rules towards an external orientation
in meeting citizens' needs and wishes by means of standardization
of work processes and their products, based on a distinctive public
service and a particular legal order survived as the foundations
beneath the various packages of modernizing reforms. This book
traces the national dynamics of public policies, organizational
design and steering tools in seven European higher education and
research systems, using these narratives to interpret and test the
actual changes and the degree of national specificities and
European convergence. This book is not a sum of national chapters
like other presumably comparative. It does not intend to tell once
again the story of the transformation of the relationships between
the state and universities. It tries to use Higher education system
to discuss issues on state intervention and steering and more
generally the NPM, governance and neo-weberian models in a specific
field. Furthermore, this book intends breaking the walls between
specialists in higher education and specialist in public management
and research policy. This well rooted division of labour is less
that ever justified as the university mission in research
(fundamental, applied, strategic) is underscored by commentors and
reformers themselves. For that reason, we have chosen to observe
the consequences of the dynamics of public policies, organizational
design and steering tools on two specific issues related to the
development of research training and organizing within
universities: the transformation of research funding on the one
hand and the expansion of graduate studies and doctoral schools on
the other.
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