Governing Universities Globally: Organizations, Regulation and Rankings

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Governing Universities Globally

To Sue, Helen, Gavin, Charlie and Patrick

Governing Universities Globally Organizations, Regulation and Rankings

Roger King Visiting Research Professor, Centre for Higher Education Research, Open University and Research Associate, Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Roger King 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2009925919

ISBN 978 1 84720 739 5 Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

PART I

1 2 3 4

Universities in the globalizing world World models of university governance Global regulatory governance Transnational governance in higher education systems: Europe and the OECD

PART II 5 6 7 8

GLOBALIZATION AND REGULATORY GOVERNANCE 19 40 68 101

STANDARDS, MODELS AND RANKINGS

University league tables The impact of rankings on institutional behaviour and policies Global rankings and regulating the world-class university Conclusion: global regulatory futures

Bibliography Index

135 166 190 214 219 231

v

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the following for taking the time to read drafts of the manuscript for this book and for offering valuable comments: Philip Altbach, John Brennan, Jeroen Huisman, William Locke, Simon Marginson, Rajani Naidoo and Clive Tucker. As usual, the overall responsibility for what has been written is mine. I am also grateful to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for permission to draw substantially, in Chapter 6, on a project undertaken for them by the Open University and Hobsons Research on university league tables. The project team was led by William Locke and Line Verbik and included this author. I am grateful also to William Locke for the inclusion of three of the case studies that he undertook for the project in Chapter 6, and to Line Verbik for her analyses and conclusions in the original project and on which the author also has relied in that chapter. Consequently much of the material in Chapter 6 which refers to the HEFCE project may be regarded broadly as collaboratively authored.

vi

Introduction This book is about the growing influence of global regulation on universities. By global is meant the operation of institutions, practices and processes on a scale that is more worldwide than are exclusively national framings. However, some worldwide processes are confined to certain parts of the globe only, while globalization is also localized or manifested in certain types of practices within nation-states. That is, we do not assume a total worldwide integration of local systems for our notion of globalization, or accept that globalization refers only to the operation of processes located entirely within global institutions (Sassen 2007). Nor is the regulatory governance framework which is used throughout the book based solely on the application of non-discretionary and legally sustained rules for the coordination and orderliness of often disparate behaviours, although such instances form one example. Rather, ‘regulation’, although similar to rules in shaping individual behaviours, is much broader in its sources and modes and generally includes both public and private institutions. It contains processes of purposeful standardization, normative internalization, and markets as solutions for coordination and collective action problems, as well as hierarchical command. We shall see that global regulatory practices particularly exhibit these ‘non-legal’ characteristics in the absence of a world sovereign along the lines of territorial jurisdictions. They tend to be more private, sector-focused, standardizing and voluntary than found in the conventional command-and-control regulatory systems of nation states. Governance operates more through ‘steerage’, networks, deliberation and communities of the knowledgeable and the expert. Outcomes tend to be implemented by working through peer pressures and horizontal monitoring by organizational actors than by straight-line hierarchical orders issued from on high. We distinguish between four modes of global governance: a) intergovernmental (government to government); b) trans-governmental (involving particular ministries or departments); c) supranational (implemented by international institutions); and d) transnational (coordination by non-state actors). Higher education systems may be subject to any of these modes and often to all of them. Yet divergences between formal acceptance of global regulation and on-the-ground behaviour

1

2

Governing universities globally

are not always easy to detect. There are a number of actors in the global regulatory chain of implementation, and each level constitutes a threat of attenuation and the possibility of regulatory ritualism. For example, global standards in higher education (or any other sector) may flow from international organizations, as initiators, to national legislators and then to particular ministries and be subject to both political contestation and inter-departmental rivalry. Further dissemination to universities may also be resisted at senior leadership levels, or the standards may be embraced managerially but suffer insufficient ownership within departments or by individual academics. Consequently, our framework rests upon careful examination of the type of global regulatory mode in the origination of global standards – the four we outline – and the levels of dissemination and commitment involved in their implementation.

KEY THEMES In the chapters that follow we explore in detail how universities are increasingly subject to global forces that shape their patterns of governance and those of the higher education systems within which they are located. It is not suggested that these forces influence all universities in all parts of the world with more or less the same impact. Universities vary in mission and exposure to worldwide patterns of competition and collaboration, and they are also responsive to different structures of incentives, accountabilities and regulation from their national governments. While research universities are increasingly subject to the scientific opportunities and evaluations presented by the rapid communications and scientific revolutions of the global age, other institutions are more focused on their local communities. They may undertake little research, follow governmental directions more assiduously than the research universities as a consequence of high dependence on state funding, or, increasingly, they may be focused as a private for-profit entity on shareholder returns rather than on the accrual of academic reputation and status as found in the public sector. Moreover, the nature of global activity varies. For some institutions, the requirement to attract fee-paying students from abroad may form a critical part of financial survival and prosperity plans. Such commercial entrepreneurialism, however, may be less economically vital for others whose global recruitment activities are geared more to attracting high-flying researchers and scholars from abroad than generating revenues, as is typically the case with leading US institutions. The economic developmental and political worldwide integration of territorial societies also varies, as do national histories and cultures, affecting both the extent and the nature

Introduction

3

of global integration across sectors and societies, and this clearly plays out for their higher education systems too. Virtually all universities retain national identities and offer national degrees when operating globally, and all generally remain subject to domestic policies, regulation and funding. Thus, distinct variety and differences in national higher education systems remain despite recent convergences as a consequence of increased global policy communication and coordination by decisionmakers. Territorial place matters for organizations, not least as headquarters for managing increasingly dispersed and complex global operations. Processes of globalization also can be found, and differ, in quite localized settings, such as the impact of global rankings on university behaviour or the consequences for institutions and local communities of the presence of high numbers of cross-border students. Newly emerging powers in Asia (such as China and Singapore) and elsewhere are also seeking to enhance the global standing and performance of their higher education systems as part of determined national governmental strategies (Marginson 2007b). The experience of these eastern Asian powers underlines that global markets (and higher education systems) are perfectly compatible with strong states and that, even amongst the largest multinationals and world-ranking research universities, competitive advantage is predominantly located in respective national systems of governance, funding and innovation (Held and McGrew 1999; Weiss 1998). But, perhaps to a greater extent than before, the governance patterns of institutions in worldwide tertiary sectors (and we use the term ‘university’ as a broad synonym for such entities) are influenced by global references and standards. This is not entirely new. Teichler (2007:18), for example, observes that ‘higher education could be viewed as very international, in comparison with other institutions, in terms of a high appreciation of cosmopolitan values, pride based on international reputation and global search for knowledge’. Moreover, historically, universities have experienced different stages of pan-national isomorphism, from the medieval influence of Christian regimes and curricula, to humanism and enlightenment and the incorporation of education within modernizing nation-states in the last two to three centuries. Today, higher education systems experience a worldwide convergence of policies shaped by common problems and the role of influential international organizations, such as the OECD and the European Union (Martens and Weymann 2007). Global influences on universities thus appear to be on the rise. At one level such processes are broad in their worldwide cultural influences – ideas of what constitutes the modern university, what subjects it teaches, how it is internally organized, and what are the appropriate relationships for universities to have with governments – while others are more specific

4


and restricted, such as the impact of the Bologna processes on common degree cycles as part of inter-governmental efforts to enhance the international attractiveness of European universities. Some phenomena in higher education are increasingly worldwide in their scope (such as global university rankings) but their influence on institutional strategies may be limited to the top echelons of certain national systems. However, university rankings of various kinds are found in virtually all the major higher education systems, and as such increasingly national league tables might be construed as constituting a global phenomenon. That is, although varying in methodologies and criteria, and focused on institutions in a particular national jurisdiction, league tables are key parts of university environments in all developed societies even though only the relatively few worldwide rankings for the top universities are global in their scope and comparisons. This reminds us that global phenomena may be found in quite national settings and processes and are not located only in worldwide institutions. Throughout the following chapters a number of key themes recur. First, universities increasingly are recognized as active organizations rather than as passive institutions whose purposes simply reflect the goals of state bodies or which are the contingent outcome of the atomistic endeavours of individual academics. That is, as organizations, universities are responsible for their fate as autonomous actors. Although the nature and extent of institutional autonomy in relations with national states varies – from almost complete legal independence on the one hand, to increased but delegated freedom within continuing state ownership on the other – and while some countries, especially the ‘Anglo’ nations such as the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, for example, have a long tradition of autonomous institutions that have become more subject to state forms of regulation in recent years, mostly universities have become ‘persons’ in their own right. That is, in a strongly collective or unitary sense, their futures are largely in their own hands. They no longer consist, at least in the main developed societies, simply as congeries of highly individual scholars and disciplines, where institutional reputations largely are tacit and non-formalized, and not especially differentiating in choices by elite students. Nor is their funding today the steady, reliable and unspecified (‘block grants’) from broadly sympathetic governments (and thus relatively unattached from systematic external performance evaluation). Rather, policies of competition, corporate autonomy, managerial authority, and the worldwide victory of the regulatory principles of transparency and accountability (for the taxpayers’ money) in public services have put paid to most of that. Universities (not simply members of universities) are agents with the freedoms and responsibilities to chart their own courses based on rational calculations of market opportunities and of their own

Introduction

5

strengths and weaknesses. Mainly these opportunities are for gaining reputation and standing rather than for achieving high revenue through pricing strategies, although the growing band of for-profit universities operates with rather different objectives. Even for the public institutions financial strength is nonetheless required to maintain and advance research reputation, to invest in institutional infrastructures, and to possess the consequent ability to offer students, and other users, additional positional advantage from their university affiliations. Universities are free to prosper but also to fail. Or, at least, this is the theory. Whether national politicians have the nerve to let whole universities cease (as opposed to merging them with others, for example) may be questionable. And whether the isomorphic processes that legitimate the idea of what constitutes a ‘top’ university, reinforced by the stratifications of university league tables, prevent the full-blooded institutional diversity based on freely chosen and distinctive missions in national higher education systems that the new model implies may be a further caveat. But institutional autonomy and diversity are how the official story generally now runs. Second, influential ideas and standards found in processes of global governance for higher education promoted by international organizations also emphasize the enhanced organizational personhood of the university. This includes increasing managerial responsibilities for entrepreneurialism and the necessity for effective and efficient administration. Independent boards of governors or trustees are expected to exercise broad strategic and oversight accountabilities over institutions, powers which in some countries recently have been delegated from the state, and to hold senior leaders to account. Worldwide processes respect and seek to enhance the free choice of institutions, but within guides, models and blueprints reflecting the distilled wisdom of authoritative standards-setters and similar agencies, governmental and non-governmental, and also transnational organizations such as the OECD, UNESCO and the European Union. Rather than law-based command and control of universities from the state (national or local), found particularly across Continental Europe and, more recently, in South Africa, but which in countries such as the USA, Australia and the UK was always rather ambiguous and largely sensitive to traditional academic self-regulatory processes, even though increasing in its formal scrutiny in recent years (King 2007a, 2007b), in the global sphere we find softer constraints. These generally consist of recommendations, codes of good practice, guidelines, benchmarks and similar models from which we can learn from others and yet be free to dissent. However, universities and their higher education systems need to provide very good reasons for divergence from the norm in order to act as influential participants in global discussions. The importance of reputational good-standing

6


and peer pressures in such forums ensures that divergence from global blueprints needs to be quite deliberate and informed to escape opprobrium or gentler mutterings. We live in a world of standards and norms, and this form of governance is especially marked at the global level. Bodies such as the OECD, the EU, the World Bank and UNESCO increasingly prescribe well-researched ways of acting for universities and other higher education policymakers. Global regulatory governance is informed more by soft law and modelling than by policy fiat backed by legal instruments. Third, private sources of authority increasingly accompany and in some cases displace governmental sources of coordination in the global world, including higher education. For example, transnational consortia of likeminded universities from various parts of the globe in the last decade or so have come together to develop programmes, to self-regulate through benchmarking and review, to gain global competitive advantages through resources collaboration between the members, and to mark out boundaries to membership that reinforce standing, prestige and similarities of mission. In some cases, positions in the global and other university league tables are taken into account in considering applications for membership. This reinforces private authority, as university league table compilers (nearly always non-governmental) also have become significant and sometimes compelling sources of influence on university behaviour and higher education markets. In some instances, however, government agencies provide key data that these private rankers can use and reinterpret according to their own notions and assumptions, although such official data are less readily available for those compilers constructing global evaluations across territorial borders. Governments also have not proved averse to utilizing standards issued from private entities for their own policy purposes, such as overseas governments providing bursaries and similar financial assistance only to those students going abroad to universities featuring highly in national or global league tables. Quality assurance bodies have also referred to declarations of good practice by university associations (on cross-border higher education, for example) as forming benchmarks with which to evaluate individual institutions (see Woodhouse and Stella, 2008, on the Australian quality assurance agency for higher education and its incorporation of privately generated guidelines into procedures for evaluating the international activities of Australian universities). Some sources of private authority, such as university league tables, have become key elements in higher education market-making activities. Yet they may operate to confound broader governmental or ‘public interest’ objectives, such as for widening social participation and for encouraging diversity of institutional missions. As we shall see, private and civil society actors, often in partnership with

Introduction

7

governmental entities, increasingly assume important regulatory roles across many sectors, but it is a ‘regulation’ based on standards, isomorphism and peer pressure rather than law-backed sanctions. Governance, particularly at the world level, is no longer predominantly the preserve of national states. Economic neo-liberalism and the associated nostrums of the ‘new public management’ also encourage private authority and selfregulation as a more legitimate and effective form of coordination than that offered by governments directly. Fourth, the role of the national state has undergone major transformations in recent decades, in response to economic and political integration with the deepening of globalization. More particularly, in financial and other economic sectors especially, the competition state is less the controller of global flows than an actor aiming to attract a reasonable share of them. It seeks the highly mobile funds and investments as part of a continuous search for comparative national economic advantage. National states operate across multi-levels of governments as they deal with global issues and problems – terrorism, criminal money-laundering, climate change and extending free economic trade – that are beyond the control of individual governments, and this is leading to increased forms of transnational governance. Increasingly too, states operate in networks of alliance with private organizations and, in some cases, appear happy to delegate governing functions to private entities. Civic and corporate private entities not only sustain governance through partnering states and similar governmental entities, but may also replace them as regulatory governors. There appears striking emphasis in regulatory governance generally on the need for states to recognize the autonomy of functional subsystems – such as the economy, education, science and the arts – whose ‘internal logic’ and professional self-regulatory knowledge it is reluctant to interfere with. The aim, rather, is to ‘meta-regulate’ at a distance where this is necessary, thus avoiding overload at the centre and disabling the innovation, dynamism and decentralized information processing of local actors (Hayek 1960). Before considering how the domain of higher education fits into new global schema, we need to outline the framework of world order that has evolved in recent decades and which is predicated on the absence (or the non-desirability) of a world state or global ruling sovereign.

THE GLOBAL WORLD ORDER In discussing global governance in higher education it is increasingly important that we have a sense of the types of regulatory entities that more generally operate in the world and which, in the absence of a world

8


government, and with major limitations on the use of hard and military power available to most national states, provide the building blocks for ordering global affairs. Inevitably such processes are messy and complex, apparently disconnected from each other and highly sector-based, yet providing the foundations for a coherent sense of a worldwide political order. One way of approaching the mosaic of interconnecting ropes and ladders that make up such a global governing order is through an examination of key networks. Transnational networks may consist of public or private actors, and often both, linked together for deliberative policymaking and regulatory activities across borders. The notion of a governance network reflects negotiated forms of public–private rule-making through processes of deliberation and partnerships. This discourse model, emphasizing that law is legitimate only if based on an inclusive and fair process of deliberation, appears particularly suited to transnational governance, as it reduces the importance of national borders and relies on individual rather than national rights and obligations (Dingworth 2007). Coordination at the global level, in the absence of a world government, increasingly involves stable if fluid groupings of operationally autonomous (but interdependent) actors, who produce, through dialogue and bargaining based on knowledge and expertise (‘reflexive rationality’), self-regulatory and normative frameworks that help secure coordination in particular sectors. Compliance does not rest on legal or state sanctions as such but is enforced through processes of trust and commitment that are sustained by self-produced rules and norms. In recent years, states have reinforced private forms of public governance as a means of reshaping (and shedding) functional tasks, whilst retaining and enhancing broader authority and strategic responsibility for promoting national economic advantage for their respective ‘competition states’ in the context of globalization. Increasingly state power depends more on the ability to participate in international institutions than on containing or insulating sovereignty within a closed-off national territory. Across a range of domains, the demand for rule-based global governance is growing, in part stimulated by the need for the world to address such common issues as global warming, terrorism and international financial flows. Broadly, it is conventional to distinguish four different modes of global governance: inter-governmental, in which states collaborate through their governments; trans-governmental, in which officials from particular ministries and departments cooperate across borders; supranational, in which international bodies exercise authority through a permanent bureaucracy; and transnational, in which non-state actors coordinate particular sectors. As well as seeking to influence governments and inter-

Introduction

9

governmental rule-making bodies, increasingly non-state global actors have developed and applied their own rules, not always with governmental approval, thus raising issues of democratic accountability and legal constitutionalism (Dingworth 2007). Transnational governance through private authority is found in such areas as internet commerce, telecommunications standards, and the establishment of creditworthiness (by ratings agencies) for corporate issuers of debt. Slaughter (2004) attaches particular importance to networks of government officials, or trans-governmental cooperation, for global governance. In this new world order, state servants increasingly share knowledge and collaborate across borders to operate effectively in addressing issues, including crime and terrorism, that are themselves networked and global. Networks are defined as ‘a pattern of regular and purposive relations among like government units working across borders which demarcate the domestic from the international sphere’ (p. 14). Importantly, however, such activities are not channelled through a centralizing foreign office or similar entity but are conducted at least semi-autonomously by the various departments that make up a fragmentary or disaggregated state. That is, the networks are horizontal. The state is thus disaggregating into its component institutions that operate domestically and (through networks) internationally. In the following chapters we shall come across a range of private networks across territorial borders that exercise forms of regulatory authority, and public–private networks for transnational governance also have increased significantly in recent years. Yet there are grounds for believing the role of transnational governmental networks remains particularly pertinent in higher education. Universities generally continue to remain reliant on governmental funding (although proportions of institutional revenues derived from this source have declined in recent years, not least for the topranked universities) and are subject to governmental regulatory, funding and other policy arrangements. Moreover, governments have become highly aware of the knowledge-creating and human development significance of their universities for the economic competitiveness and social wellbeing of their peoples. In higher education the task for governments has become one of successfully combining levels of institutional autonomy with public accountability – regulating ‘at a distance’ – and for the steerage of universities to be located within well-judged and transnationally consistent governance arrangements. By no means are states out of the global governance picture. Global governmental networks have certain common functions across policy domains, although clearly distinguishable in many other characteristics through possessing particular sector features. They build trust,

10


develop cooperation and learning, increase information and contacts, and often become sufficiently well entrenched for individual and national reputation within such contexts to matter to participants. Generally, they function through the use of persuasion, modelling, dialogue and knowledge-sharing; they are informal and nimble enough to respond flexibly and speedily in a fast-moving world. Cross-border networks have the advantage of being able to agree and administer rules, and also to arbitrate when necessary, without the formal paraphernalia of elected territorial governments (although, on the downside, also incurring the prospects of ‘democratic deficits’, opaqueness, and lack of legitimacy and accountability). More especially, as we have noted, networks generally are composed of the elements of disaggregating states – ministries, regulatory agencies, courts and legislatures – rather than being formed by unitary state actors (except as found less commonly in full treaty or similar negotiations). They help to solve what Slaughter (2004) defines as ‘the globalization paradox’ in that we need ever more governance on a global and regional scale but not centralizing authority and its aloofness and coercive capacities operating far from the people being governed. Moreover, sector-based networks attract the experts and the knowledgeable, and those with the professional and scientific backgrounds that help forge agreement and confidence. Regulatory networks cover a wide spectrum, from those that are informal and bilateral, to the highly institutionalized and multilateral as found in international organizations. Their functions vary too, although at the heart of a disaggregated world order are sets of horizontal networks among national government officials in their respective policy areas which collect and share information of all kinds. However, enforcement networks take a stronger form and generally arise when government officials in one country lack the capacity to enforce particular laws alone. Harmonization networks may be even more formalized, perhaps through treaty, in which regulators and other policymakers seek a common regulatory standard to govern all, rather than agreeing simply to mutual recognition of diverse territorial arrangements. Often in such circumstances, as with the EU for example, a supranational authority is required to which national officials assent (effectively to a transfer of sovereignty) in order for overall effectiveness and regulatory reach to be gained. However, vertical networks of this kind, where supranational agencies reach down directly into national sovereignty, are often more controversial and formalized than horizontal networks, which issue rules or guidelines where national sovereignty is less in play (and indeed is frequently reinforced). Consequently the vertical network generally consists of a supranational entity working closely with domestic national bodies (such as the courts) in order to secure effective enforcement. Nonetheless, many international organizations, such as the

Introduction

11

OECD, are principally habitats (arenas) for meetings of national officials rather than being truly autonomous or resembling supranationalism. (However, Chapter 4 suggests that the authority and role of the OECD’s central secretariat may be becoming stronger, not least in helping to develop OECD standards and similar modelled prescriptions.) Including for education, the OECD aims to help countries to learn from each other and to highlight (and to recommend) policy options that national governments may have difficulty in generating in domestic politics. The objective is more to shape future or longer-term policies than necessarily to provide detailed plans for immediate adoption nationally. The OECD shares information, undertakes comparative research, and produces models and codes of good practice that are articulated at a sufficiently high level so as to attain wider applicability and avoid the complexities of formal and more detailed legal obligations. Although its membership is confined to the world’s most advanced nations, its research and policy investigations often include non-members, and its principles and benchmarks achieve a wider and more authoritative global significance than simply for its members. As with other such regulatory networks, the OECD provides well-researched and invaluable information to formulate frameworks of best practice, governing principles, codes and standards that allow governments and organizations (including within higher education) to regulate themselves, but within the constraints of peer pressures and reputational self-regard rather than by prescribed specific commands backed up by detailed monitoring and possible sanctions. In a world of increasing information overload and complexity, government networks (officials and experts) such as the OECD acquire a ‘brand’ or reputation as credible purveyors of information that has been sifted and authenticated, which is invaluable for the time-stretched and the otherwise bewildered national decisionmaker.

THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS In the following chapters we examine how universities are located within a realm of global governance, developing and highlighting the themes we have just outlined. For the most part we confine our attentions to those institutions that are called universities, or that clearly operate as universities in the amount and levels of higher education that they undertake even if lacking the formal title. We use the term ‘university’ to cover both of these examples. We recognize also that increasingly the description ‘tertiary’ is applied to the sector (by the OECD, for example) to reflect the increasing diversity of provision and institutions offering education at

12


initial and sub-degree levels, which forms a significant component of ‘postsecondary’ education. However, for the most part we are concerned with university and university-type institutions, although, as appropriate, as in discussions of institutional mission and diversity, for example, we locate our processes in a wider sense of ‘tertiary education’. We begin in Chapter 1 with an account of the contemporary university and the key characteristics of higher education systems in the global age. The modern autonomous university is a socially influenced phenomenon, regarded by policymakers (and institutional leaders and many staff members) as an accessible and socially-relevant organization. More particularly, it is a critical instrument for national economic competitiveness. As such, the aloof and socially isolated body of a half-century and more ago, in which academic rigour depended on both conceptual and institutional monasticism, not least to understand and develop knowledge based on sacred methodological and internally generated canons, has become transformed into a vehicle of national utility. It provides preparation for a much wider range of occupations than that characteristically for the elite professions of law, engineering and medicine, and the training of scholars and senior civil servants, that had generally dominated university education in many countries half a century and more ago. Moreover, external accountability and transparency in public affairs have become triumphant regulatory principles worldwide, and this has influenced the governance of universities nearly everywhere, not least in the introduction of external quality assurance bodies and the rise of performance-based funding. The chapter explores the rise of private higher education provision around the globe (and the ‘privatizing’ of the public universities) and the regulatory implications, not least for quality assurance and consumer protection. The rapid growth of private providers has provided a rising element of institutional diversity in higher education systems – and such differentiation is a global policy mantra – but the still-called public universities are also differentiating, not least by reputation, and their brands are subject to the vagaries of increased private standards and regulatory authority in university league tables. The global diffusion of funding instruments that are focused on user-pays and high-tuition-costs/high-student-loan policies is also highlighted, to illustrate the embrace of market-like and consumerist forms of coordination for universities worldwide by policymakers. The growth of cross-border higher education also has important regulatory consequences for universities, including that flowing from trade agreements, and is stimulating the growth of softer forms of global regulation through the influence of international organizations such as UNESCO, the OECD and the WTO, and their diffusion of codes of best practice and similar guidelines (although the WTO has legal arbitration

Introduction

13

procedures and is the most constitutionalized of these international entities outside the EU). It is a form of international provision where the longstanding globalization of scientific exchanges is increasingly accompanied by the active corporate endeavours of the university as ‘person’. Yet the chapter points out that the motives for cross-border provision are numerous and that the regions of the world display different drivers. These include the policy-driven activities on student mobility of the European Union, the high-skill-seeking approaches of the leading US universities, and the commercialism found in the Asia Pacific region, and in countries such as Australia and the UK, that reflects in high private demand for undergraduate and taught master’s provision from international students paying deregulated fees. Yet national regulations remain important as both obstacles and opportunities for cross-border flows, such as on qualifications’ recognition, quality assurance, accreditation and visas. Unsurprisingly, national regulators, not least quality assurance agencies and accrediting bodies, are increasing their international range to cover the international activities of their domestic institutions and, in some cases, as with the US regional accrediting bodies, regulating foreign university incomers. Moreover, the international dimension has become a much stronger driver of university strategies than before (Woodhouse and Stella 2008). Although markets and operations have globalized more rapidly for universities than has regulation (unlike, say, in accountancy), and universities are predominantly regulated in a conventional sense by national governmental agencies, this is by no means the complete picture. Regulatory governance involves more than the state these days, particularly on the world stage. Increasingly universities are self-regulating themselves through international peer-driven processes of external review, and are becoming subject to the softer forms of regulation and private authority globally that are found in other sectors too. In Chapter 2 we explore the influence of economic models in public policy discourse generally, not least the claimed advantages of markets and competition as both efficient allocators of resources and also forms of regulation and coordination. Theories of public choice and the new public management have significantly influenced higher education and form a key global template for universities worldwide. That is, such notions have become globally institutionalized as private sector instruments have come to be regarded as wholly appropriate for application to universities and other public services. Two other global policy templates are discussed in the chapter: institutional systemic diversity in higher education sectors, and the idea that universities are a key to national economic competitiveness. The role of international organizations in both connecting and diffusing such templates

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as examples of good policy practice is also examined, as are the ambiguities found in such models. Such processes appear particularly appropriate for the application of neo-institutional explanations that are focused on the extent to which national entities, such as universities, are deeply shaped and made more uniform by a wider world culture. Universities are quite homogeneous worldwide in many of their key features – curricula and subjects offered, for example, display remarkable consistency around the world despite high variations in local circumstances – while the norms of science strikingly inform policy processes of many kinds. Significant regulatory implications for universities flow from such processes, especially at the transnational level, and these are discussed in the context of the ‘post-regulatory state’ and ideas of ‘networked governance’. We examine notions of regulatory governance and transnational policymaking more closely in Chapter 3. Here, three main explanatory approaches are offered for global similarities in university governance: economic competition, in which the regulatory modes of the dominant world economies and their university systems tend to be diffused to others; the institutional influence of inter-governmental and other cross-border forms, such as the EU and the OECD; and, third, the impacts of transnational networks of professionals and experts. The chapter examines also contemporary notions of the regulatory state and regulatory capitalism, and the consequences for levels of regulation and their modalities in the modern world, not least for universities. The outcomes often are ambiguous, resulting in mixtures of top-down external formality and target-setting, for example, but within retained notions of academic peer process and self-regulation. In global governance especially, soft law forms of governance tend to prevail, based on utilizing notions of peer pressure and reputation rather than in exercising traditional command and control. Decentred forms of regulation appear particularly appropriate for both transnationalism and higher education systems more generally. However, problematic issues of transparency, accountability and legitimacy loom large in such processes, and we examine ways in which such matters may be approached without losing the benefits gained from networked governance processes delivering a public interest. Chapter 4 considers specifically two examples of transnational regulatory governance in higher education which contain important nongovernmental as well as inter-governmental elements. One is the European Bologna Process and the increasing role of the European Commission in the development of a common higher education ‘space’ or area across Europe. The other is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an association of the 30 most advanced nations. We analyse it as a key influence in constituting policy models and ideas of great authority based on widespread research, and as an important

Introduction

15

gatherer and publisher of data on national education and other performances. The latter significantly influence governments, especially by operating through processes of reputation and peer standing. Increasingly the OECD is extending its authority in the field of tertiary education, particularly through the development of comparative data on learning outcomes. Its authority is based on the dissemination of models of best practice that follow extensive thematic reviews, and which effectively constitute sets of standards for higher education systems. Three particular themes are explored for both organizations: the manner in which transnational regulatory and other policies reflect wider ‘world society’ models of how best to govern universities in the modern age; the levels to which on-the-surface similarities and convergences in structures and system architectures across higher education systems disguise important differences in local interpretations and applications; and, finally, the increasing role of the supranational or vertical network level (alongside governmental horizontal networks) in the two organizations, and the resort to soft law and voluntarism rather than hard-line compulsion for achieving authoritative leverage over higher education systems. The growing role and authority of permanent officials are discussed as indicating the importance of managerial and expert power, and similar administrative resources, in providing, for these two international organizations at least, levels of organizational autonomy apart from formal inter-governmental supremacy and supervision. Through the chapters of Part II we explore examples of private authority in the global governance of higher education, and the increased role of standards and benchmarks in guiding university strategies. Chapter 5 looks closely at league tables of university performance as a global phenomenon, in the sense that these are found nationally around the globe, but also at the development of institutional rankings that are global in reach and which purport to highlight the leading ‘world-class universities’. We examine reasons for their growth, relationships between rankings and governmental and wider public policy objectives, the underlying assumptions about the ‘top’ universities in the compilations, the impacts of league tables for institutional behaviours, and their role in producing orderliness and market-functionality, not least across borders, and explore how, rather like the credit ratings agencies in financial services, they perform the role of ‘embedded knowledge regulators’. Chapter 6 looks more closely at studies that have investigated the impact of university league tables empirically, particularly those by Hazelkorn (2007), and by Locke and his colleagues (2008) for the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It is clear from both investigations that universities take these forms of private regulatory governance

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very seriously although not always admitting to it. Increasingly the world of higher education and the institutions that help to form it are perceived by simple significations, and league tables fall into such a category. In a world of information overload and complexity, individuals search for authoritative short-cuts to obtaining the knowledge they require for their decisionmaking, such as in deciding which universities to apply for. By no means are such decisions based on high formal rationality: rather, psychological research tells us that individuals look for simple heuristics or bounded rationalities in their decisionmaking, and university rankings may be regarded as falling within such categories. Chapter 7 looks more closely at the global rankings in regulating the world-class university. It explores the notion of ‘world class’ and the intense interest that government policymakers around the world appear to have in possessing at least a few such universities within their own national jurisdictions. Policies of selectivity and concentration of funding to institutions in countries in support of such aspirations are considered, as is the alternative notion of the ‘world-class university system’ that seeks less elitist means of raising research and other performances within the context of valuing institutional diversity. The two main global rankings, and the methods and models that underpin these, are explored in detail, as is the increasing emphasis in governmental research funding in focusing on publication rates, citations and similar statistics in their processes for evaluating university performance. The extent to which global rankings are influencing senior university leaders is also explored, although it is recognized that to date little such investigation has taken place (in comparison with that on national league tables, for example). The so-called ‘emerging global model’ of the research university, and its close ties to the worlds of knowledge and innovation, is also explored as forming a further ‘global template’ for university governance to add to those we outlined in earlier chapters. The book concludes by looking at what is next in researching university global governance, and suggests a number of approaches. In summary, throughout the chapters, the focus is on understanding the university as a ‘person’, as an organization with its destiny and reputation in its own hands. This produces significant consequences for how universities are best governed, not least internationally. Soft law, decentred regulation and a proliferation of guidelines, benchmarks and recommendations illustrate authoritative recognitions of the autonomous university, but one that as a consequence is increasingly shaped by notions of world standards and culture, and which is driven by anxieties for reputation and standing. How we arrived at these conditions is a story that starts with Chapter 1, which follows.

PART I

Globalization and regulatory governance

1.

Universities in the globalizing world

INTRODUCTION Teichler (2007) notes that during the nineteenth century distinctive national models of higher education emerged. The British approach, centred on Oxford and Cambridge, emphasized teaching and the closeness of the relationship between tutors and students in order to develop well-rounded personalities. Collegiality and autonomy from the state were its key characteristics, involving non-hierarchical, cooperative decisionmaking and high levels of academic self-determination. Nonetheless, subsequently into the later decades of the twentieth century, levels of public funding generally were as high as in the more state-directed European systems, although, until more recently, block grant funding by government to universities reinforced the longstanding sense of institutional autonomy. In France, however, universities and their curricula have been strongly coordinated bureaucratically by the legal-rational authority of the state, reinforced by high institutional decentralization, and where separate professional institutions outside the universities (ecoles, research organizations) attracted higher prestige. The internationally influential German system became characterized by the integration of teaching and research, and the notion that academic freedom and institutional independence were best guaranteed by the state and by a strong professoriate. The US model, especially as it strengthened as a perceived global leader throughout the twentieth century, combined the British approach at undergraduate level with the German model of a key research function at the graduate level. However, the central or federal state in the USA plays a much more restricted funding and planning role than in many other countries, with, rather, local states and forms of self-accreditation processes providing key regulatory processes. Three forms of governance and coordination have been associated with these national models (Clark 1983). The Continental European systems have been regarded as state bureaucratic with weak institutional leadership, and where the government generally reserved to itself powers, through detailed laws and directives, for matters such as student admissions, staff appointments, curricula development and the granting of awards; the British model emphasized academic freedom and institutional autonomy across such areas; so, mainly, did the USA, which has been characterized 19

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by market forces and strong managerial leadership, although local states have increasingly sought to regulate the public universities in key policy areas, such as accountability and tuition fees. Although key national varieties of higher education governance remain (King 2007b), in recent years the introduction of a form of regulatory supervision by the state through a combination of market forces and state-backed performance evaluation has indicated a more common regulatory model across countries than before. It coincides with stronger executive powers and responsibilities at the institutional level, and often reduced public funding per student for university operations. Moreover, scholarship, research and reputation have become increasingly global, although regulation and funding remain predominantly (but not solely) national. The outcome is rather an ‘ambiguous’ higher education regulatory state in which the state’s relationships with the universities combines wariness, supportiveness, and often the desire for greater governmental shaping and supervision whilst recognizing the necessity for quite high levels of institutional autonomy to enable creativity and innovation to flourish, not least in the public interest (King 2007a). Competition, efficiency, utility, differentiation, quality assurance and performance evaluation have become highly salient policy characteristics, while the student body has become more socially heterogeneous. Moreover, steeper gradations in institutional quality and performance differences than before and more selective funding methodologies reflect governmental and other recognition of rising world-class competition in university provision, especially at the top levels. Increasingly policy attention focuses on institutional performances by the leading universities on the global rather than national playing field, sustaining notions of increased vertical stratification. Broadly, there is little doubt that higher education sectors around the world have been undergoing major transformations and some convergences in recent years. Student numbers and institutions have expanded rapidly, and so has the notion of the university as an accessible and socially-relevant, rather than exclusive, institution. The model of mass, and increasingly universal, access to post-secondary education (defined as around 50 per cent or more of the relevant age cohort) has diffused from the USA to many countries, and around 140 million students are now found worldwide (Altbach 2007). Moreover, notions of lifelong learning and the necessity for regular employee retraining in an age of rapidly obsolescent knowledge mean that universities no longer simply provide the next stage of education for young school-leavers, but cater for much wider age and maturity ranges, and this contributes to growth pressures. Student populations generally also have much higher proportions of women than two or more decades ago, adding to heterogeneity.


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University education is seen to be vital for a country’s economic competitiveness through improved productiveness, for enhancing social equity, for the sustainability of democratic and citizenship values, and for a nation’s social and physical wellbeing (these are some of its public goods) while providing individuals with the ability to become upwardly careermobile and better paid (these are its predominantly private goods or individual payoffs). As a consequence of these ‘real-world’ impacts universities have becoming increasingly challenged by governments to look a little like their often generally private and privatizing national economies as well – to be more enterprising (in their modes of decisionmaking and ability to attract private income), more business-focused (in applying research for industrial solutions and constructing skills-based programmes for company employees) and more socially relevant (in devising curricula that students and employers find useful, work-friendly and career-enhancing). There has been a move away, at least in much public discourse, from older models of the university as necessarily rather aloof from the world – an institution as essentially having to be protected and isolated from society in order to ensure the intellectual freedom, intensity and curiosity required for the production of new knowledge – to one regarded as too crucial an agency for delivering economic competitiveness and other governmental and wider social objectives to be left entirely to its own devices. Nonetheless, it is important not to overdraw the comparison. For example, the liberty to undertake basic research and scholarship is regarded not only by many academics but also by some industrialists and politicians as just as valuable for producing the ‘blue-skies thinking’ necessary for economic development as more directly applied and commercial solution-seeking knowledge production. Moreover, most research and scholarship in universities continues to be produced non-commercially and as a ‘public good’ (Marginson 2007b). Tensions and dilemmas concerning the appropriate balance between institutional autonomy and state-directedness for universities continually abound for leaders and policymakers virtually everywhere. Increasingly this dilemma is being resolved by the state setting overall objectives for higher education systems, often through annual letters from ministers, establishing coherent regulatory frameworks, including for quality assurance, and constructing performance-related and targeted funding schemes, including competitive research funding, along with enhanced consumer information about institutions that it or a governmental agency may collect. In a few countries, such as those of the UK, for example, or Ireland or New Zealand, intermediary funding and regulatory bodies also operate as a form of ‘buffer’ between governments and the universities, thus, on the surface at least, adding to institutional senses of autonomy (although this may depend on the extent

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to which bodies such as funding councils reflect governmental as opposed to institutional representations). Additionally, governments may supplement competitive pressures by recognizing other types of institution. They may enhance student choice through voucher and similar schemes in which university funding is in the hands of the user and which may be used for both public and private educational purchase. Or they may widen and make more flexible credit transfer and accumulation schemes, again possibly including both public and private providers. Publishing quality and satisfaction information collected from surveys and similar mechanisms, as with the annual UK National Student Survey, is a further consumerist instrument that may be employed. This ‘steerage’ then allows universities the autonomy to operate as autonomous organizations but responding to the overall incentives and constraints established by governments governing ‘at a distance’. Governments generally create legal frameworks to allow formal representation of such autonomy, through powers creating local boards and councils with specified objectives and often composition, to include businesspeople and other outsiders, for example, and legislating local institutional responsibilities and authority for matters such as property ownership, personnel, the selection of students, financing, the supply of education, and research. As we shall see, growth in higher education provision and revised notions of what are considered to be the essential functions of modern universities are becoming established worldwide as key premises for raising a nation’s economic performance. Before seeking to analyse why this is so, we should identify two other important characteristics of the contemporary university that are critical to understanding the emerging ways in which higher education institutions are being governed and regulated. First, universities, and the systems in which they are located, generally have become more private (and more publicly accountable) affairs over the last decade and more. Although private colleges and universities have existed around the world for some time, and numbers have grown in recent years with the inability of public funds to match the political desire for higher education expansion, many formerly state or public tertiary institutions also have taken on a more private persona. The introduction of market-type mechanisms by governments seeks to reinforce competitive forces through increased freedoms for students to choose their institutions and programmes on the basis of adequate information and external quality assessments, and through the payment of tuition and other fees ‘as consumers’. Institutional autonomies may be enhanced or reinforced through freedom of entry to markets, the ability in some areas to set fees, and the ability to specify what is taught.


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Governmental aims for marketization policies generally include increased institutional efficiency, heightened responsiveness to external stakeholders, more diversified and especially private funding, and deeper cultures of innovation and entrepreneurship. Now no longer simple emanations of national states with their objectives largely set externally by governments, ‘public’ universities these days are expected to operate rather as would commercial-sector entities and to develop their own corporate strategies and objectives for institutional development. That is, they are expected to operate as coherent and well-managed organizations rather than as loosely coordinated collections of scholarly disciplines. For most countries, universities predominantly have been funded by governments. The contemporary desire by many national governments to construct and expand research universities, with at least a handful meriting the description ‘world-class’, means that public funding will continue to be a major source of university finances as a means of sustaining globally-competitive scientific research innovation. Only in the USA are there found a significant number of private universities with the ability to conduct prestigious research, and even these are supported by research grants from the US federal government (Altbach and Balan 2007). But, inevitably, governments, while concentrating basic research funds to those with the capacity and track record to deliver the best outcomes, face difficult fiscal pressures in financing other demands on their higher education systems, such as for widening participation and raising the quality of student learning outcomes. They do so within a context of rising claims for public expenditure priority in other areas, such as healthcare, and perceived electoral hostility to widespread tax increases. In response governments tend to encourage universities to collaborate more with the business sector in developing applied research and teaching programmes as sources of private income. Numbers of industrial partnerships, executive training programmes, and consulting services by universities are growing in many countries, notably the UK and Australia as well as the USA, as is the outsourcing of functions to private commercial companies, such as for marketing and recruitment, or for operating firstyear preparatory programmes for international students on university campuses. Such moves reinforce contemporary governmental policies that emphasize the corporate autonomy, organizational competitiveness and economic relevance of universities. Increasingly also the consumer element looms larger as a source of higher education funding and as a harbinger of wider cultural and organizational change for universities. User-pays or ‘shared-cost’ models are becoming more widespread in helping to fund higher education systems, usually in the form of substantial charges for student tuition and other services, underpinned by private and public

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loan schemes. Such policies by governments receive global legitimacy from international organizations, such as the OECD, the G8, the EU, the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF, engaged as they have been since the post-Cold War years with the global diffusion of liberalism and globalization, and the imprinting of these processes on to forms of national governance. In the USA, too, private philanthropic donations play a large part in the funding of many of the leading universities. However, it has proved harder to transplant such private endowment cultures to countries outside the USA, despite encouragement by governments, such as those in the UK, although the very top universities in the UK, for example, appear to have been attracting larger private endowments in recent years.

PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES Although the numbers of institutions and students in higher education systems have expanded dramatically around the globe in the last decade or so, perhaps the growth of private provision has been its most spectacular component. It is estimated that around one in three students worldwide is in the private higher education sector (Altbach 2007). The USA, Japan and Chile, for example, have long-established private fields of higher education. In the USA, private institutions constitute some of the most prestigious and longest-established universities, such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale, and this applies to only a slightly lesser degree in Japan and Chile. Such institutions possess large research and endowment funds and are not reliant on tuition fees as their only or primary source of funds (unlike most private higher education providers in the USA and elsewhere). Such established private universities rarely have been ‘for-profit’, at least in a formal sense. Usually they have adopted a charitable-like ‘non-profit’ structure, sometimes for tax advantages, even if businesslike and quite commercial in their operations. Under US tax regulations, for example, these not-forprofit institutions cannot be organized to benefit private interests, their assets must be permanently dedicated to charitable purposes, and net earnings cannot be distributed to owners and shareholders. Nonetheless, the large size of some college endowments and similar assets in a context of rapidly rising tuition and other costs for students and their parents has aroused US legislators’ interest in seeking greater public returns for the current benefits derived from non-profit status. In 2008, a proposal in Massachusetts, the location of a number of wealthy private ‘not-for-profits’ such as Harvard University, for the state to introduce a tax on college endowments exceeding $1 billion generated public controversy as to whether such wealthy universities should be allowed to retain


25

their charitable basis. At the same time the federal Senate finance committee discussed a proposal to require universities to pay out 5 per cent of their capital a year, the minimum requirement for private foundations (Financial Times, 22 May 2008). Nearly all the major regions of the world have private higher education. Those countries where it has existed for some time have seen such provision grow strikingly. But in the last two decades new private provision has emerged in the Middle East (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Syria) and in Africa (predominantly Anglophone rather than Francophone countries), while the fall of communist regimes has seen subsequent rapid expansion of private provision in eastern and central Europe since the 1990s (Levy 2007). Private higher education (PHE) has a long pedigree in Latin America and parts of Asia too. In South America, for example, it stands at around half of overall provision. In China, since the purposeful and rapid expansion of the higher education system from 1999, private universities had come to account for about 6.6 per cent of student enrolments, or about 1.34 million of the 20.2 million students enrolled in formal higher education, by 2006. Additionally the major public universities have set up second-tier colleges which are income-generating extensions benefiting from the university’s self-accrediting status. These colleges are effectively private institutions and had enrolments of 1.47 million students, around 7.3 per cent of the total in 2006 (Hayhoe and Lin 2008). China’s 1998 higher education law stipulates that private universities are legal persons (and thus capable of possessing private property), and since 2002 boards of trustees have been mandated to oversee the governance of such institutions. A subsequent law enacted in 2003 allows a ‘reasonable return on private school investment’. Elsewhere in Asia, Malaysia also has a sizeable private sector (Lee 1999). In the early 1990s Malaysia had around 150 private institutions, and in 2007 this had grown to over 500 non-public tertiary entities (Tierney and Sirat 2008). Several older private institutions take up the majority of overall provision in Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan. Only in western Europe does the public sector seem to remain relatively unchallenged – although conventional universities are in a sense slowly ‘privatizing’ – but ‘green shoot’ private developments are detectable. However, in western Europe and also in Australia and New Zealand, the limited role of PHE to date is confined largely to niche markets in highly specialized areas of study, rather than in providing the broad areas of conventional academic standing or in the mass provision of higher education. Mostly it is limited to management, commerce and information technology programmes and occurs more at the diploma and certificate level than degree and postgraduate degree awards (Levy 2004).

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Mostly PHE growth has occurred unexpectedly for governments that have tried to catch up subsequently in their regulatory and funding policies, including by giving legal recognition to previously disallowed PHE, as has happened in China, Malaysia and South Africa in recent years, and in turn this has helped to fuel its growth (Levy 2002). Moreover, a host of for-profit (FP) private companies are beginning to supply a range of qualifications outside their domestic (usually US) jurisdictions to other countries, in some cases with little domestic regulatory oversight and quality assurance. At the system level we see that private colleges and universities nonetheless are encouraged by governments to help meet rising demand for higher-level qualifications, and also to provide their ‘public service’ counterparts with further challenges to improve their market responsiveness and overall efficiency and effectiveness. Such private entities tend to be highly reliant on tuition and similar student charges for their business models and lack the capability or funds to engage in research, a function increasingly confined in most countries other than the USA to wellestablished public universities. In the USA, reliance on tuition and other student charges has led to persisting violations by FPs of US regulations, such as paying admissions tutors a commission to enrol students who have no or little ability to benefit from the education provided, and this has led to a toughening of federal rules and prescriptions on such matters. Three basic causes are generally advanced for the growth of PHE (Levy 2004). The two most longstanding are what we might label ‘civil society’ purposes. These are a) providing ‘something better’ as a result of dissatisfaction by the socio-economically privileged with the standards of mass public higher education (as has occurred in the USA and South America, for example), and b) providing ‘something different’ as a result of religious faiths, or ethnic or nationalist aims (especially if these are perceived by such groups as being ‘at risk’ in some way). Religious affiliation for private universities can often be traced historically to when religion was largely pushed out of a dominant role in the new nation-states and their public universities, a trend reinforced by the increasing secularization of academic subjects in universities everywhere throughout the twentieth century, not least the rise of the natural and social sciences. In Europe and Latin America, Catholicism long has been a major influence in the establishment of private universities. Today Muslim and Pentecostal groups continue this religious tradition (the latter especially in Africa and the Americas). In Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands, however, religiously founded private universities subsequently have received public grants in return for state bureaucratic controls and have become indistinguishable from the public universities. In contrast to ‘civil society’ providers, a third explanation sees recent


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PHE suppliers as ‘demand-absorbers’, meeting the demand not met by public institutions, and the for-profit (FP) sector is its fastest-growing element.

FOR-PROFIT HIGHER EDUCATION The FP sector has grown dramatically in many parts of the globe in recent years (see Levy 2004, 2007; and also other work by PROPHE at New York State University, Albany). It is larger and more developed in the USA than elsewhere, however, and of the broadly 9000 postsecondary institutions in the USA nearly half are FP. The vast majority of FPs in the USA traditionally provide for non-university students, although, since the early 1990s, universities have taken the largest share of FP expansion, and degree-granting places are increasing quickly. Several large US-based companies (Apollo, Laureate and Kaplan, for example) have a worldwide presence, establishing campuses in other countries directly, purchasing existing foreign institutions, or marketing distance education curricula for international delivery. By 2008 Laureate Education Inc. owned 29 universities and postsecondary institutions on three continents. Despite some commercial behavioural similarities with the older not-for-profit private elite universities in the USA, FPs are defined by the US government as able to disburse funds other than those required for operational costs to shareholders in exchange for the investment risks taken. In contrast, the elite private universities must devote surplus resources to charitable and non-profit purposes, even though their actions and strategies often appear no less ‘profit-making’ than those of the large FP institutions. (In some other regions, such as Australia, Africa, and central and eastern Europe, public institutions admit ‘private’ or full fee-paying domestic students alongside their publicly subsidized ones.) A wide range of FP institutions exist worldwide. In Malaysia, for example, ownership may be by individuals, single companies, consortia, publicly listed conglomerates or government corporations (Lee 1999). In the USA Levy (2007) distinguishes between the following: ●

● ●

corporate universities, which mostly train employees of the owning business to develop human resources capacity in order to engender higher profits for the company; non-degree-granting institutions, which mainly offer short-duration courses and which constitute around half of US FPs; degree-granting institutions, of which there are around 800, with around 300 of these being four-year universities (the rest being

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two-year institutions) and with about half of these offering graduate degrees. Most of the degree-granting institutions are small and not well-resourced enterprise colleges. They are locally oriented, with a limited and specialized curriculum, owned and managed by a few individuals who are often family members, and highly reliant on tuition fees. However, the last decade or so has witnessed the rapid growth of a corporate or conglomerate FP sector, with around 9–10 ‘super’ corporations listed on the US stock exchanges. Most have prestigious regional accreditations and focus on postgraduate as well as undergraduate provision. They tend to be multi-divisional and national rather than local, lacking the sense of geographical place that tends to characterize more conventional colleges and universities. These are large higher education corporations, and their private universities, such as the University of Phoenix, Strayer University and DeVry University, have branch campuses across a wide geographical area and offer quite a broad suite of programmes such as business, law, education, psychology and health. Most FP organizations tend to be highly hierarchical and corporately managerial in their governance and leadership functions, to be market-led in their curricula range, and to operate primarily at the undergraduate level. The largest portion of graduate provision and research that is supplied tends to be in specialized occupational niches. Faculty staff members are mainly part-time and work-based practitioners rather than top-flight academic researchers, reflecting the central purpose of such entities in providing courses with close workplace relevancy, and these staff members are more subject to the requirements of organizational flexibility and administrative authority than their public counterparts. Employment contract rights are more limited, and broadly academics are expected to deliver pre-set programmes rather than devise distinctive curricula. FP provision has grown rapidly in the USA in the last decade, and the University of Phoenix (part of the Apollo Group), for example, is now the largest of the US universities (in student enrolments), catering for mass demand for occupationally relevant courses from adults. Phoenix has expanded rapidly by replication across many locales and by reducing opportunity costs for its students. It provides convenient class times and locations, standardized curricula and rapid credit accumulation, and increasingly and successfully offers on-line distance learning. Located in fast-growing population and business areas Phoenix has proved popular with working students who have little inclination or opportunity for the more total life experiences that traditional universities offer. A key driver has been a process of standardization in which pre-packaged modular


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programmes can be delivered virtually anywhere with guaranteed levels of quality and student satisfaction. The academic role generally is ‘unbundled’, with the material substance of programmes collected and pieced together by full-time course designers against clearly formulated learning objective specifications, while tutors focus on delivery (Geiger 2007). Apollo, along with Laureate and Kaplan, is among the most prominent of the FPs internationally, although there remain significant regulatory barriers to such expansion in a number of countries, and this impedes the current development of truly global FP players. However, in recent years, global investment companies (such as Amadeus in Australia) and private equity groups have started to become more involved in the ownership of the large FPs, and such developments may lead to a more globalized institutional framework over the next decade. In 2007 (before the world financial credit crunch that immediately followed) the US Education Management Corporation, an FP with 97 000 students, was sold to private equity in a $3.4 billion buy-out and was subsequently de-listed from the exchanges. Such processes raise issues of public accountability. At least shareholder-owned organizations are subject to a range of financial and corporate governance controls, but these are generally lacking following private equity takeovers. Regulatory requirements led, for example, to the Apollo Group in 2007 being fined for not disclosing to investors a critical US Department of Education report on Phoenix’s aggressive recruiting practices. When the full story came out, Apollo’s share price plunged. A particular concern for US regional accrediting agencies is that key decisions in the larger FPs are often taken in remote corporate headquarters, and this debilitates notions of local leadership, governance, collegiality and accountability that such bodies generally have insisted on when dealing with the more conventional providers (King 2004). The business models of the FPs are less dependent on private finance than is often believed. Third-party monies (governmental and from employers) rather than from individual pockets have fuelled FP expansion in the USA, as the system of federal student aid, since its inception in 1972, has regarded students from FPs as eligible for support. Geiger (2007) has shown that, especially since a large rise in loans limits in 1992, the profitability of FPs as a result of student aid was enhanced significantly, and it is doubtful that FP higher education could survive on private revenues from students alone. It is estimated that Kaplan, for example, derives more than 80 per cent of its income from federal student aid in the USA. Most FPs in the USA would not exist without the availability of federal US student finance: essentially, for Geiger (p. 148), FP is a means for levering public funds for private reward. Both the increasing prosperity of the US elite private universities and the rapid expansion of the FPs (not least as an

30


outcome of fast-rising tuition and other student charges) have been reinforced by public policies (at federal and state levels) in expanding student financial aid (more than expanding institutional operating funds). This has allowed much higher tuition and other charges, and the large conglomerate or ‘super’ FPs have enjoyed rocketing share prices and phenomenal expansion. University funding seems increasingly routed through consumerist channels as part of high-tuition-cost/high-student-loans policies by governments. Such policies appear to be diffusing globally. Tuition charges are being introduced or raised by governments worldwide, and such schemes are generally underpinned by student financial aid provision. Moreover, FPs have proved effective and aggressive lobbyists of government, not least in the USA, such as in seeking policies widening the scope and eligibilities for student financial aid (such as to cover distance learning students, and to raise federal loan levels so that they do not remain limited to providing only 90 per cent of an institution’s income but up to 100 per cent). The introduction of student voucher schemes in some US states (such as Colorado), so that students in both private and public institutions are free to exercise choice over the distribution of public funds to institutions through their selection decisions, is only likely to reinforce such trends, and to gradually diminish the proportion of such funds going to the public universities as more of the quantum goes to private institutions via student payments.

SYSTEMIC INSTITUTIONAL DIVERSITY IN THE GLOBAL AGE In one sense, the worldwide growth of private colleges may be regarded as helping to deliver increased system differentiation in national higher education sectors. Public policy, encouraged by international organizations such as the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO, and also the US-emulating and competing EU, generally stresses the necessity for higher education institutions to pursue more varied missions as a means of enhancing system diversity. Increased social heterogeneity, modern economic complexity, cultural variety and heightened individual choice often are cited as major societal factors in support of the need for institutional variegation and non-standardizing provision. Universities, like the modern world itself it is believed, must also reflect social diversity and more complex divisions of labour. Moreover, as governments are faced with the task of finding increased funding for research universities, especially for highly expensive scientific equipment, in order for them to compete globally, institutional diversity becomes an instrument also for concentrating


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research funds to fewer universities against high performance criteria. It also justifies reducing units (if not necessarily overall levels) of public funding for teaching functions as part of governmental strategies for ‘teaching institutions’ to become more ‘business-focused’ and employerfunded. A wider range of private provision is also encouraged to enter higher education markets as contributing to such goals. A combination of largely deregulated fee levels, increased institutional autonomy and public expenditure constraints also facilitates private, revenue-seeking commercial activities abroad by so-called traditional or public universities, not least by those in countries such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, but also increasingly including countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. These frequently ally with local private entities for the establishment of branch campuses or for devising franchise arrangements for the overseas delivery of the university’s programmes and awards. Yet the extension of private provision is not the only instrument for procuring system diversity. Increasingly, the ‘public universities’ are differentiated by levels of research, social access, employer-focus and teaching quality, and these institutional varieties are encouraged in governmental funding and other policies wherever possible. Liberalization and globalization, of course, whatever form they take, have the tendency to widen the distance between direct government controls and the perceived interests and aspirations of the institutions. In this sense, despite their increasingly strategic relevance for delivering key governmental objectives, universities are increasingly ‘detached’ from their national states. Nonetheless, as we shall see, rising organizational autonomy and enhanced market-like incentives are often accompanied by increased public calls for accountability and transparency. External and government-supported regulatory controls for universities, rather than diminishing significantly with rising marketization, generally have resulted more in changed modalities and forms. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the regulatory governance of universities is increasingly exercised ‘at a distance’ rather than through state micro-management. Moreover, ‘meta-regulatory’ techniques tend to be employed, in which a university’s own procedures become the datum for outside quality assessment, rather than it experiencing more direct inspectorial investigation. The development of the university as a global player also adds to at least the semi-detached nature of, particularly, the leading research-based universities from the national state. Globalization in this context for higher education generally has referred to the increasing contact and alliances between scientists and scholars around the world. This phenomenon may not be new, although the multi-layered intensity and speed of communications of such relationships as a consequence of the growth of information

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technology probably are. Around one-fifth of the world’s scientific papers are co-authored internationally, for example, while worldwide disciplinary networks provide increasingly strong academic linkages. The language of commercial and academic globalization – English – dominates publications, citations and the similar metrics that are increasingly used by funding bodies and private league table compilers to evaluate the research and other performances of universities. A report from Universities UK and the UK Higher Education International Unit in 2008 claimed that researchers at UK universities are involved in 50 per cent more international collaborations than a decade ago. International collaborative research output, for example, grew from 97 592 journal articles between 1996 and 2000 to 144 457 between 2001 and 2005. Moreover, in 2007, 40 per cent of UK research council grants had an international component, while half of PhD students and 40 per cent of research staff were non-UK nationals (THE, 8 May 2008). Yet, in addition to the often quite individualized exchanges between academics across territorial borders, globalization in the modern age also refers to the development of the university as an organization with corporate impact on a worldwide stage. Universities develop strategies to compete and to ally globally and do not simply wait upon the variable outcomes of individual scholarly networks. University leaders actively manage the search for the best and brightest of academic, research and student talent and devise incentives to attract them to their institutions. In Asia, for example, and no doubt increasingly elsewhere, academics are encouraged by university managers to publish internationally and in journals that attract the highest levels of citations (Ki-Seok and Sunghee 2007). International networks of universities, such as Universitas 21, where membership is based usually around the exclusionary notion of reputational equivalence, have become important means for university managers to enhance brand reputation and funding sources, to more directly conduce to and manage engagements in collaborative research, to construct joint curricula, and to facilitate student and staff exchanges with peer institutions. For some universities the motives for entering global alliances mainly are reputational and revenue-generating, but for many, especially outside the rich ‘North’, the aim appears primarily to increase capacities and to extend opportunities for staff and students as part of broader institutional development. Increased international reach by universities helps realize their strategies for enhancing global reputation, maximizing income and securing elevated rankings in university league tables, and is regarded also by governments as a source of national innovation and economic competitiveness. Highly regarded universities are seen by governments as helping to attract inward


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flows of foreign investment, particularly in research and development. The world leader in attracting the best researchers from abroad has long been the US higher education system. Its attractions include generous bursaries and financial aid, the best scientific and other resources, high international standing, and a relatively open labour market. Other countries and regions are taking concerted steps to compete and to attract the best brains, such as through the mainstreaming of international collaboration in the EU’s recent Seventh Framework research grant regime, and the establishment of centres of world excellence by countries such as Singapore and China, including by providing funding incentives to prestigious universities from abroad to set up locally. It is not clear to what extent the developing countries will become more excluded from global research networks as a consequence of initiatives by the more advanced countries, although a number of the latter’s governmental research programmes are beginning to emphasize preferences for research that have relevance and applicability in the developing world. Moreover, the increasing international dimension of many of the contemporary world’s ills – such as climate change, environmental despoliation, and the spread of dangerous and highly infectious diseases – is regarded by many policymakers as requiring global partnerships and solutions involving both developed and developing worlds, not least in higher education.

GLOBALIZATION AND TRADE IN HIGHER EDUCATION Universities as organizations also compete within the cross-border tertiary market for more high-fee-paying students who are prepared to cross territorial borders to secure the best available education. Vincent-Lancrin (2005) estimates that the number of foreign students in OECD countries doubled in the two decades up to 2002, and undoubtedly has expanded further since, with the majority from Asia. More than 2 million students currently study abroad, and this number is likely to quadruple over the next two decades. Additionally, many other students, especially in Asia, stay at home and participate in the programmes of overseas universities provided at local colleges, or sometimes at locally established branch campuses, with universities from Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA generally leading the way. Increases in cross-border higher education in recent years have taken a number of forms. Not only does it include conventional mobility across borders by students to attend universities in a country other than their own, but it also involves the willingness of

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universities from those countries listed above to export their programmes overseas to the students. Programme and institutional mobility of this kind is particularly pronounced to the countries of the Asia Pacific region, notably Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR and, especially in recent years, the China mainland. Institutional and governmental motivations for these developments vary, and are often mixed. We should note that cross-border mobility by students and academic staff is not a new phenomenon. The USA for many years has attracted the best qualified from other countries, and student bursaries and other governmental aid to attract students and researchers from abroad have long featured as key elements of international diplomacy in a number of the most developed nations. Yet there has been a quickening of the migratory academic flows in the last decade or so and a sense that the globe increasingly conduces to one overall market. A recent OECD investigation identifies four key reasons, and accompanying policy responses, for encouraging cross-border activity in higher education by both universities and politicians. One is a traditional mutual understanding approach which covers broad political, cultural, academic and development aid objectives. Key instruments include student scholarships, academic partnerships, and exchange programmes. The other three purposes, however, are more economically driven or self-interested. The skilled migration approach places stronger emphasis on the recruitment of international students and researchers to enable domestic university and occupational sectors to become more competitive and innovative, and the USA has been a leader here, especially at the postgraduate level. A third approach is a less publicly subsidized one, and offers higher education on a ‘full-fee’ or commercial return basis in order to enhance institutional income. In recent years, not least in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, increased institutional autonomy and reductions in the unit of public funding for the conventional universities, alongside encouragement from governments to be more entrepreneurial, including in the international market, have seen this approach become more pronounced. A consequent policy response, however, in part as a result of discovered cases of doubtful and low-quality provision in such university exports, is for national quality assurance agencies for higher education to extend their international and cross-border span, and for strong statements and recommendations on regulating cross-border provision to issue from international organizations such as the OECD and UNESCO to governments, their relevant agencies, and institutions. Increasingly too, the US regional and other accrediting agencies have expanded their activities to cover foreign universities coming into the USA or simply those staying at home but wanting increased legitimacy in the eyes of international


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markets (Eaton 2005). US accreditation also offers non-US entities a non-governmental, mission-focused approach and covers both public and private bodies. Increasingly US accrediting bodies appear to be cooperating with quality assurance agencies abroad in providing more globalized services, with the latter, for example, proving initial intelligence on foreign institutions seeking US regional accreditation (Morse 2008). The final approach to cross-border higher education, which is found more in the less developed societies, focuses on capacity building. Here internationalization is regarded by governments as a means of responding to rising demand for higher education and also as a means for improving the modernity of domestic university provision. A number of south-east Asian countries, for example, have provided public support for their citizens to study abroad while also attracting good-quality institutions from elsewhere to start operations locally (Vincent-Lancrin 2005). Although increased cross-border higher education is becoming a globalized phenomenon, regional variations are significant. In Europe, for example, student and faculty mobility between countries generally has been policy-driven and partly funded through various programmes of the EU, such as ERASMUS. Increasingly such movements have been encouraged as part of inter-governmental efforts through the so-called Bologna Process to create a common ‘higher education space’ through enhanced credit transfer arrangements, common approaches to degree structures and quality assurance, and the development of publicly funded research partnerships across the European countries. The USA, on the other hand, has long sought to attract highly talented students and researchers from abroad through the provision of generous bursary and scholarship packages. The ‘Ivy League’ universities particularly are sufficiently well endowed to offer attractive financial terms to high-fliers from elsewhere. Cross-border university education within the Asia Pacific region, however, has largely been fuelled by consumers, notably by student and parental market demand for a full degree from an overseas institution, predominantly on a private fee-paying basis. In all these cases, however, whatever the motivations of providers, there is increased risk of the less advanced societies experiencing a ‘brain drain’ or, at best, ‘brain circulation’ to the richer countries, leading to a cycle of impoverishment for their domestic higher education systems. Although recent international trade negotiations as part of the WTO GATS Doha round have sustained the notion of private cross-border higher education as a trade-in-service, and thus subject to broader trade regulations and policy liberalization, for the most part the extension of such provision has remained largely subject to other factors, such as national regulations concerning student visas, qualifications’ recognition,

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quality assurance and accreditation. Nonetheless, the increasing heterogeneity of tertiary systems and institutions around the world, and the relative lack of open information for consumers on institutional performance and resources, leaves the opportunity for very low-quality and sometimes fraudulent providers to operate. As a result nationally-based regulators and accrediting bodies are increasing their international range to include both the overseas provision of their domestic institutions and those entities coming the other way and wishing to enter their national market. At the same time, the market demand by students and their advisors for simple short-hand evaluations of higher education institutions globally is leading to the growing influence of privately produced national and world institutional rankings of universities. Nonetheless, agreement on intergovernmental policies for global higher education trading is not easily secured, although in other than trade matters (where education ministers tend not to be in the lead) policy convergence appears more easily attained. In part this derives from international governance generally across many sectors being characterized by softer and more private forms than those forms found in legally dominant national states. Moreover, the globally significant US higher education system is not primarily coordinated at national state level (by the federal government) in comparison with most other leading countries. Policy and accreditation activities fall within the compass of the local states or are driven by the US institutions themselves, leaving quite a gap in the transnational collective capacities of the major national states in seeking to influence forms of governance in national systems of higher education. However, this is largely offset by the emulation of the US system displayed by policymakers elsewhere. Nonetheless, in recent decades national governments have increasingly coordinated their higher education policies through international organizations, with the OECD, UNESCO and the EU providing important sources of discussion and learning. Moreover, these bodies have collected increasingly standardized and comparable data on national educational performances, and have stressed the growing importance of higher education internationalization for economic and other forms of national wellbeing. The European Bologna Declaration (1999) may be regarded also as a response to rising global competitiveness between higher education and economic systems, especially the challenge of the USA to the European countries. It recognizes the benefits of wider European collaboration in higher education, not least in the promotion of general economic competitiveness across the Single Market as espoused in the agreements reached by the EU Council in Lisbon in 2000 (‘Lisbon Agenda’). Inevitably these increased international flows and the idea that higher education can be sold or ‘traded’ abroad have implicated universities in


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wider policy debates and made them subject to a broader range of national governmental bodies and rule-making. Immigration policies in many advanced societies are increasingly predicated on favouring well-educated and qualified entrants, and in preventing terrorist activities and radicalization, not least among the young. Inevitably as a result, the international recruitment of students and staff, and the traditional commitment by universities to openness and freedom of expression, invites attention and demands for closer supervision of universities from a variety of ministries concerned with matters of national security. On the other hand, trade and competition authorities are anxious to enrol universities in wider governmental efforts and goals to achieve greater national competitiveness and productivity in the global economy, and are not content to leave such issues to government educational ministries alone. Inter-governmental and supranational bodies, such as the OECD or the EU, see universities as key agents for regional and social integration and the extension of knowledge-based cooperation between nations. The specific forms of coordination of universities by governments consequently are giving way to a more diffuse set of controlling influences both within and outside territorial jurisdictions. As a result, compared with a few decades ago the international dimension acts as a much stronger driver of institutional strategies in higher education. Although scientific research has for long operated within global knowledge networks, these days international mobility, rising market information on a worldwide scale, and the multi-level, inter-territorial governance of most nation states generate major global constraints and opportunities for universities. However, considerable variation remains between national systems. National states (including at the local level) continue to retain a strong policy interest in their domestic universities, seeing them as critical agencies for delivering economic development, social inclusion and even national prestige. Most regulate and fund their higher education systems to levels that are considerable and not easily ignored. Undoubtedly the research-intensive universities especially have increased operational autonomy and generally have obtained more private and diversified sources of funding that make them less dependent operationally on public funding than before. But all universities, at the middle and lower echelons of national higher education systems particularly, remain reliant on governmentally funded domestic student demand, on quite high levels of public resources for both teaching and research, and are subject to an increasing variety of government-backed performance targets and external quality assurance monitoring. Nonetheless, governments may be wary of intruding too deeply into university affairs, not least as universities are subject to a host of global influences that are barely comprehended

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by politicians. There exists widespread policy recognition of regulated autonomy for universities as the appropriate ‘world model’ for achieving the creativity and innovation increasingly desired by governments, but state-endorsed notions of wider public accountability and transparency in university affairs have become globally triumphant principles too. In describing the apparently inevitable march of globalization and its influence on national higher education systems, it is important nonetheless not to overlook key national varieties. King (2007b), for example, describes major differences in regulatory governance, stemming from differing historical path trajectories and varying locations in the global division of labour, between higher education sectors in the US, the UK, Continental Europe and South Africa. The long and successful fight against the racially discriminatory policies of apartheid in South Africa, for example, led to a major ‘command-and-control’ approach to higher education governance in the late 1990s, as a means of pursuing vital social policies, at a time when such regulatory approaches were beginning to fall out of favour in other countries. The so-called ‘state development’ model for economic development successfully adopted in a number of Asian countries is also often referred to as offering a significantly different model of institutional development to that found in the more market-led societies and economies associated with the West and as involving more government direction of university priorities than found in other countries (Wade 1990; Weiss 1998). Yet such differences appear increasingly undermined. State economic-development societies increasingly adapt to globalization and its governance practices (see Kitthananan 2008), while higher education and other sectors also are increasingly influenced by the liberalizing approaches of international bodies and networks, resulting in increased convergence in their regulatory models.

GLOBALIZATION AND REGULATION In considering issues of globalization it is often useful to distinguish between the worldwide reach of respectively a) markets; b) providers; and c) regulation. The extent of the global integration of, say, markets where, at their most advanced, buyers and sellers are linked instantaneously in their transactions from all around the world may be different in scope and spread to that of the international operations of the companies engaged in such activity. Similarly the global harmonization or convergence of regulatory standards in sectors may differ considerably from levels of market and operational globalization. At one end of the spectrum, for example, financial markets are characterized by high levels of global


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interconnectivity between buyers and sellers, and increasingly by a worldwide movement to common accountancy standards. That is, both markets and regulation in financial services are significantly globalized. In higher education, many universities are becoming more global in their operations (teaching and research) and in their markets, not least through technologically enhanced channels for international student enrolment and learning. Students increasingly purchase university services across national borders, including through internet-provided and similar forms of distance learning. Universities also are major international players in scientific production, industrial application and researcher recruitment. However, despite the increasing globalization of markets and operations in higher education, the regulation of universities is less globalized – or so it appears. The formal, legally-sanctioned regulation of universities is generally conducted by national or similar territorial jurisdictions and not by international organizations. However, this is not the end of the story. Although universities may be subject to national regulation (and, as we have noted, national systems of higher education continue to display distinctive ‘path’ or historical features), it should not be assumed that the character of higher education is determined solely by national needs and interests. Or rather, national needs and interests often are conduced, discussed and interpreted internationally. Increasingly the content of higher education regulation and the model of the ‘modern’ autonomous university that steadily it reflects exhibit marked convergences across territorial borders that reveal processes of world institutionalization. Moreover, transnational bodies such as the OECD, UNESCO, the World Bank (WB), the EU and the IMF are also promoting ‘soft’ regulation in the form of advice and recommendations as part of the acceleration of epistemic regulatory influence on national policymakers, and this is quite compelling for national higher education authorities. Outside the governmental realm too, the creation and promotion of global and national university rankings by major media companies and other ‘private authorities’ are providing informal but often highly influential forms of global ‘ordering’ for higher education institutions and national systems (which are discussed more extensively in Part II). In the next chapter we examine more closely global models and templates in higher education systems before turning to issues of transnational regulatory governance more generally in Chapter 3.

2.

World models of university governance

INTRODUCTION Since the demise of Soviet communism and the Cold War at the end of the 1980s, a feature of new governance structures in state policymaking around the world in the context of global competition is the predominance of economic models and their influence within policy discourse (Hay 2004; Kay 2008). Notions of free trade, open markets, and well-trained and flexible employees are normalized as necessary for material prosperity and democratic governance (Peck 2001). A key assumption in such thinking is that markets are the most efficient allocator of resources across a range of domains, through the operation of the price mechanism particularly and its reflection of myriads of individual preferences for the supply of goods and services (in comparison particularly with failed welfare and socialist states that sought to allocate by bureaucratic administration). In this model public intervention is justified primarily (and minimally) to offset market failure in cases where public and private costs/rewards are out of alignment, where insufficient information for citizens obtains for rational decisionmaking to take place without further state-encouraged disclosures on matters such as product quality and performance, to supply huge public goods that are not produced by private markets alone, such as a system of national defence, and to break up monopolies and promote competition. As we shall see, universities also have become subject to such processes in their governing and regulatory arrangements. Such propositions form part of so-called public choice theory, which suggests that governments rather than markets create inefficiencies. That is, the general welfare and the efficient distribution of capital are best advanced in this view by the exercise of individual choice, established private property rights and the workings of competitive markets, not by state officials pursuing their own vested interests and misunderstanding or simply ignoring market signals. Generally, in this perspective, governments are not good at delivering the quality and personalized services that citizens want. Kay (2008:30) suggests that public choice theory underpins the range of public sector reform that gathers together under the notion 40


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of the ‘new public management’ (NPM). It provides the NPM with its main assumption, namely that the lack of competition in the supply of public goods and services has the same negative consequences as in the private sector. Without competition, it is argued, bureaucrats pursue their own preferred policies (happily immune from personal loss or organizational bankruptcy), ignore costs, follow rules rather than innovate, easily persuade less-knowing (than themselves) politicians of faulty policy solutions, and broadly ensure minimal but uniform standards of provision rather than the more differentiated and customized services that the public wants. As a result, proponents of the NPM generally seek a structural reorganization of the public sector, more competition between providers, and private sector delivery wherever possible under well-specified and regulated contracts let by the state through tender. A key aspect is heightened individual choice by consumers/citizens on the basis of better information on public service performance following governmental and media evaluation, and sometimes through voluntary or enforced disclosure of information by the public organizations themselves. Increased consumer scrutiny and more expert delivery are also enhanced in this view by reforms that break up large public bureaucracies into more specialist and visible agencies, either executive delivery arms or regulatory bodies that supervise private suppliers. The regulatory state in an age of governance under conditions of the ‘new public management’ is one that coordinates and directs (suppliers, networks, non-governmental entities and private–public alliances of various kinds) rather than provides authority or services directly.

GLOBAL TEMPLATES: (1) THE NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT The new public management is an example of a governance model for higher education that is globally institutionalized. Although starting off as a form of management expertise and good practice promulgated particularly by private consultants, the NPM has evolved into a form of regulatory good practice for higher education (and other) public service systems. Marginson and van der Wende (2007:8–9) suggest that the techniques of the NPM reflect the processes of systemic and institutional reform generally being conducted throughout the world in response to globalization. In their view the templates of the new public management include the modelling of national systems as economic markets; government-steered competition between

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Governing universities globally institutions, and executive-steered competition between academic units; partdevolution of responsibility for administering and often for raising finances; incentives to link with business and industry; performance measures and output-based funding; and relations with funding agencies and managers based on quasi-corporate forms such as contracts, accountability and audit . . . in the last two decades these reforms have been the strongest single driver of change . . . consequently institutional regulation is becoming stronger and professional regulation weaker.

Broadly, the global template for university governance and management described as the NPM refers to the greater application of private sector instruments across a range of public services (not just higher education). This occurs in a context of reduced governmental scope and size, reshaped bureaucracies that generally demarcate operational from strategic functions, with the former often relocated to quasi-independent and independently managed agencies, the introduction of competition not only through internal markets but through the separation of the functions of procurement from operational implementation (with commissioning increasingly from the non-state sector and thorough public–private partnerships), and the more powerful use of performance management and evaluation techniques. However, we need to understand better the reasons and processes for the worldwide diffusion of such ideas and the increasing convergence of regulatory practices and institutional frameworks, not least as they influence higher education systems.

GLOBAL TEMPLATES: (2) SYSTEMIC DIVERSITY As well as the NPM, systemic diversity in higher education is another global template, in large part reflecting the emulation around the globe of the world leader in university education – the USA – with its huge variety of providers. As we noted in the previous chapter, ministers, knowledge brokers, and both public and private policy researchers in bodies such as the G8, the OECD, the EU and other similar transnational organizations continually emphasize the importance for higher education systems of distinctive institutional missions catering for a variety of educational and social needs. However, despite the apparent clarity of such world views there is often ambiguity in national policymaking as to whether the objective of increased institutional diversity is predominantly one for the public part of the higher education system only or for the higher education system as a whole. If it is the latter then regulatory provisions that enable the expansion of private – for-profit and not-for-profit – postsecondary provision as a challenge and competition for the public sector institutions


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would appear to be the appropriate policy instrument. Regulatory innovations of the kind recently adopted in Australia – the so-called ‘National Protocols’ (King 2006) to make it easier for approval to be given to new domestic and foreign providers, ranging from the specialist to the more comprehensive, and for private students to receive publicly funded assistance – clearly add to overall system diversity. We have noted in Chapter 1 that private higher education has expanded around the globe and rapidly in recent years. For many of these reasons, bodies such as the World Bank and the OECD have welcomed the growth of private, particularly for-profit sectors of higher education across and within territorial borders, as both adding to system diversity in many countries and also generating increased competition, innovation and effectiveness. Such private provision helps governments to meet rising demand and a sense of entitlement for higher education from their populations by taking pressure off the public purse. High levels of funding support for higher education are usually beyond the means of many fiscally hard-pressed states, which are generally coping with inadequate taxation streams and insufficient expenditure capability, and privately funded providers from abroad are often welcomed as helping to cope with such issues and in helping to meet rising demand for higher education. The ‘public interest’ task of such receiving states, however, is to regulate foreign (and more local) commercial bodies so that they meet at least minimal operating conditions, and to ensure that they provide quality programmes. As a result, international organizations in recent years have focused on disseminating good regulatory practice guidelines and similar advice to national policymakers on this and related matters. Moreover, the recommendations are aimed as much at the regulatory authorities and institutions of the ‘sending’ territories (as much private higher education provision across borders is delivered by the commercial arms of traditional or ‘public’ universities) as they are at the domestic policymakers. However, an approach to systemic diversity that concentrates on encouraging more private providers tends to leave the public institutions with a more homogeneous character than policymakers generally prefer, despite decisions to reward institutions for research excellence and other performance outcomes on a more selective and quality-assessed basis than hitherto. Although it is possible to identify more specialist university institutions in the public sector throughout Continental Europe and parts of South America, more often historically this reflects the outcome of determined and well-resourced policy action by national states rather than efforts to secure diversity through the operations of the market. Nonetheless, selective approaches to funding streams by governments seek to increase mission differentiation within public sector systems of higher education,

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including through the creation of a tier of ‘world-class’ research-intensive universities. This is an increasing global tendency which is reinforced by the emergence of influential global rankings of world-class universities by the THE newspaper and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Diversity processes may also be advanced when public funding is allocated by contract against submitted and approved institutional strategic plans. It is clear that in many sectors privatization and globalization do not spell the end of governmental controls. Rather they change their type and modalities of influence. If anything, regulation by the state, or co-regulation by the state and professional or similar self-regulatory associations, appears to have grown with the marketization and internationalization of universities over the last two decades. The establishment by governments of more independent quality assurance agencies, for example, has become much more common around the world, including as a consequence of the Bologna Process and its focus on the encouragement of such entities. Rather than these global developments being completely separate national events they are obviously interlinked – but how and through what processes? And are global regulatory processes for higher education emerging to accompany those found at national level? If so, in what form, and how do they compare with the more formal and ‘harder’ legally sanctioned processes of national regulatory governance? There are powerful reasons why universities increasingly resemble global rather than nationally embedded bodies and appear subject to ever more worldwide convergences and influences, and these are considered in later chapters. First, however, we need to examine the role of higher education in increasingly knowledge-based economies and to locate this within a further global template.

GLOBAL TEMPLATES: (3) UNIVERSITIES AND ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS In recent years universities have come to be regarded as critical agents in the economic and social life of most advanced and developing societies. Following our consideration above of the worldwide notions of the new public management and systemic diversity, we might regard the strategic deployment of universities in pursuit of national economic competitive strategies as a third global template. The ‘knowledge economy’ is regarded by policymakers and others virtually everywhere as at the heart of a country’s economic performance and as containing those parts of the economy that are the most dynamic, innovative and globally integrated. These sectors often employ the largest numbers with higher education degrees,


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and, in the global economy, knowledge has become the primary factor of production. Such assumptions clearly enhance the national importance of universities. Tertiary education is regarded by transnational bodies, such the World Bank (2002), as not only inculcating the broader powers of the mind that are necessary for all occupations in a rapidly integrating world economy, where high value is associated with brainpower and analytical skills, but also offering more occupationally specific training across many different fields. Moreover, the contemporary universalizing of the concept of lifelong learning reflects the increasing role of higher education institutions in providing learning at virtually all stages of the adult life-course to cope with rapid changes in skills and practices. In its training, research and informational roles, quite high levels of tertiary education are viewed by the World Bank and other international organizations as vital if countries are to adapt to the extensive changes associated with new communication technologies and rising computer power, and to respond to the challenges of innovation that the rapid compression of product cycles and the growth of the service industries in the global economy throw up. Such provision is especially important in an age of extensive educational and social mobility across borders. The advanced economies increasingly compete fiercely to attract highly skilled migrations of labour, in part to counteract the ageing and insufficient demographic replacement of their domestic skilled workers. Inadequate investments in higher education tend to hasten human capital flight or ‘brain drain’ from the less advanced societies, and further add to their exclusion from the dynamics of the world economy. The global significance of the views from the World Bank (replicated in other inter-governmental bodies such as the OECD, the EU and UNESCO) lies in its advocacy of higher education as necessary for virtually all types of society and economy: advanced, transitional and early developmental. Although such bodies emphasize the role of universities in the economic progress and competitiveness of nations at all levels of development – for the necessary dissemination of both knowledge and skills in generating human capital resources – it would be wrong to portray these influential stances as entirely ‘economic’. In the last decade or so the World Bank and other transnational donor bodies, such as the EU and the IMF, have increasingly stressed the necessity for good governance, strong regulatory authorities, and civic capacities (‘important public goods’) for both economic and wider national wellbeing in nation states. Universities are regarded as central instruments ‘in empowering domestic constituencies, building institutions, and nurturing favourable regulatory frameworks and governing structures’ (World Bank 2002:xi), so that social capital and social cohesion, essential for economic growth, are secured.

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GLOBAL TEMPLATES: CONNECTED However, the nature of higher education provision is not simply a given in these increasingly authoritative worldviews. It too must reflect the diversity and competition of the private economy if it is to meet the varying needs and capabilities of workers and citizens. That is, this global template requires sustaining by those models associated with the NPM and systemic diversity. As we have noted, for some time now it has almost become a truism in higher education policymaking around the globe that a diversity of higher education institutions in national systems is necessary for capacity-building and competitiveness in an era when virtually all adults, with their varying levels of aptitude and social background, are thought capable of benefiting from further study at all stages of the occupational working cycle. Tertiary institutions with differentiated and varying missions generally are regarded as helping to develop the quality of institutional provision (focusing on what you are good at in your own particular niches is the model for universities and colleges) and also as vital instruments for decisionmakers to respond adequately to the growing requirements of modern social complexity, consumer choice and a sophisticated global division of labour. Nonetheless, despite the rhetoric, government actions at national level often seem designed to encourage conformity and quite high levels of institutional uniformity. They maintain regulatory ‘caps’ on undergraduate tuition fee levels and funded student numbers, for example, while efforts to encourage institutions to increase their private earnings through international student recruitment often lead to a plethora of cheap-cost business and information technology courses both on- and off-shore. Media and ministerial outcries at proposed institutional closures of subjects that do not pay their way economically but are viewed by government as being in the public interest – such as occurred with the proposed closure of some science and language provision in England recently – also force universities to cross-subsidize low-demand or possibly low-quality provision, thus reducing incentives for institutional diversity through programme restructuring. Moreover, too much specialization in the name of diversity leaves institutions exposed to the cold winds of changing fashions in student preferences, and inclines them to comprehensiveness – not specialization – in their provision. Universities are asked by both national and inter-governmental decisionmakers to deliver high-quality research and teaching, social access, business innovation, regional regeneration, cultural enrichment, excellent local community relations – and often all at once. It raises policy dilemmas in many countries as to whether quality or diversity should be the


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aim. It may well be that quality rather than functional differentiation will become the major policy goal for universities operating in the more marketized and globalized conditions of many higher education systems. Therefore government policies of institutional differentiation may come to be regarded as instruments rather than the main purpose. That is, institutional diversity is a policy means rather than a strategic goal. The primary objective rather is to facilitate distinctive brand reputations for universities, firmly evidenced by demonstrable quality provision, and in those subject areas and functions that are chosen for investment and attention by governments and institutions. Despite the obstacles to institutional diversity around the world, we should also recognize that significant institutional differences do occur within the traditional public higher education realm. Public universities in many of the advanced societies vary considerably in size, income and prestige, and not least on levels of research income, which have become increasingly selective and concentrated in public funding regimes. The proportion of institutional revenue from the state as against private fees and charges also varies considerably between the public institutions, while the qualifications, social backgrounds and previous school affiliation of students can also differ considerably despite concerted actions by policymakers to encourage wider social accessibility and attainment. Despite the persistent claims of policymakers and economic leaders in virtually all the advanced (and many of the developing) nations that university systems remain insufficiently diversified, businesslike and responsive, nonetheless higher education sectors are steadily becoming characterized by increasing functional segmentation and, in some cases at least, sharper stratification and inequality levels in many countries. This is particularly apparent in countries adopting market reforms for their tertiary education domains. In part these trends reflect the model provided by the most emulated higher education system worldwide, that of the USA, which for many years has been characterized by often quite formally stratified and diverse institutional configurations in its national patterns of tertiary provision. They range from state-governed to private, often elite or specialist, universities and colleges, and now include the conglomerate ‘for-profit’ bodies that have grown in the last decade or so. It is a system that includes fast-growing, broad-based community-based colleges with predominantly ‘access’ two-year programmes, on the one hand, and research-intensive and world-leading universities, on the other. In 1973 the highly influential Carnegie classification of higher education institutions in the USA identified several categories: Research Universities, Doctorate-Granting Institutions, Comprehensive Universities and Colleges, Liberal Arts Colleges, Two-Year Colleges and Institutes, and

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Professional Schools and Other Specialized Institutions (such as seminaries, free-standing law schools, and business colleges). It also distinguished between public and private institutions. But by the time of its 2005 revision the original simple Carnegie classification had developed into a set of multiple parallel classifications to reflect the increased diversity of the US higher education landscape. Kerr (2002) suggests that the Carnegie classifications are increasingly being overtaken by rapid changes, with more distinctive segments in the national tertiary system currently than ever, and with more variations in the fates of the institutions within each of them.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE USA The impact of wider forces on national higher education systems and the universities within them inevitably will vary around the globe. One approach, however, is to take the US model of higher education as perhaps the most admired by policymakers elsewhere and as providing a picture of where these other systems themselves are heading. We are never likely to find complete convergence on the American model worldwide, even if this was desirable. For example, the US approach to undergraduate programmes tends to be less specialist and aimed at providing a broader approach for much longer than, say, found in universities in the UK and other parts of the British Commonwealth. Moreover, forms of regulatory governance for institutions in the USA are less centrally statist and more self-regulatory and local-state based than found in a number of countries elsewhere. Nonetheless, certain broad similarities to the USA are detectable in other countries, not least in moves elsewhere to introduce more competitive market and user-pays characteristics and to move away from strong funding reliance on public expenditure budgets. These emerging features are longstanding characteristics of US higher education arrangements. Tertiary education in the USA provides virtually universal access from school-leaving to the grave. Over 25 per cent of adults possess a higherlevel degree, and there is continuous adult occupational up-skilling and opening up of new training markets. The intermingling of leisure with tertiary studies by older citizens also contributes to the swelling stock of US college credentials. Some retirement housing estates are beginning to be situated on university property with regulations insisting that residents must study at the nearby university (not least to enable university authorities to meet legal stipulations that their land can be used only for learning purposes and not simply for commercial real-estate appreciation). With the relative decline in recent years of public funding for the state


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universities, and with increasing reliance more generally by institutions on private revenue, including tuition fees and other user charges, there has been intensified institutional competition for both status and income. This has resulted in ramped-up marketing efforts by institutions to attract students, especially the brightest and the best as far as the leading universities are concerned, to the detriment of wider social participation and access objectives (Kirp 2003). Investments in student demand management, in student services and amenities, in new learning technology, and in alumni fundraising are some of the activities that command stronger institutional leadership attention than in previous decades. In the elite, research-intensive universities there is also high rivalry to secure the leading researchers and to pay accordingly. Such ‘star wars’ are aimed at capturing the professors who are able to land large governmental and corporate research funds, attract foundation and alumni support, entice the most qualified students, enable higher rankings for their universities and departments in national university rankings, and add generally to the overall prestige of the university. (In Australia and the UK, too, there are claims that more selective research assessments and funding by governmental bodies, and, of course, the competitive influence of mediacompany league tables, are resulting in similar processes.) There is consequent pressure on university administrators and boards of trustees in the USA to lower teaching costs, especially with replacement non-tenured and part-time contracted faculty for more costly full-time and often tenured teachers in undergraduate programmes, and to eliminate subjects that are not ‘paying their way’, such as in the arts and some sciences (Kirp 2003). Some claim too that ‘grade inflation’ and lax admissions practices reflect a more commercialized consumer-satisfaction, rather than scholastic, approach to academic standards and student preparedness. Other changes influencing the contemporary university in the USA (and elsewhere) lie in the income-earning prospects provided by knowledge advances in a limited number of disciplines. Although some subjects, such as physics and engineering, have long helped universities to earn income from both the private sector and government, newer developments in the biological and the life sciences seem capable, especially in the light of the recent DNA revolution, to expand such opportunities exponentially. The old distinction, between universities as the generators of original knowledge (‘blue-sky thinking’), on the one hand, and private firms as the appliers and commercializers of inventions, on the other, appears to be being overtaken by joint research ventures and teams where such divisions are blurred. These collaborations seek to enhance the global competitiveness of US corporations while allowing universities opportunities to raise income and to reduce dependencies on state funding. The large companies

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have sought more knowledge at the same time as universities have sought greatly increased private revenue. These developments clearly raise ethical, mission-based and organizational issues for the research-based universities (Brint 2002). Do they threaten: the traditional universality and wide accessibility of knowledge creation in universities; the collegiality and self-regulation of academic governance based on a sense of a common weal; internal authority and managerial leadership, including that exercised over the entrepreneurial ‘peripheries’ of the institution; and the long-established function of the university for producing, conserving and disseminating the stock of human knowledge in ways that do not depend on criteria of commercial profitability? Related challenges for the faculty lie in the growth of market awareness and practices among university managers, and the undermining of professional discretion and judgements by increasingly litigious and internet-plagiarizing students and by more formalized and external accountabilities for performance centred on the impersonal application of standardized procedures. For community colleges and those at the lower end of the prestige rankings, there is sharpened competition from the fast-growing for-profit tertiary organizations, with their focus on ‘stripped down’ and standardized learning in a few subjects. However, in providing largely low-cost and high-demand credentials for those adults seeking work-related qualifications with a quick occupational and career payoff, such bodies provide a threat also to some of the revenue streams of higher-rated institutions that have relied on such markets themselves for additional incomes, in areas such as continuing executive education. The USA possesses a large and robust private sector. This has been characterized in the last decade or so by the remarkable growth of conglomerate, multi-divisional, for-profit and shareholder-owned institutions that increasingly are becoming active in cross-border provision. User payments for the purchase of higher education are long-established, and institutional leadership is characterized by highly professionalized management. The role of the federal government is relatively minimal in comparison with, say, the role of government of the nation-states of Europe, focusing on the provision of research grants and student financial aid. In the state sector, institutions are funded for operational purposes at the local level, and regulatory governance – law, rules and supervision – is also local. Moreover, quality assurance takes the form of self-regulatory accreditation and is quite decentralized. The major accrediting bodies are institutional membership and peer-reviewing associations, and there is a strong commitment to institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and the importance of institutional mission. However, local states are demanding


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more transparent and measurable signs of quality from institutions, not least in response to consumer concerns at rising costs for students. Although the US system historically has been focused more on domestic than international issues, reinforced by the small federal governmental role in higher education that consequently reduces involvement in wider inter-governmental forums for international policymaking (although not undermining the USA’s role as a model for emulation), in recent years this has been changing. Stimulated by the rising policy saliency of national economic competitiveness in the USA in the late 1980s (when Japan appeared to offer a major economic threat) the federal government has taken a strong lead in WTO GATS discussions on liberalizing crossborder provision of education services. Outside government, however, the self-regulatory associations, such as the American Council on Education and the accrediting supervisory body CHEA, have turned to more global matters, including exporting their services to institutions outside the USA as well as seeking international agreements on cross-border regulation and quality assurance. Moreover, self-accreditation has come under increasing political and federal governmental attack for lacking in transparency and public accountability and as requiring more state-insisted standards and openness.

OTHER COUNTRIES – ARE THEY FOLLOWING THE USA? Marginson and van der Wende (2007:22) suggest that ‘the most striking vertical difference in the global landscape is the special and hegemonic role played by American higher education, led by the powerful American doctoral sector’. The USA provides most of the world’s top research universities and is a major attraction for talent from elsewhere. Normatively, the US model of autonomy, competition and markets for effective regulatory governance appears to be globally dominant, especially in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and also in the emerging central and east European countries. However, other countries generally display key regulatory differences with the USA. National state agencies, for example, continue to exercise a coordinating function in areas of funding and quality assurance that contrast with those of the USA. If anything, as we have noted, the long-established systems of self-regulatory accreditation in the USA are coming under stronger state criticism at both the federal and the local level, which may push the US regulatory systems closer to those found across the Atlantic. Moreover, US dominance in higher education cannot be assumed

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automatically to persist for ever. Countries such as Korea, China and Japan pose potentially formidable challenges to the USA as they invest heavily in their higher education sectors, especially for research. Mandarin as a language promises to become used by as many people as English. Many countries too are seeking to emulate the USA by expanding their number of ‘world-class universities’, ambitions regularly fuelled by the increasing influence of national and global university league tables. In the UK, decisionmakers appear intent on at least mimicking the USA in their desire for the universities to collaborate more effectively with business. Government funding appears to be reflecting the priority for research that has fairly immediate impacts. Annual real-terms annual increases in the science budget by the government have been accompanied by demands from ministers that universities must ensure that they translate research findings more effectively into business applications. In order to improve the commercial exploitation and knowledge transfer of university ideas and findings, the UK research councils, for example, are now required to tailor their programmes more closely to the requirements of firms and other end-users in their consideration of grant applications from academics. The level of input to peer review from the users of research is consequentially increasing. Yet university scientists question the overall benefit to business of such an approach. Not only are universities engaged in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (and this is still the predominant mode), but curiosity or ‘blue-sky investigations’ may be the best source of the longer-term innovation that business is dependent upon. Other academics not only question the applicability of such an approach to the humanities and large parts of the social sciences, but note that many of the most significant breakthroughs with important advantages to business historically have derived less from immediate applied research in top-down, state-designated priority areas than from basic curiosity-driven discovery. This discussion indicates that we are able to detect common and converging issues in the development of the modern university across territorial boundaries. As the importance of universities to most societies grows there are increased attempts at making them transparent and thus more accountable. Governmental as well as non-governmental bodies, such as the media with its increasing proliferation of rankings and willingness to subject universities to more intrusive investigative journalism, place universities at increased reputational risk from a wider chorus of critics. Some – mainly outside higher education – question whether universities are modern and enterprising enough, and whether the empire of academic collegiality and self-regarding professional protectionism is a continuous source of foot-dragging recalcitrance against modernization. Others,


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mainly faculty staff in the institutions at ground level, more vociferously object to intrusion by governmental agents and corporate sponsors alike, and mourn the apparent decline of the academic revolution from the triumph of its governance from its earlier peaks three or more decades ago. For many in universities there is a feeling of working at a time of great change, where public-serving institutions are becoming more privately and corporately self-regarding, and increasingly disembedded from the national state and its social objectives (Brint 2002). In the next chapter we will examine further some of the globalizing and universalistic tendencies in higher education systems and seek to offer explanations. But first it will be helpful to consider claims by neo-institutional theories that locate organizational convergences and homogeneity within worldwide social processes.

NEO-INSTITUTIONALISM A primary foundation of neo-institutionalism is a sociological claim that social organizations and social actors are not only ‘embedded’ in widescale settings of meaning but also in a real sense constructed or constituted by them. A key assumption is that actors and their behaviour are thoroughly shaped by the cultural meanings and organizational models found in their wider environments. This suggests more than individual and group agents responding to the incentives and influences in their wider milieux, but argues that their very identities, instruments and goals are adopted from the wider system in which they are located. At the level of the nation-state and society, the proposition is that these units directly correspond to models found in the modern world – ideas of what it is to be a modern nation-state, or to be ‘progressive’, and how individual capacities and rights are to be defined. Organizations too display similar isomorphic processes of adaptation and reflect legitimated models found in global discourses and wider practices. Particularly, initial European and now world cultures have major consequences for social structures and are key components of globalization (Boli and Thomas 1999; Jepperson 2002). Neo-institutionalism focuses on the extent to which national actors and their perspectives and aims are deeply shaped – and therefore made more uniform – by a wider world culture (Ramirez 2003). This wider setting legitimates some identities, goals, instruments and models and not others. Consequently, the dynamics of world society in this perspective help drive education systems towards convergence and similarity. A key theorist, John Meyer (2006), draws on the work of phenomenological sociologists,

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such as Berger and Luckmann (1967), to depict the world as composed of institutionalized knowledge and culture, represented in frameworks and scripts that individuals and organizations are socialized into learning. That is, stories, symbolic abstractions and collective representations as to what society is and what it means are learnt as social facts and form ‘recipe knowledge’ for actors in accounting for the social system. A related idea is that the formal structures of modern organizations reflect the founding ‘myths’ and narratives of their institutional environments (rather than necessarily reflecting internal technical work or even commercial considerations). In this sense, much organizational activity is more ‘ceremonial’ than strictly functional. It indicates to internal and external groups the search for legitimacy (and hence access to resources necessary for survival) through commitment to group or sector norms, such as that of rationality. In this view the worldwide growth of formal organizations in recent decades reflects continuing processes of rationalization in modern society and is leading to the increasing standardization of formal organizing. A global discourse has arisen on how organizations should conduct themselves. Institutions, such as universities, are now depicted more as organizations with agent powers and responsibilities for their survival and prosperity, rather than as rather passive bureaucracies pursuing ends externally established. Increasingly they engage in planning, marketing and information-gathering. There is a converging similarity of organizational form and structure found, for example, in the higher education ‘field’, reflecting the external influences of a range of processes: coercive, including regulatory; mimetic, located in the emergence of standardized responses to risk and uncertainty by competitive organizations responsible for their own welfares; and normative, including those values associated with professionalization (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). A key aspect of universities as actor organizations is that they rather than others, such as governments, parents, the school system or even the students themselves, become responsible for student and staff performances. Consequently they are subject to increased external evaluations and rankings, and in the case of research particularly many of these are based on global comparisons. Of particular interest for an understanding of organizational developments in education, theorists in this interpretative tradition point out that national educational systems and curricula, while changing in major ways over time, nonetheless do so in similar fashions and periods across countries. Comparative investigations demonstrate that educational arrangements around the globe are more similar than would be expected given the quite marked variations in levels of development and cultural traditions,


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and they move in concert with changes in influential world models (Ramirez 2006). At primary and secondary school levels, subjects, ideas of the school and its organization, curricula content, and learning and teaching methods seem patterned by world fashions and standard rules and ideas concerning the role of education and its relationships with the world of work. Education has become globally institutionalized. Moreover, occupational culture throughout the twentieth century encouraged rationalization and universalism and directly contributed to the emergence of the idea that all individuals gain from being schooled. Such views were espoused and communicated by nation-states, and also by the well-educated professional experts they employed and who provided apparent living proof of its advantages. The admired nation-state in global discourse pledged itself to a schooled population as part of the very process of nation-building and civilizing (Ramirez 2003). At the level of higher education, of course, we may regard the three templates of NPM, systemic diversity and national economic competitiveness discussed above as contemporary examples of increasingly globalized world models or scripts. Although actual countries differ considerably in their material conditions, modern imaginaries – ‘in the mind’ – of policymakers and others exhibit considerable homogeneity, reflecting transnational accounts and ideas. The education regarded as ‘modern’ and as ‘globally appropriate’ across nations reflects worldwide cultural scripts and institutional meanings and consequently becomes quite standardized. Shifts in these models occur at world system level, and educational curricula, for example, become based on ideas found in global society. Moreover, such convergences appear to be attributable to the rise of global discourses and transnational networks, such as those epistemic communities of experts, advocacy and consultancy organizations that operate in particular policy domains, and inter-governmental bodies such as the OECD or the World Bank. Dominant world models in the integrated global system that are available to be mimicked are disseminated by professionals and are strongly influenced by national prestige in the world system, particularly that of the USA. In more specifically considering higher education – its shape, organization and regulation – there appears to be an acceptance in global discourses as to its critical features. Curricula increasingly reflect global understandings of knowledge and are heavily influenced by scientific validity irrespective of local practices or interpretations. Notions of corporate autonomy, marketization and social relevance for the key organizations, namely the universities and colleges, are strikingly to the fore. Although we have noted the emphasis on institutional diversity as a core component

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of global policy views on higher education (suggesting differentiation and high variability), the idea of diversity itself is universalized and therefore homogenized. As nation-states become less sovereign in the emerging world society, the culture of the world system reinforces a wide-reaching dissemination of ideas based around notions of commonalities, similarities and standardized individuals (persons with human rights and entitlements to be educated to tertiary level). As many countries expand their higher education provision, and their research and scientific activities, neo-institutionalism does not locate its causal mechanisms in the pursuit of economic development. In this view, unlike those espoused by the World Bank and others, the linkages between higher education and national wellbeing are less to do with achieving instrumental economic objectives than in manifesting institutional commitment to ideas of a progressive society based on scientific rationalization. Higher education expansion is what modern, rational nation-states do, as ideal global citizens. An intellectual and political casualty of the modern global fashion concerning the potential of all adults for development through a lifelong engagement with the education system (conceived as an inalienable right and as necessary for human capital formation) is what we might term ‘education elite’ theory (although it continues to flourish in Germany; see Baker and Lenhardt 2008). This stresses the limited numbers of individuals in national systems capable of being educated to quite high levels of attainment and advocates restrictions on numbers of university places. In world society, elite or exclusive views on the place of higher education in national development, and the number of individuals capable of benefiting from going to university, now appear almost as an anachronism. Rather, in ideas of system diversity are reconciled notions of both elitism and mass universality through promotion of institutional differentiation. However, such reconciliation is proving difficult to achieve in some national higher education systems. In Germany, for example, Baker and Lenhardt (2008) point to profound institutional and cultural difficulties over the expansion of student enrolments as encouraged by state policymakers. In contrast with education in many other countries, German education at all levels is not based on universalistic concepts of mass education but is characterized by exclusivist institutional and status distinctions that are traceable to the nineteenth century. Germany has one of the smallest enrolment percentages in its universities of all OECD countries, based on an extremely selective secondary school system and an entrenched view within higher education at many levels that only a select few have the intellectual aptitude to benefit from university studies.


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SCIENTIFIC RATIONALIZATION AND THE UNIVERSITIES At the heart of these global processes of higher education standardization is the idea of science as the exemplar of progressive rationalization. Drori (2003) defines the sciences as worldwide bodies of authoritative knowledge held by expert personnel who are trained and certified to common professional standards. Scientific authority is most clearly exhibited within higher education systems. Values of objectivity, validity and testability provide scientific claims with a status that is rarely matched by politicians and selfinterested lobbyists. Consequently, enrolling scientific evidence and scientists in decisional processes as advocates is a key achievement for policymakers, not least at the transnational level where other types of resource (law, democratic election and funding) are less readily available than for national governments. Higher education and the sciences are vital contributors to the cultural and knowledge systems of modern globalizing world society, and a critical means of disseminating world models and prescriptions. As such, science operates as much as a global cultural force as it does a set of universalistic techniques or technologies. Moreover, the end of the ‘Cold War’ between Eastern communism and Western capitalism has only reinforced the standing of science and the role of the universities, as the former communist countries, established around an ideology of scientific Marxism and the veneration of scientific methodologies as the apex of rational modernism, have had more direct influence on wider global discourses. In this sense, the worldwide spread of science may be regarded as a global ordering device in the absence of more direct governmental authority. Associated with rationalization, science encourages organization and rule-making, and the creativity and responsibilities of socialized but empowered individuals. Science is based on a knowable world rather than one shrouded in unknowable secrets; uncertainties become risks that are manageable and provide opportunities for more evidence-based and effective action (Drori and Meyer 2006). The outcome is that organizations of all kinds, including the universities as the centre of scientific rationality, are regarded as agents capable of advancing modernization through enhanced autonomy and continual learning. Policymaking in the modern world has come to be regarded as best played out paradigmatically through rational and scientific decisionmaking, where apparently disinterested expertise is the key resource, rather than the outcome of power structures and the interplay of self-interested and value-laden political groupings. In these views of global culture and governance, however, power becomes quite decentred, and the focus of conceptual analysis rather is on consensual transnational communities overcoming collective action

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problems and technical issues of coordination and regulation. The ability of normative structures to generate differential capacities for individuals and groups to pursue their respective ideals and interests is largely ignored. Barnett and Duvall (2005), for example, refer to the notion of ‘productive power’ as the ‘socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification’ which shapes what (and who) counts as a source of authoritative expertise. For example, it could be argued that the NPM provides a normative system of meaning that legitimates the decline of academic and collegial forms of authority in universities in favour of that possessed by state-empowered managers. Similarly, the global templates associated with systemic diversity and direct university support of economic development also help to increase the power of research universities in national higher education systems, and that of high-flying academics in biotechnology and similar near-market university units, while university administrators and the humanities, for example, in such circumstances may suffer diminished influence. By including considerations of power within notions of governance we also allow for levels of local and national variety in the interpretation and implementation of global templates that considerably weaken institutional notions of global uniformity and standardization.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ACADEMIC FIELDS However, among the more impressive collections of data in support of the neo-institutional approach to world culture and the globalizing and standardization of the modern university is that indicating the worldwide synchronization of changes in university curricula over the twentieth century. Frank and Gabler (2006), for example, remark on two forms of integration in explaining the rise and fall of academic fields. One refers to subjects and disciplines, or the various knowledge domains, as components of a unified body of university knowledge that changes over time. That is, as some academic areas decline and others develop or grow, they do so in relationship to each other. The second form of integration refers to the linkages in the overarching global environment, and to the associated world-cultural models within which these changes in disciplinary fashion occur. Specifically, as scientific rationalizers, universities deliver a mission to explain reality and its changing modes in the subjects that they offer. Moreover, this is undertaken in objective and universal terms, including following rigorous processes of peer review. If institutions do not follow the canons of rationality and scientific modernity, then they fall foul of global cultural criteria as to what constitutes a university.


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Given the university’s overriding commitment to objective truth in its description of external reality, then it would be reasonable to assume a certain level of convergence among higher education institutions around the world in their academic make-ups. A working assumption for Frank and Gabler is that when globally institutionalized understandings of reality change then so do the factors of academic production – the constituent materials for university teaching and research – and so do the subjects studied. The universalism of higher education means that global cultures always take priority over more local meanings (even in the Middle Ages, European universities taught a pan-European student body in the common language of Latin to inculcate universalistic norms of reason, then of science). More particularly, the growth of the modern university as a global institution reflects a fundamentally altered cosmology in the world. The belief (religious) in the natural world as mainly unknowable and as reflecting the randomized processes of the godly and the sinful, with God as the master, has given way to a view of the world as composed of more systematic and law-like processes that are amenable to empirical and theoretical investigation. Moreover, intervention by empowered and knowledgeable humans transfers the means of mastery to scientists and away from the mysteries and revelations of a supreme religious deity. Gradually, for Frank and Gabler, rationalization and secularization in the globally institutionalized cosmology opened parts of social and natural life to reasoned scientific examination. This reinforced the standing and the relevance of universities greatly, and sustained their worldwide expansion of students and the range of subjects studied. The investigation by Frank and Gabler into the subjects offered by universities around the globe throws up remarkable patterns of similarity, such as to confirm to them the efficacy of the global cultural frame, in part historically inspired by the university heritage of British colonialism in what is now largely termed the British Commonwealth. Universities are rarely influenced by local cultures in the subjects that they offer but demonstrate a remarkable worldwide convergence. Particularly, the rise of secularism and scientific rationalization in the world has raised the importance of the social and the natural sciences in the academic heartlands of universities. Around the globe the academic cores converged over the decades of the last century, so that at the beginning of the twenty-first century there are high levels of similarity in the curriculum for the sciences and a little lower in the humanities for universities, irrespective of local or national circumstances. There is a global decline in humanities and in areas once considered to be the high culture of Western civilization. This appears to be explained by the rise of ‘low or mass culture’, and a lessening of faith in the Enlightenment verities of modernism, and a concomitant

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popularity for postmodernist claims for relative as opposed to universal truth. Changing world cultures have resulted in shifts in the ‘scripts’ for action and structure that have undermined the basis of classics, archaeology, philosophy and theology as subjects, while leaving history, literature and some languages largely unscathed. The subject of history too has shifted in its curriculum emphasis in the light of changing worldinstitutional developments, with increasing emphasis on supranational, international and global units of analysis. Moreover, ancient studies are giving way to modern, and with ‘the people’ and their cultural and social activities given as much attention as ruling elites. However, it is the social sciences that have been marked by the most notable disciplinary growth in universities around the world. Their object of study – the rationalized society – appears to be central to modern society’s preoccupations, and they share the belief (once thought of as arrogance and ungodly) that the world is understandable, alterable, and capable of being manipulated through the operation of rational scientific laws. They hold out the prospect that progress, liberty and justice may be open to all – a mainstream global-rational perspective. Frank and Gabler remark that there has been a major global-institutional reframing that has granted standing and influence to the universal social sciences, and that the growth of the social sciences forms the university’s single biggest recent curricular transformation. This universalistic convergence of academic subjects has occurred despite the contrary pressures for particularism that have been ramped up in recent years. These include enhanced competition, marketization and mission diversity in higher education systems, generating drivers for subject distinctiveness and particular niches between universities located within many different national terrains. Such tendencies for a reinforced academic division of labour have been sustained by enhanced notions of the public and social relevance of universities in worldwide policy discourses. Yet subject similarity and convergence are the features of the contemporary university, suggesting strong influences against the global economic if not the worldwide cultural templates in higher education. Theoretical explanations for such isomorphism appear to lie in the accelerating power of globalization generally, and associated global-institutional frames and models of world reality, that emphasize the relative rise and fall in perceived relevance of particular knowledge domains for explaining current reality. New universities in developing countries reflect in what they study world-legitimized subjects and standards across learning, research and application. State elites also increasingly contribute to isomorphic tendencies in higher education worldwide. They have become educated in


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a more global or cosmopolitan world culture than their own local ones, and around the world they appear more closely tied to each other than to their respective populations. Hence, there is the increasing magnetism for decisionmakers of having ‘world-class universities’ within their national domains, a matter discussed in later chapters.

THE LOGIC OF MASS HIGHER EDUCATION The worldwide curricula influences on university programmes and research – reflecting the move from religion to science – are also accompanied by a global-institutional commitment to the idea of mass or universal higher education, both as an individual right, reflecting the triumph of democratic ideals, and as a builder of economically necessary human capital. The implication is that universities should be socially accessible and relevant for their wider communities. The outcome is a move from the notion of the ‘socially buffered’ to the ‘socially embedded’ university (Ramirez 2006), and is encouraged by the ‘soft law’ and advice of transnational networks, organizations, media rankings and accreditation bodies. In the UK, for example, governmental policy emphasizes the increased social relevancy for universities of what is described as the ‘skills agenda’. Plans to bring more than a million adults into higher education in England and Wales, following the government’s response to its commissioned review of occupational skills (Leitch 2006), require universities to be increasingly responsive to what learners and employers actually want, with additional university places being co-funded by employers, and with business exerting real leverage over the content and delivery of programmes. In this view, the UK government argues that all universities should be comfortable with being described as ‘business-facing’. In contrast, the socially buffered university, in Ramirez’s account, is the traditional, mainly European model, in which an autonomous (from the state) college of scholars and students engage in the study of canonical knowledge and high culture. Effectively they are insulated from the wider society, and this monasticism is regarded as essential for the deep contemplation of God’s universal truths. ‘Noise’ from the wider society is regarded as highly detrimental to the objective and disinterested pursuit of truth and to the conservation of culture and national heritage. Knowledge is thus valued for its sake and not for its economic payoff; any thought of its wider social applicability is a matter for others, for outsiders. There is presupposed a canon based on a bounded and integrated corpus of knowledge. Although the university curriculum has never fully reflected this ‘ideal

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type’ of institution – that in the US has long been open to wider social and economic influences – the contrasting type of ‘socially embedded’ university indicates the major global changes in interpreting the role and function of the modern university. This is more than a move towards becoming the ‘enterprising’ or the ‘entrepreneurial’ university, although that is a key characteristic of the increasingly multi-functional ‘multiversity’ (Kerr 2002). Universities are expected to meet meritocratic and increasingly multicultural standards, to operate fairly, and to act as other organizations act – with goals and plans, and with a rising managerial discourse and a desire to manage corporate identity and reputation.

REGULATORY GOVERNANCE These changes to the global framing of the modern university clearly carry significant regulatory and governance implications. There would appear to be major and universalistic governance dynamics at work at the national and institutional levels, some of which we have alluded to already. These include a stronger managerial and organizational discourse and the development of corresponding corporate structures, the growth of wider public, governmental and media interest in the ‘secret garden’ of university activities and its self-regulation, and a more influential role for business and similar corporate executives from outside, such as active members of boards of trustees and as major funders and providers of research collaborations. The increased recruitment of non-tenured, temporary and part-time contracted staff by universities to teach the early years of their undergraduate programmes, which we discussed above, also may have important governance implications, as many such staff often have restricted rights of participation in campus decisionmaking (usually at the insistence of the full-time tenured faculty). The traditional model of self-regulatory academic collegiality in university systems – a classic feature found in pure form in the socially buffered institution – may also be under severe strain. This may arise less from formal efforts by university and political leaders to reduce the decisional power of the faculty and their bodies, such as senates, than from increasing competitive and career pressures on academics to research, teach, publish and earn income for the university. Dill (2005) suggests that the institutional frameworks of academic governance – its procedures and rewards – are changing around the globe as a consequence of government decisions and marketization. In the USA, for example, it would appear that academic collegiality is being steadily ‘hollowed out’, especially at the local or departmental


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level as academics pursue their own research agendas, with a concomitant ‘degradation of the academic ethic’ (Dill 2005). Although the form and structure of departmental democracy remain, hard-pressed academics are increasingly aware that the often time- and resource-consuming nature of local academic democracy carries severe career health-warnings. Faculty have become more individualistic in their orientations, focused more on research and publications than teaching undergraduates, and the critical resource is time (Dill 2005). Research is the key means to raise personal and departmental reputations and to attract additional revenue, but the research and publications markets are increasingly competitive, in part stimulated by governmental policies of funding selectively based on evaluations of quality, and also by the growing influence of research-based global university rankings. Dill (2005) argues that individual disciplinary and similar socialization into academic standards and professional conduct, and into the methods of peer review and external examining, for example, is insufficient for the maintenance of academic self-regulation unless accompanied by the collective supports, structures and processes of disciplinary and departmental collegiality and meetings. Professional processes of self-regulation, such as external examining and the requirements internally and externally for quality assessments, require collective effort and time in order to be effective but also to help ward off looming and less welcome interventions from public agencies outside the academy. Even more significantly, perhaps, research and publishing priorities may result in lessened interaction with students through simple unavailability. Although email may have reduced the ease by which students and staff members are able to send messages to each other, the overload of such communications on staff can be high and difficult to respond to adequately. At the higher institutional level, the influence of both the faculty and their bodies may also be reducing, with some of their power and authority passing to university chief executives and boards of trustees, and in some cases to trade unions. Chait (2002) suggests that in the USA governance influence of the faculty remains strong only at selective, mainly researchintensive universities, and even here it is spasmodic, whereas, for those in less prestigious institutions, raised managerial direction and faculty unionism are more pronounced. However, investigation reveals that the process of power transmission is less that of an exchange between the lower and higher echelons of institutions than from universities generally to outside entities that provide funds to the universities. These include student consumers (and often their parental supporters), state administrations and their law-makers, individual donors, and corporate sponsors. There appears to be less power to be shared internally by faculty, administrators

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or boards within institutions, as much of it has leaked outside to these external entities. However, we need to be wary in assuming that governing power and resources are always fixed in amount, and that it is effectively a zero-sum game so that the accrual of authority to one source automatically leads to a commensurate diminution in the power of another. Clark (1998), for example, argues that the new ‘entrepreneurial universities’ are capable of having the best of both worlds. They gain greater funds from more diverse sources (and therefore increased funding autonomy) and improved capacity to innovate whilst still being capable of maintaining academic self-governing integrity. More externally focused institutions are able to cast off the accumulated baggage and laggardliness that have accreted over the decades and are able to become more businesslike, spirited and self-responsible for their organizational wellbeing. This involves the purposeful strengthening of planning units composed of both administrators and faculties, and greater support for the units on the margins of the academic subjects that are involved in external problem-solving and applied research in project teams that are often multidisciplinary. Nonetheless, universities in many countries remain rather loosely coupled organizations. Those activities occurring at the top may differ considerably from those taking place at local level. Research on UK universities suggests that departmental and even senior managers in the older and more research-intensive universities especially are rather reluctant managers. Often they may be in such positions out of a sense of duty or because it is their turn (Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2007). The motivation to exercise relentless scrutiny and direction by heads of academic units over their members is often not there. Such managerial behaviour is an unaccustomed practice for those who continue to respect the norms of collegiality and research achievement, values with which they have lived for so long. Moreover, even the most senior managers in an institution recognize that there are limits to the exercise of hierarchical executive authority, and generally they protect and support academic departments from the burdens of external regulatory enquiry wherever possible (King, Griffiths and Williams 2007). Internationally too, loose coupling may explain why trans-border alliances and consortia of universities frequently deliver much less than they promise (Beerkens 2007). For the most part such consortia of the similarly esteemed provide symbolic value and reputational enhancement rather than significant accretions of more tangible resources. This may explain why surveys of the academic profession continually demonstrate continued satisfaction with the professional autonomy of the occupation, despite the external encroachments of recent years and


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dissatisfaction with pay levels, research pressures and teaching loads. The chief merit is the absence of what others would describe as ‘a boss’ and levels of workaday independence that many other workers would die for. There is a feeling by academics across territorial borders that their collective power has receded, and that the authority of boards of governors and central executives has grown in its stead, although not much evidence that this impinges greatly on their daily preoccupations. Nonetheless, in the USA, for example, there is some evidence that governing boards have become more active, if not at the heart of the academic enterprise then in the paraphernalia of external relations and strategic direction that increased organizational corporatization makes inevitable for all such structures. Chait (2002) suggests that such entities used to be largely honorific and decorative gatherings of the great and the worthy whose very presence added to the legitimacy and glow of the institution. Their most obvious substantive role was to protect the university from political and economic bad weather. Yet, over the last two decades or so, trustees have come under greater scrutiny from the media, students, critical academics and politicians than ever before. And, in the litigious culture that characterizes life in the USA across many domains, judges and lawyers have not been slow to take up accusations and complaints from many sides, whether substantively evidenced or otherwise. Among the many accusations found in the media, business circles and political assemblies are claims of uncontrolled costs (leading to high tuition fees especially), self-interested faculty, neglect of undergraduate teaching and an overemphasis on mysterious and non-relevant research, over-easy curricula, painfully slow governance and leadership, lax standards for admissions, and politically correct and non-meritocratic discrimination. Rising public scrutiny of academia around the world reflects the increasing value of higher education for both individual and national success. Consequently, governing boards and university leaders are constantly reproached for not being activist enough to sort out these many alleged ills, and many boards feel obliged to demonstrate that really they are in charge. This stronger governing disposition is probably felt most urgently in the USA (and elsewhere) in the state-supported institutions, with their more pronounced forms of external accountability and with state administrators more able to use funding levels, at least at the margin, to press for more intervention and state-directed reforms. Furthermore, as business boards more generally have become active in the economic domain, then so have those representatives from the corporate world on university councils. Not only have higher education institutions come more to resemble business organizations and thus provide a recognizable entity for business representatives to operate within, but, increasingly aware after

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joining if not before, of the longstanding norms associated with academic peer review at the ground level, business representatives realize that the operation of more generic and familiar organizational processes is where their experience enables them to add most value. Yet the professoriate still holds considerable sway over the priorities of the academic reward system and its social controls, and this continuation of collegial governance is not a state of affairs that boards of trustees and similar governing bodies will change soon. The extent to which the professors associated with the expanding profit centres at the periphery of the institutions will gain more organizational power is less certain although it is likely to grow. Research stars are frequently less interested temperamentally in the often time-consuming and sometimes arcane practices of academic democracy than in pursuing the status and income associated with dedication to the task in hand. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that their ‘hidden’ or unarticulated power will not expand, not from collective or collegial activity in senates and departmental meetings so much as from their propensity to help universities to meet many of the objectives being set externally for them, not least in media rankings and the state performance criteria being established for higher education institutions. As Chait (in Brint 2002) notes for the USA, but in a description that could be advanced for a number of higher education systems worldwide, ‘changes in resources dependency, revenue sources, customer expectation, and the competitive landscape – in short, changes in market conditions – have reduced the influence of faculty, administrators, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, lay boards, and augmented the sway of external constituencies’. In the next chapter we examine contemporary issues of regulatory governance and their implications for higher education systems, not least the growth of more formal and external processes of evaluation. We note also the forces for the development of global forms of regulatory governance, examining particularly the influence of standards and the emerging role of the university as an active organizational agent. Universities everywhere appear to offer universalistic patterns of subject provision, yet their governance and regulatory arrangements remain predominantly a national affair. However, formal inter-governmental regulatory influences are growing, most notably exemplified by the Bologna Declaration (1999) processes for many European countries based on convergence to common qualifications frameworks, pan-European quality assurance processes, standard periods of study and degree cycles, and shared educational definitions. Countries outside the Bologna developments, such as Australia, have expressed interest in more formal articulation of their own higher education systems with Bologna, raising the prospect of more grounded


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regulatory foundations for world institutionalization and global cultural models. We examine notions of regulatory governance more closely in the chapter, particularly as applied at the transnational level, and begin to analyse the emerging world of higher education governance across borders.

3.

Global regulatory governance

INTRODUCTION In the Introduction and in Chapters 1 and 2, we outlined some of the processes that underpinned the growth of transnational convergence in university governance, such as more autonomous models of organization, growing governmental and other notions of universities’ social relevancy, more market-like mechanisms, internationalization, policies of institutional differentiation, and notions of external and increasingly formalized regulation. As part of our account we pointed to a range of non-governmental and wider social processes underlying similarities in university models around the world, such as the remarkable global uniformity in the rise and fall of academic subjects in university provision, and the influence of world blueprints or ‘scripts’ in higher education policymaking. We also outlined explanations – cultural, economic and political – for these developments. These are drawn out a little more here before proceeding with a further analysis of regulatory governance. Utilizing the work of Gilardi (2008), and particularly Jordana and LeviFaur (2006), on the diffusion of specialized regulatory agencies around the world and across many policy sectors, we draw on their approaches to offer a distinction between three main explanatory approaches for global similarities in university governance. The assumption is that many of the common arrangements in higher education systems that have emerged are linked rather than separate phenomena.

THREE THEORIES One theory we may offer for convergence in transnational university governance is that of economic competition, and it runs as follows. The state’s dependency on successful forms of advanced capitalism, and its belief that universities are critical instruments for achieving economic wellbeing, means that national governments are likely to adopt the regulatory and organizational models of the world’s leading economies and university systems, particularly those of the USA. In the USA, for example, is found a higher education system composed of quite highly differentiated and 68


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autonomous universities with distinctive missions. These characteristics tend to be viewed by international organizations and national governmental decisionmakers as more likely to deliver the innovation, knowledge and skills necessary for high economic performance than, say, systems where institutions are broadly homogeneous and subject to tight and quite detailed state supervision. Generally, progress towards a more US-style system of higher education requires countries elsewhere to start within a stronger central governmental framework than is found in the USA, whether these be unitary or federal. Prescriptions associated with the introduction of more US-styled governance approaches from within a strong central governmental context include reforms that help to insulate universities from wider political interference, often through the establishment of independent and intermediary regulatory agencies (including for funding and quality), and by allowing greater forms of institutional autonomy through legal independence, corporatization, delegated freedoms within the state, and so on. These steps are considered as avoiding too close an imposition of state objectives on universities that would hamper creativity and basic research while maintaining public accountability and national governmental steerage capacity. However, policy convergence generally has taken two forms. In those higher education systems where universities have been established as state agencies, with detailed micro-administrative coordination by governments (as traditionally found in much of Continental Europe, for example), financial and managerial autonomy has been expanded as state intrusion has given way to more macro- and meta-regulatory accountability, ex post facto. However, in countries such as Australia, the UK and the USA, with long-established traditions of local institutional independence, heightened external accountability and performance monitoring by governmental authorities have been the order of the day without any great increase in institutional autonomy delegated from the state, albeit with increased corporatization and organizational personhood for institutions a notable tendency. As relationships between high economic performance and certain forms of university governance become generally accepted by policymakers, in a world increasingly characterized by dense interconnections between nations, the institutional designs of the most successful economies are likely to be adopted by others. The USA particularly is emulated as an exemplar of global research excellence, systemic diversity and high levels of private funding – factors in its tertiary system that are regarded as causally associated with the world dominance of its economy and the excellence of its universities. The university system is no different to any other domain with significant economic importance in this respect: indeed

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regulatory convergence across nations under the influence of the USA and other leading Western countries may be found across a range of sectors (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). In the economic competitive approach, emerging similarities in higher education systems are seen as reflecting the influence of the most dynamic and economically advanced nations, and as resting upon a belief that postsecondary systems of higher education are critical to national competitiveness in the increasingly knowledge-based global economy. A problem with this explanation is that, nonetheless, universities are only loosely connected to a nation’s economic performance and have wider social functions than simply economic. It seems almost as plausible to argue that higher education expansion occurs only when countries have reached a level of economic attainment that affords it, rather than the reverse causal relationship. Moreover, higher education systems have distinctive national cultures and structures that are not easily overcome in the pursuit of universalistic conformity, however encouraged are governments by international organizations and similar peer-driven processes (King 2007b). Conversely too, there are reasons other than economic competition for policymakers to emulate other jurisdictions, such as a lack of their own resources to design alternatives to prevailing world models, irrespective of whether the latter are regarded as appropriate for particular local circumstances. As a result, a second explanation, rather than derived from global economic rivalry between nations and a search for comparative advantages in governance associated with ‘world-leader’ economic power, locates causality for converging transnational university and other institutional modelling in the growing authority and institutional influence of intergovernmental and other cross-border forms of governance around the world, particularly as found in the European Union and bodies such as the OECD, the IMF and the WTO. In most trans-governmental associations, members are required both to actively participate in rule-making and then to implement the outcomes at the national level. This requires often that they acquire increased regulatory capacities and also a willingness to accept institutionally driven compromises on ‘best practice’ governing models aimed at creating level playing fields across borders and markets. National adaptation to such outcomes is made easier by the tendency for transnational governmental bodies to operate at a level of highly codified abstraction and principles, as is the case generally within the EU. This leaves many administrative regulatory powers (and room for variation) at national level. Even when international bodies lack the legal instruments of the EU or the WTO, for example, they usually issue soft or voluntary codes and recommendations rather than mandatory hard law, which again


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generates openings for more local interpretations. Inter-governmental influences on territorial jurisdictions are also facilitated by the practice of ‘conditionality’, by which prospective members of influential organizations such as the EU, or hopeful funding recipients from bodies such as the IMF, are required to sign up to particular governance and similar marketfriendly models in order to succeed in their applications (Hurrell 2005). The influence especially of the Bologna Process and the competitionreform objectives of the EU’s so-called Lisbon Agenda that we discussed in the opening chapters also promote increased convergence in national systems of higher education across Europe. For example, the operations of quasi-independent quality assurance regulators are becoming a more widespread feature of national higher education systems under the stimulus of inter-governmental Bologna agreements, while the model of the modern autonomous and socially relevant university is consistently promoted as exemplary by the European Commission. Moreover, such processes create or enhance networks of professional regulators (such as that for European quality professionals – the European Network for Quality Assurance, or ENQA) that increasingly adopt positions that may be at variance for some quality assurers with their national ministers more than with fellow peer regulators. The reputations and identities of such regulators, perhaps even their careers, depend increasingly on their esteem and standing with professional colleagues in similar positions elsewhere as much as on pleasing their own territorial masters. This increases pressures from such networked experts on their respective national government officials to adopt models that facilitate transnational convergence in regulatory governance. Yet circles of quasi-governmental regulators are only one part of emerging epistemic or knowledge communities concerned with transnational governance in higher education. The system of higher education in the USA, for example, being less directed by the central state than in many other countries, provides a model of world emulation ‘at a distance’ rather than achieving its high influence through processes of inter-governmental negotiation. Therefore, we also need to buttress our second or institutional explanation with a third proposition that is drawn from the ‘world society’ and ‘institutionalism’ accounts discussed in the previous chapter, and where the emphasis is on norms rather than on asymmetrical power and economic relationships. Gilardi (2008), and Jordana and Levi-Faur (2006), argue that transnational networks of professionals are highly important agents for regulatory change. As we noted in our previous discussion of world society theory, regulatory convergence across many policy sectors is regarded in such accounts as strongly influenced by the norms of Western rationality.

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Its ‘high priests’ of professionals, experts and scientists are regarded as spreading this norm of rationality through networks of the knowledgeable, including via international organizations (such as the OECD) that are committed to liberal norms and preferences, not least since the end of the Cold War and the apparent global triumph of democracy and capitalism. Particularly, such networks contain both state and non-state actors, with the ‘non-political’ prestige of scientific and expert knowledge from the latter conferring added potency to deliberations and outcomes. Those policy communities that tend to be institutionalized on the foundations of common knowledge, and which draw from the integrating normative and disciplinary socialization processes found in scientific and similar professional networks, often display high levels of coordination. The convergence in higher education systems of regulatory governance in this theory may be regarded as the outcome of norm diffusion through networks backed by the authoritative power of scientific values and rational judgements. The global regulatory diffusion of governance norms is aided by the much greater use of regulatory modes in transnational rule-making that are ‘softer’ and less mandatory than found in territorial national states containing a monopoly of law-making. These more voluntary governing characteristics imply a belief in the efficacy of technocratic, non-political decisionmaking in a more competitive and globalizing world – a world where soft law, standards, benchmarks, rankings and monitoring frames tend to prevail in the regulatory governance of organizations. These are influences that are based on rational and universalistic arguments rather than on the hierarchical command or simply the legal authority of nationstates, and are seen as more conducive to achieving understanding, agreement and effectiveness than control through fiat. It generates a form of global governance, involving both formal and informal rule systems, in distinctive sector areas of influence that generates compliance based on shared norms and cognitive belief systems, common practices and widespread standards-following. The new public management, drawn from the commercial sector and discussed in Chapter 2, may be regarded as such a transnational template – one that has moved initially from being an instrument of management practice as promulgated by advisory management consultants to becoming established as a wider regulatory standard, being taken up by numerous nations and influential international organizations, such as the OECD and the World Bank. Standardization is a key mechanism that helps to produce transnational coordination in a world composed of increasingly autonomous organizations, such as contemporary universities, which value their independence and do not take kindly to external state directives, particularly those emanating from abroad. As we shall see in Part


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II, league tables and similar comparative evaluations by newspaper and other non-governmental producers fall into a similar category of private standard-setting which challenges the traditional regulatory monopoly of national states. But national states too are subject to increased standardization pressures from inter-governmental entities such as the OECD, and by the publication of comparative national educational and other performances by such bodies. Notions of good practice as found in the leading performers leverage considerable peer pressure on governments. Moreover, considerable private authority is also exerted on national states through evaluations of government debt and related funding policies by the ubiquitous US credit ratings agencies, such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. It is likely that all three theories for convergence in institutional governance across borders – model-taking based on global integration (and the desire for national competitiveness in the context of the world-leader economic dominance of the USA); the institutional and authority influence on national governments of inter-governmental and regional policy processes; and the normative power of professional networks based on scientific knowledge and expertise – may have something to offer in explaining processes of transnational rule-setting and standardization in higher education. Before we consider these matters further we need to say more about the regulatory national state and, especially, the growth of private authority within global governance. We now turn to these issues.

THE REGULATORY STATE The long-drawn-out twentieth century is often characterized as witnessing both the rise and the fall of the Keynesian welfare state in the more advanced societies, and its eventual replacement by ‘the regulatory state’. The 30-year period after the end of the Second World War in 1945 marked the advance of social-democratic welfare thinking and concern to ameliorate the plight of the relatively worse-off through state control of competitive markets in goods, services and labour. Markets were thought to be best tamed, corrected and therefore maintained through state operation of key public services such as education, transport, health and housing, by fiscal and micro-economic interventions to manipulate demand, through direct governmental controls over prices and incomes, when necessary, and public ownership or the nationalization of major industries, such as utilities. Transnationally, too, the mid-twentieth-century birth of bodies such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the

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General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (later the World Trade Organization, WTO) and the World Bank (WB) and, of course, the development of a European ‘Common Market’ in the 1950s, which prefaced the stronger political arrangements of the contemporary European Union, manifested the growing worldwide belief that governmental instruments could work on a grander scale than just the nation-state. While there was never real prospect or appetite for global government, there was nonetheless a general desire for increased inter-governmental cooperation (as we noted in our consideration of Slaughter’s account of the new world order in the Introduction). Transnational institutions with strong intergovernmental authority were regarded as necessary for smoothing out the worldwide disparities in the supply and demand of goods and services between nations, and in securing the overall wellbeing and economic development that had been largely forfeited by the trade protectionism, militarism and economic depressions that had scarred the inter-war years. Nonetheless, the nation-state never seemed more popular than in the second half of the twentieth century despite the rise of international organizations. The spread of ‘imagined national communities’ (Anderson 1983) fuelled numerous and generally successful movements for national independence based on notions of territorial contiguity and social identity. Yet increasingly nation-states sought the validity and legitimacy that membership of transnational organizations are thought to ascribe – it is perceived as a sign of modernity – and nationalism and internationalism became developing and intertwined tendencies that have since co-existed relatively easily over recent years. Moreover, the last two decades of the twentieth century, following the example of Thatcher’s administrations in Britain, became increasingly ones of privatization and enhanced markets and competition in the public sector, captured in notions such as the new public management (NPM). This ‘competition state’ differed from the welfare state in its stronger market-facilitating view of regulation and the delegated application of many of its governing controls and institutions to independent regulatory and executive agencies. The age of competitive markets was therefore also the age of increasing state regulation, eschewing micro-interventions and state ownership perhaps, but a state with increased capacity to protect consumers and to maintain competitive conditions in sectors, particularly, where large, previously state-owned and now privatized bodies still dominated. Increasingly, state governance has focused on steering events and networks of actors, particularly across functional rather than territorial policy spaces, rather than on providing and distributing services directly. Moreover, regulatory capacity has grown outside the state too, in corporations and a host of other non-governmental entities, and many


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organizations, including the state, both regulate and are regulated. Rather than characterizing all this as an age of ‘neo-liberalism’ we have rather an era of ‘regulatory capitalism’ – a global order where there is vast expansion of governance of all types and in which exists a reciprocal relationship between corporatization and regulation (Braithwaite 2008; Levi-Faur 2008). There has been a managerial turn in recent regulatory approaches, exemplified in ideas of ‘meta-regulation’ (turning internal and risk-managed organizational procedures into external forms for public accountability) and in notions of corporate social responsibility. Here, too, as the first regulatory capitalist rather than social democratic state, the USA has provided an important source of emulation for countries elsewhere. As we shall discuss later, the state in an age of regulatory capitalism increasingly has become characterized not only by its enrolment of nonstate organizations for policy and regulatory purposes, but by the use of less hierarchical control modalities, and the construction and application of ‘softer’ forms of networked and negotiated authority for its governance, than were found in earlier periods. Mobilizing civil society into regulatory architectures has become regarded as universalistic good practice, enhancing both regulatory legitimacy and effectiveness. Globally, in the absence of a ‘world government’ and the concomitant ability to govern through legally backed ‘command-and-control’ instruments, such ‘shared’ governance practices in any case have become inevitable at the transnational regulatory level. However, we should not assume that the national regulatory state has abdicated all sense of itself as the primary territorial sovereign. It continues to possess financial and democratic resources beyond the scope of most if not all non-state actors. In times of international financial crisis, such as the recent housing-market-generated credit crunch from 2007, national governments have ridden to the rescue of some globally oriented institutions over-exposed to mortgage defaults, on the grounds that such banking organizations are too important to fail (Forrest 2008), while also protecting banking depositors, as the only actor capable of such necessary actions for sustaining the world’s financial system. Notions of state legibility and accountability to the centre – ‘the audit society’ (Power 1997) – and periodic bouts of ‘hyper-policy’ innovation and the search for high accountability in the public interest are generally still to be found in the regulatory state (Moran 2003; Scott 1998), as universities particularly will testify. Yet, inter-governmental forms of coordinated rule-setting are not all plain sailing. Often they can generate levels of distrust, as implementation in particular territories may be dependent on street-level bureaucrats whose enforcement styles often vary significantly between countries (Vogel 1986). The problem with bureaucratic rationality in its more extreme and

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hubristic forms is that it leads to failed policy implementation and even more pernicious consequences as a result of ignoring real, functioning and often informal local practices and knowledge. Nonetheless, the regulatory state introduced in Britain under Thatcher administrations in the 1980s (and many countries elsewhere subsequently) increased levels of state regulation and surveillance in both economic and social fields, whilst at the same time reducing micro-controls in the economy and enhancing market forces. Gradually, however, we see throughout the regulatory world at the turn into the twenty-first century attempts to respond to the criticisms of high bureaucratic state regulation and its ‘targets culture’ by extending softer, responsive and more risk-based modes of control. Persuasion looms larger now in state rhetoric as it seeks to steer increasingly complex networks containing authoritative agents that are private as well as public, and often transnational as well as national. Bargaining and negotiation – the identification of interests and commonalities through open and reasoned deliberation – have come to seem more appropriate (and effective) processes for the age of governance and globalization than state-centred, top-down and legally sanctioned ordering. Models of discursive and rational democracy – superior to electoral politics for some – and a sense of growing societal complexity, plurality and relativism have helped to move the state in more decentralized and cooperative directions. Nowhere are these tendencies more apparent than in our increasingly transnational world. Without a world government, global governance inevitably involves compromises between organizations that are not arranged in formal hierarchies or governed by states that possess a monopoly of legitimate power. Braithwaite and Drahos (2000) suggest, in their study of worldwide business ordering, that to comprehend how the achievement of global regulatory governance is institutionalized requires the understanding of the workings of a whole web of influences. Conventional beliefs that policy outcomes arise from the realistic interplay of state interests are no longer sufficient: webs of reward and coercion are generally less causal in the global arena than webs of dialogue and persuasion, and associated processes of modelling. Moreover, such dialogic rather than outright power processes help to constitute normative commitments to regulatory policymaking and its outcomes and to increase the odds that compliance will be high. Consequently, non-state actors across territorial jurisdictions have shown increased ability in recent years to collaborate in constructing (and also enforcing) rules and standards that attract widespread legitimacy, including by those not involved in their formulation, thus becoming active private regulators. For example, ‘coordination service firms such as ratings agencies, institutional investors, trade exchanges, investment banks as well


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as multinational law, accounting, insurance and management consultancy firms enjoy considerable authority over others, by setting and enforcing distinct standards of acceptable behaviour’ (Graz and Nolke 2007:6–7). Voluntary rule-setting of this sort is potentially quite flexible and global in responding to the uncertainties experienced by many actors worldwide. Nonetheless, a key factor appears to be degree of competition between economic firms. Although preferring self-regulation in good times, dominant producers tend to call upon the state for regulatory (and market) protection when their competitive positions are threatened by others, not least from other countries (Mugge 2007).

REGULATORY GOVERNANCE Recent regulatory scholarship analyses a number of associated challenges to traditional theories of regulatory governance (King 2007a; Morgan and Yeung 2006). One such concerns the idea of the primacy of the state as the sole repository and representative of a nation’s goals and values. Increasingly a host of non-governmental institutions, including both commercial and voluntary organizations, operate not only as representatives of social interests but as sites for public deliberation, and sometimes as private agencies of public authority. A second challenge to statedominating models concerns the decreasingly hierarchical nature of state governing activities and the increasingly ‘flat’, horizontal and overlapping sites of networked governance. Here state rule occurs more through negotiations with a series of decentralized organizations operating within rather fluid partnerships and alliances, and where cooperation and collaboration are the resources needed for participants, including the state, to realize their goals. Moreover, not only does the authority of informal civil society groupings sustain that exercised by the state in such networks but often it takes its place (Bevir and Rhodes 2003). In turn, however, private authority itself is governed more by public interest notions, so that values of transparency and public accountability, for example, penetrate the private sphere too, in part as a consequence of increased governmental contracting of private companies as suppliers of services (Freeman 2003). The overall result, however, is a further emerging recognition that command and control as a means of rule is a weakening pulse in ordering social outcomes. Law as a regulatory instrument is frequently faced with limitations on its effective implementation, often through neglect of local knowledge, and insensitivity to sector norms, and because of the rather binary nature of judicial outcomes in comparison with the problemsolving requirements of much effective policymaking. Indeed, law itself

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appears increasingly constituted by forms of private authority and decisions taken in global institutions and other national jurisdictions (van Schooten and Verschuuren 2008). A variety of control modalities often is required for effective governance, including competition, dialogue and consensus, as well as command. Moreover, most empirical investigations of regulatory policymaking across many different sectors indicate that, in practice, hybrid amalgams of a number of control instruments tend to be used rather than pure forms, and that regulatory effectiveness depends on adjusting regulatory methods to local circumstances, particularly to modulating them according to the varying track records in compliance of those being regulated. Inevitably perhaps, normative considerations tend to accompany empirical observations in prescribing regulatory techniques in both academic and governmental analyses. This is found in so-called risk-based or responsive forms of regulatory governance, for example, when both resources efficiency and moral reward may be cited to justify ‘light-touch’ regimes for those regulated entities with a history of conformity and general good behaviour (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992). It is also apparent that different national legacies and traditions influence regulatory approaches. In Britain, for example, a long history of self-regulation, principles-based models, informality and conciliation in regulatory surveillance has not entirely disappeared, despite the recent growth of formalism, codification and external evaluation by governmental agencies. The higher education regulatory state, for example, is an ‘ambiguous’ one and displays contrasting tendencies to deploy formal state external evaluation with retained notions of peer assessment and collegial judgements (King 2007a). Regulatory objectives in the UK more generally often seem aimed at securing compliance, even if this takes rounds of negotiation, rather than ensuring enforcement. In the USA, by contrast, legalism and a rules-based culture are more prevalent, although such approaches are often criticized on the grounds of inflexibility. US culture and practice generally are wary of the discretionary powers that principles-based approaches afford regulators, and sceptical of the variability in outcomes that may follow, and the lack of transparency with which they are reached. Nonetheless, despite a global tendency to move away from such approaches, rules-based and legalistic methods appear clearer and therefore freer from arbitrary power and the self-interested ‘insider’ interpretations of regulation found in more negotiated and informal processes. US regulatory influence around the world helps account for the phenomenal global growth of transparency as a key regulatory principle, not least for publicly supported and regulated services such as higher


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education and where sizeable amounts of taxpayer funding are expended. (Nonetheless, the regulatory principle is generally regarded as appropriate for corporate governance across a range of domains where investment ‘at a distance’ and the wider public interest are involved.) In higher education, value for money and similar assurances about the financial efficiency and managerial effectiveness of increasingly autonomous universities are widespread goals for policymakers and regarded as requiring increased regulatory interest. Similarly, quality and the preservation of academic standards are thought to benefit from more open ‘rendering of account’ by universities to external auditors, while equity and fair access are also desiderata stimulating governmental and media curiosity in university affairs. Consequently, quality assurance systems, performance-related funding, market-mechanisms that enhance student preferences and institutional competition, external business and other ‘non-insider’ representation on university councils, and wider public dissemination of information on university performances are among the reforms that have been introduced by governments in recent years. In return, however, universities, like organizations in other domains, tend to complain about over-intrusiveness, red tape and the high costs of additional bureaucracy, and sometimes question the ability of external agencies to effectively undertake their role. On the other hand, there are often doubts publicly as to whether institutions have the managerial expertise necessary to discharge their new functions and whether universities are amenable to notions of corporate unity of purpose that are adopted from the private sector. Increased or maintained institutional autonomy alongside added external accountability and marketization provide a policy mix that governments believe marks out an appropriate balance between institutional freedoms and state responsibilities for effective steerage, and which encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, mission distinctiveness and the preservation of the public interest (OECD 2008). However, the boundaries of the new settlement between the state and the universities are continuously tested and under stress, and the overall architecture remains essentially contestable, occasionally a little precarious, and potentially reversible. A further feature of transnational governance is the role of private authority, and here again the influence of the USA is marked. In the highly globalized financial services sector, for example, US credit ratings agencies, such as Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s, have developed a truly global network of offices to act as sources of private authority. But this follows less from US regulatory aggression than the desire to access US capital markets and the emulation of US regulatory practices (Kerwer 2005). Private authority is often mixed with public regulatory authority

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when such ratings and rankings are incorporated as standards and benchmarks within governmental risk-based policymaking. State-backed information disclosure on organizations, including universities, and third-party regulatory endorsements are examples of how regulatory instruments – private and public – become intertwined in regulatory architectures, and in part also help to give credibility and an element of public accountability to private standards-setters and evaluators. In some cases the allocation of public resources to organizations may be linked to ranking positions. In the market for international fees-paying higher education, for example, in some countries (such as Malaysia) public bursaries and scholarships for those travelling to study abroad, such as to the UK, are restricted to those attending institutions in the higher echelons of league tables of universities produced by the (London) Times newspaper. Less directly perhaps, policymakers may rely more on ‘naming and shaming’ through the publication of performance rankings (whether they are ‘official’ and governmentally produced, or private and mediaconstructed) and on the heightened sense of corporate brands, and reputational risk to them, by universities operating in highly competitive and marketized conditions, than on conventional hierarchical regulation. As we have noted, in many postsecondary sectors for example, comparative performance information (from, say, the OECD) reinforcing peer pressure and public accountability has often become more powerful than legislation and formal regulation in shaping institutional behaviour and strategy, and reflects a growing field of international comparisons and benchmarking across many sectors.

TRANSNATIONAL REGULATORY GOVERNANCE Indubitably there has been a regulatory cascade at the global as well as the national level in the last decade or so. A range of control modalities is shaping and balancing the spread of market reforms throughout the world. Markets have become as much a control or regulatory device for improving public organizations and publicizing private bodies as a means for supplanting regulation itself. State regulation expanding alongside the growth of privatization appears to be a global phenomenon (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004), although increasingly it is exercised through the creation of new semi-independent regulatory agencies, a process which has diffused from the advanced societies gradually to other countries. In 1980, for example, independent regulators were found in only around 10 per cent of country sectors in western Europe, while 20 years later this had grown to 80 per cent (Gilardi 2008). Gilardi notes that a common feature of such


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arrangements is a deliberate insulation from political control in order to increase the credibility of policy commitments, and to lock in future governments that might have different policy goals. Nonetheless, the independent regulatory authority is a socially valued and legitimate form that has diffused around the globe, in part encouraged by bodies such as the EU and the OECD, as a consequence of emulation, of learning from competitors, and as ceremonial and symbolic means for policymakers to gain legitimacy and protection from criticism. Moreover, the influence of the high-status and economically important USA, the first state to employ such independent agencies on a large scale, has significantly propelled the globalization of this regulatory institution. Braithwaite (2008:19–20) traces the global regulatory influence of the USA to its domination and leadership as a capitalist economy throughout the twentieth century and into the new decade. Anti-trust legislation, by constraining cartels and inter-company collusion, has long encouraged big-sized corporatization through merger as an alternative and legitimate means to cartelization for securing market share and high yields in the USA. This has resulted in increased economic efficiency through enhanced competition between the large corporations and encouraged a belief by both state administrators and corporate leaders that regulation aided markets and did not simply stultify competition. A process of ‘reciprocal causation’ between the state and corporations meant also that the demands and costs of public regulation helped to protect big companies. Regulations were difficult and costly for smaller entities to adopt and led to increased acquisition by the larger corporations. In turn large corporations increasingly have the capacities to regulate themselves as responsible agents, singly or in industry and similar associations, using also market leverage over networks of suppliers and buyers to extend corporate social responsibility to wider liaisons, not least to protect brands and to avoid media and public damage to reputations. Regulatory technologies around the world also have advanced to enable local knowledge to be incorporated into a range of sophisticated and often hybrid ‘meta-regulatory’ architectures, where there is a regulation of (self-)regulation through turning internal organizational processes into objects for lighter-touch and less inspectorial forms of external investigation (Parker 2002). Moreover, ‘while states are decentred under regulatory capitalism, the wealth capitalism generates means that states have more capacity both to provide and to regulate than ever before’ (Braithwaite 2008:29). Regulatory capacity for national and transnational organizations consequently has expanded enormously with the global triumph of capitalism and markets since the ending of the world challenge of state communism and the Cold War by the early 1990s.

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Transnational regulatory governance, as we have noted, generally is less reliant on state-centred, sanctions-based and legal controls of the kind found in traditional national states, and relies more on softer and dialogical forms. These usually involve codes of good practice and similar voluntary and generally non-detailed recommendations. So-called gatherings of ‘epistemic communities’ of experts, including such as scientists and similar knowledgeable representatives from non-state bodies, tend to be influential in policy formulation and its eventual global take-up and implementation. ‘Science’ and ‘expertise’ are often regarded as essentially ‘non-political’, and such views tend to reduce conventional political and interest-group activity in transnational governance in favour of more ideational deliberation. Nonetheless, regulatory diffusion across borders generally requires quite high levels of cooperation between governmental and regulatory officials in the varying territorial jurisdictions. Moreover, inter-governmental institutions, such as the OECD, the EU or the WTO, have highly influential standardizing consequences for national governments through the publication of official performance indices or country evaluations of systems and policies. A key characteristic of global regulatory governance is that it tends to be compartmentalized by policy domain or sector, such as higher education or pharmaceuticals, rather than being broader in function but more geographically contained, as found with state-based regulation. Consequently, transnational forms tend to be the constructions of those who know the sector, its agencies, the culture and the key players very well and across territorial borders. There is often a sense of a ‘shared community of fate’ and increased prospect of consensus and agreement in policymaking as a result.

NATIONAL VARIETIES OF REGULATION The extent to which we can discern the emergence of transnational forms of regulatory governance in part depends on the extent to which nationstates are open to global and similar influences. We referred above to the influence of national histories – culture and structure – in determining responses and shaping the specific national configurations of national states. Moreover, influential ‘varieties of capitalism’ theories argue that national institutional arrangements, involving the organizations of capital, labour and the state particularly, are arranged in historically determined patterns that can block off efforts at reform or produce globalizing impacts that are not consistent with the national model (Hall and Soskice 2001). That is, it could be argued that institutions in countries become


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constrained by previous national decisions and actions, thus maintaining diversity between countries in their regulatory arrangements. However, institutions do change, often ‘out of sight’, incrementally and slowly. Change is not always the outcome of revolutionary upheaval (Streeck and Thelen 2005), and it is important to recognize that ideas and individuals can break through even the most well-encrusted structures (an example being Margaret Thatcher in the UK during the 1980s). The necessity for economic and political change is not necessarily directly causal or immediately comprehensible but requires interpretation and ‘narration’ (Blyth 2002; Hay and Marsh 2000). Regulatory trajectories are not entirely ‘locked in’, and policymaking across advanced societies often appears to reflect a common ‘script’ or ‘blueprint’. Regulatory narratives, for example, that are based on a claimed ‘inevitability’ for globalization and increasing social complexity often contain arguments for the centrality of flexible governing forms, including greater use by governments of ‘decentred’ patterns of social coordination and a move away from legally centred, command-and-control hierarchy (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Black 2001; Scott 2004). Nonetheless, formal institutional convergence is not always as it appears. Even when there is adoption of globally endorsed regulatory architectures by states, underlying cultural and delivery patterns may be operating quite differently under the surface. Walter (2006) argues, for example, that the move away from ‘developmental states’ in countries of east Asia, such as Japan, towards more neo-liberal regulatory states based on wide establishment of independent regulatory bodies in key areas such as banking supervision hides the continuing strong discretions operating in practice and which reflect the influences of domestic political pressures. There is consequently a substantial gap between formal convergence upon international regulatory standards and underlying behaviour. Such instances also signify that state ‘infrastructural power’ retains its utility (even expands) in some countries as globalization deepens, not least to protect sectors and individuals most exposed to its competitive impacts and who often are located in parts of economies that are more nationally dependent than the larger multinational corporations. But major and dynamic companies also look to the state to support national innovation structures and supply skilled labour (Weiss 2005). In this sense, the national grows with the transnational. In a number of sectors we find structures and flows that mix the local and the global in complex ways. Housing markets in many of the advanced economies are a case in point. Forrest (2008) outlines how national governments continue to exercise important influences on housing markets (although reducing their role as direct providers of housing) through tax and savings policies, planning and land use controls, and environmental restrictions.

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Mortgages also are generally obtained by householders from local financial institutions. Yet, as we have seen with the recent international credit crunch (which originated in the USA’s sub-prime housing market) and falling house prices in a number of countries, the financial influences shaping local housing markets are located increasingly in worldwide capital markets. In turn, too, regulatory processes and standards-setting for such markets steadily are becoming more global. It is clear that national path dependencies may be weakening in the age of globalization. Although it is possible to detect national regulatory ‘styles’, for example, such as the contrast between the behavioural informality associated with the UK and the more rule-based formality of the USA, in recent years there has been evidence of emerging global similarities. The ideas associated with concepts of ‘responsive regulation’ (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992), for example, suggest that the complexity of modern social existence and the many difficulties associated with state-sanctioning command-and-control forms are leading to increasing similarities in regulatory techniques and technologies worldwide, based on softer and non-legally binding rules such as standards and guidelines, alongside more risk-based approaches.

REGULATION BY LEARNING FROM OTHERS There is little doubt that contemporary social, technological and institutional complexity is increasing regulatory reliance around the globe on soft law (guides rather than command), on self-regulation, on flexibility, and on learning from others. Inevitably in the modern world, path dependency is giving way to stronger forces of global convergence. However, this does not result in global uniformity. The characteristic of contemporary regulatory theorizing is that it emphasizes the variety of institutional designs and technical choices available to regulators in both differing territories and policy domains. Increasing this involves the enrolment of, and negotiation with, a host of non-state bodies. The convergence lies in the recognition that regulatory governance is a sophisticated activity in which policy learning and the exchange of practices and ideas across boundaries are an efficient and effective means of policy formulation and implementation. Increasingly organizations of all kinds learn and improve by watching and competing with others, monitoring horizontally rather than being steered from the top down. Moreover, transnational policy adoption in sectors reduces the extent to which regulatory exceptionalism, or regulatory laggardliness, exposes national decisionmakers to risk from powerful globalizing entities, particularly large economic conglomerates.


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International organizations also increasingly tend to govern through persuasion, deliberation and soft forms of surveillance (such as reporting on national performances but without any formal sanctioning role). Voluntary rules that are couched in the language and form of frameworks enable the rules to be applied to particular circumstances without too much danger of apparent non-compliance. In this sense, soft rules and conventions are in essence transnational. The OECD, for example, tends to focus on processes that enable the development and diffusion of agreed ideas through processes of regular peer review (Morth 2004). The constraints are essentially normative and rely upon reputational and credibility concerns by members for their compliance, including by enthusiastic early adopters of models seeking to establish themselves as modernists, as ethical leaders, or as simply legitimate in the eyes of the international community. The OECD does not simply act as a policy initiator (or ‘broadcaster’). It also serves as a forum within which members share information, learn from others, and construct shared purposes and identities as like-minded countries with common values. Nonetheless, we should beware assuming that such bodies engage in the rather (allegedly) polite and often disinterested manner of the university common room. Key interests are at stake and bargaining can be hard. Moreover, sharp-witted policy entrepreneurs (public and private) are often able to market regulatory solutions very effectively rather than just carry the day on the intrinsic merits of particular proposals. Furthermore, not all international organizations operate in this soft manner. The WTO, for example, which has an interest in education as a trade-in-service activity and which has helped to define it as ‘tradeable’, has become a more constitutionalized organization in the years since it transmogrified in 1994 from the earlier and rather looser regulatory body known as the GATT (Cass 2005). Like the EU (apart from its open method of coordination) the WTO has tended to adopt a harder rule-based approach, including the use of a disputes resolution procedure. In the field of competition regulation, however, the International Competition Network (ICN) may be regarded as offering a ‘third way’, between the ‘experts’ approach of the OECD and the legal approach of the WTO (Djelic and Kleiner 2006). Membership is voluntary and inclusive to competition authorities, and there is no permanent secretariat or budget. Members pay their way, and rule-making and rule-following are predicated upon socialization. The ICN has the potential to become transformed into a stronger rules-based regulator but, at this time, operates more as a site for transnational collaboration, the exchange of ideas, and discussion and comparison of good practices.

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In broader regulatory matters, however, the OECD is a crucial organization for global modelling and its diffusion. In some areas, such as the chemicals sector, it is a formal standard-setter. Generally, however, its influence is intellectual and ideational, and it is perhaps the most significant means transnationally for the formation of knowledge through networks of experts and decisionmakers. International bodies of this kind tend to promote ideas in quite abstract form, enabling proposals to be generalizable and with potential universal applicability. Although coercive or realist power is exercised by nation-states in various forms of global governance, particularly that of the US in the field of trade, where access to the USA’s large domestic market is a key power resource, expertise, if anything, plays an even more important role (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). US regulatory agencies have technical knowledge, experience and a tradition of openness that make them admired as model-givers in global policy communities. There is thus still a stronger tendency for the core nation-states in the world system to be followed or modelled than those located on the periphery. Policymakers and regulatory authorities are constrained for time and resources like many others in a rapidly changing global order characterized by an increasing range and diversity of issues. The attractions to ‘short-cut’ for many governments, by taking existing, highly regarded and road-tested regulatory blueprints ‘off the peg’, is large. Inevitably, most countries tend to be ‘policy-takers’ rather than ‘policy-givers’, especially when heightened respectability and legitimacy and a form of global policy warmth are also likely outcomes from such imitation.

DECENTRED GLOBAL GOVERNANCE State realism, pursuing national self-interests and using the instruments of reward and sanctions, appears remarkably inadequate to describe much transnational regulatory governance in a decentred world where state institutions are only one of a diverse range of organizations concerned with such matters, and where webs of persuasion and rhetoric play a more significant role than webs of control. Braithwaite and Drahos (2000) note that large areas of regulatory activity are in the hands of self-regulating and non-state entities, often with explicit state approval, whether these are classification societies or more formal standards-setters. Frequently states’ regulatory agreements follow from private regulation, and there are many points of entry to influence change. There seems a widespread and global expansion of various forms of private authority. Consequently we are finding that new regulatory


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instruments, in some cases based on rising legalism but not all, such as contracts, rankings, standards, auditing and evaluation are being used by both state and non-state regulators. Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006) suggest that companies virtually everywhere are increasingly subject to multiple certification processes involving a variety of categories and standards, including efficiency, quality, ethics and environmentalism. Consequently, an increasingly marketized and corporatized transnational world – one continuing to lack a global system of government equivalent to the powers and identities of national territories – is not one without rules or order. Rather, organizations of every kind (but particularly international ones) are increasingly associating in policy networks and sector constellations in ways that are producing a growth of regulatory activities. World regulatory order, as a consequence, is more based on a quilt-like patchwork of order found within distinctive policy domains than resembling the more totalizing and encompassing systems of rule found in national states. In some ways, it is easy to over-simplify the contrast in regulatory governance between the sovereign nation-state and the emerging global order. Theorists of governmentality, following Foucault, for example, argue that power in national territorial jurisdictions always operated with multiple centres rather than emanated simply from the state. Rather, the normalization of social order was achieved, and identities constructed, through the activities of a ‘vast array of petty managers of social and subjective existence’, such as psychologists, medics, accountants and others, who shaped personal and organizational conduct on behalf of a state ‘operating at a distance’ but without violating formally the private, free, autonomous and responsible statuses of the individual – a key tenet of market-based capitalism (Miller and Rose 2008). Increasingly, as the technologies and rationalities of the market have spread to previously ‘public’ domains such as education and health, and to government itself, new instruments of regulation, such as audits, standards and targets, extend the notion of governing ‘at a distance’. They do so without trammelling the increased autonomy and freedom of choice of individuals and newly empowered organizations such as universities that the rationalities of markets demand. Yet the new global regulatory order takes the notion of multiple centres of power, and the role of experts and private authority outside the state, much further. Drori and Meyer (2006) argue, too, that such world ordering in the absence of a world sovereign is underpinned by a global expansion of scientific rationalization (‘scientization’) and its authority over a wide range of issues and concerns. Science creates both a sense of the empowered and rational organization and the prospect of taming nature, thus turning uncertainty into risk (one that can be managed). Importantly, science is regarded as a universalizing rationality uniting actors paradigmatically

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around the globe in their confidence and approach, and as increasingly diffusing scripts and explanations for social, and not just natural or physical, matters. Thus, ‘scientization constitutes both the agent-carriers – the scientific discipline, the research institute, the political unit – and the scientized script, or model, of modern social action’ (Drori and Meyer 2006:49). We may question the extent to which scientific authority holds policymakers in thrall – we see in food and related health scares that there is often popular scepticism about scientific claims to expertise in the face of ‘common sense’. While science may be respected, often scientists and their judgements are not. Yet transnational scientization and its impact in decisionmaking may be harder to hold accountable in the absence of deeply ingrained global democratic communities than in the national sphere. More particularly, though, science and purposive rationality as key modernist and globalizing values are changing the character of organizations. In both the state and the private sector, the contemporary organization is an agent with the power to master the environment and is responsible for its own actions – its success and its morality. Unlike the case in the rather sleepy bureaucracies of traditional organizations – serving and reflecting the external authority of ruler, professional guild or firm owner – modern employees are empowered participants in the organization, which itself is a constant learner and responsible for its own standards and quality, and interdependent with other organizations. Professionalism in the modern world of the transnational organization is perhaps the prime example of such change. For many years, professional workers have been protected from the outside world, not least from the market, by their self-regulating professional associations. They received their authority and status for exactly these non-worldly and noncommercial reasons. But both the old bureaucracy and the old professional ideals are giving way to well-educated and skilled organizational members, who are required to be active participants in the achievement of organizational goals. In return, however, private corporations are expected to demonstrate corporate social responsibility and to exhibit appropriate and perhaps symbolic institutional characteristics, such as the introduction or expansion of human resources departments. Transnational governance appears increasingly secured through standards and the role of meta-organizations than through state sanctions or hierarchical regulation. Standards are described as voluntary and advisory rules that are designed for the many by the few (Ahrne and Brunsson 2006; Brunsson 1999). In the globalizing world, standards have become important coordinating devices for securing orderliness – they tend to be based on expertise and scientific universalism, have no boundaries, and may be adopted by virtually everyone. Standardization rather than state authority


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has become especially important in higher education (and other sectors) as universities value their autonomy and are generally unwilling to sacrifice their organizational characteristics on other than a voluntary basis. Moreover, the internal organizations of universities often remain loosely coupled compared with stronger corporate forms of managerial authority found in the commercial sector, and standardization is a form of regulation that can be effectively applied when organization is comparatively gentle in its coordinating characteristics. As we have stated previously, there is no world government at the global level, although there is a need for the coordination and cooperation that transnational standards-setters help to provide. Nonetheless, standards clearly influence organizations and tend to produce similarity rather than difference, although some standards may be ambiguous (occasionally deliberately so in order to widen their appeal), while others may result in organizations re-describing their practice in accordance with a standard rather than changing their practice, all of which reduce the chances of homogeneity. Meta-organizations (when the members are organizations rather than individuals) also help to secure global coordination. As we noted in the case of university consortia, members tend to be recruited on the basis of similarity, and such meta-organizations are quite numerous in research and development processes. Although easy to form, however, university organizations are not as good at utilizing shared resources as they are in enhancing university reputation. Consensual decisionmaking and reputational equivalences in participants nonetheless lead to low member turnover (Beerkens 2007).

REPUTATION, RISK AND UNCERTAINTY The notion of organizations as agents responsible for their own fates has important implications for how they manage risk and uncertainty in their external environments. Universities particularly are organizations that trade highly in reputation and in the ‘purchasing’ of esteem and high standing. University consortia and similar network alliances, for example, seem poor at turning collective capacities into high resource-adding synergies based on complementarity of resources, but very good at enhancing the reputation of the membership and confirming their broadly similar rankings in the world (Beerkens 2007). In an age of increasing autonomy, competition and nation-state detachment from direct interventions and micro-controls, universities around the world increasingly regard the safeguarding of their reputation and the ability to successfully manage risk as essential for survival and prosperity.

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Power (2007) has outlined how risk and its management tend to produce particular types of rational organizational design. Governance, including inter-organizationally generated global regulation, is characterized often as a means of ensuring that organizations have the capabilities for managing risk effectively. External regulatory accountability, or meta-regulation, by state and similar agencies, for example, focuses on the internal procedures and processes by which risk, including quality, is potentially identified by organizational leaders and for which plans are made. Thus, in higher education in the UK in recent years, the more direct interventionism and micro-assessments of the Quality Assurance Agency have given way to processes of institutional audit where universities’ internal procedures, arrangements and corporate leadership are turned ‘inside out’ for external evaluation (King, Griffiths and Williams 2007). In this sense regulatory governance has taken a more direct managerial turn. One consequence is a tendency for increased organizational conformity in order to display acceptance of wider quality risk norms in the sector and to those outside. A further effect may be what Braithwaite (2008) describes as ‘regulatory ritualism’, in which private and public accountability processes such as audit tend to morph into a ‘ritual of comfort’ and pacification rather than an adequate guide to performance. There is a process of adaptation by organizations to amplified regulatory governance in which securing conformity to regulatory processes becomes more important than achieving the objectives themselves. Rules, protocols and procedures become the means to demonstrate regulatory good practice as part of corporate self-defence rather than actual desire for improvement.

SOFT REGULATION Lawyers and politicians are not necessarily pre-eminent in transnational governing forms. Rather, epistemic communities are generally heavily populated and influenced by professionals and scientists, and it is their ‘non-political’ and rather technical language that unifies such groups. Such entities are constructed not simply by regular interaction – even in a globalizing world such meetings are necessarily limited – but by what neoinstitutionalist theories would describe as common cognitive and value schemes (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006; Powell and DiMaggio 1991). These are generally the outcome of professionalization and related socialization processes resulting in broad agreement on what constitutes expertise and knowledge, and leading to shared interests and goals. The result has been a proliferation and diffusion of global, standardized models and blueprints that help to solidify the cultural and institutional web


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characteristics of world society. These templates and ‘frames’ enable state and non-state actors to be benchmarked and evaluated (and probably changed). Although states remain as important regulators, they operate in a world of multi-level governance and are embedded in and increasingly shaped by a transnational community and its established models. A consequence is that the globalization of regulation is often conducted through the means of contests over broad principles rather than specific policies, while that most cherished of scientific and professional values – transparency – has in recent years become globally institutionalized, not least as a crucial instrument for securing accountability (of regulator and regulated). Deliberation and forms of reciprocal and non-reciprocal adjustments, not least at international gatherings, enable levels of trust to develop that build forms of coordination, such as harmonization (strong) and mutual recognition (weaker) of standards, thus helping to bring about the convergence of regulatory arrangements across national and policy domains. A further effect is that modelling – observational learning with a symbolic content – has become the critical mechanism of diffusion in many policy areas and across many borders. Although transnational forms of regulatory governance often operate without the formal sanctions of legally backed national state regulation – for these generally are not available – soft regulation nonetheless can be remarkably effective. Processes of dialogue and persuasion – deliberative democracy and authority – help to redefine interests and promote a sense of interdependency and normative commitment through conversation, thus generating instincts for compliance, which become encapsulated in organizational routines and standard operating procedures. Codes, frameworks, principles of good practice and similar exhortatory and advisory instruments enable a globalization of practices that does not rest on the power of enforcement capacities. Rather, peer esteem, ‘good behaviour’ and informal praise and shame, within a context nonetheless of international competitiveness and often following periodic national evaluations by bodies such as the OECD, IMF and World Bank, are sufficient for both compliance and convergence. The growing systems of transnational governance are marked more by reciprocity (or, to refer to Braithwaite and Drahos, at least by non-reciprocal agreement) than by coercion and threats of punishment.

ORGANIZATIONS IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE Two forms of organization appear to be significant in global governance. These are standardizers and meta-organizations. Ahrne and Brunsson (2006), for example, suggest that hardly any part of social life is without

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standards and those (standardizers) that promote them (such as the OECD). In the modern world, where individual human rights notions and models of universal justice appear often to be stronger than the rights of national citizenship, many standards are directed at organizations and people regardless of their nationality. In this sense too, standards become global. Although often not binding, standards (especially from globally respected bodies such as the OECD and the UN) have a deep impact. Standards-keeping is frequently a means by which individuals and organizations constitute their identities as ethically sound or particularly effective. As with notions such as scientific universalism, the growth of individual social identity, the spread of concepts of individual rights and responsibilities, and perhaps the diffusion of marketization practices and arrangements based on the supremacy of individual choice and decisionmaking, standards appear based on general knowledge and categories, and on the assumption that all individual agents are in a position to follow them. The ability to invoke scientific knowledge with credibility is a particularly potent resource for standard-setters and reinforces authority. Ideally, of course, successful standardizers are able to have their standards accepted as normatively appropriate, as internalized, and as followed almost unreflectively. Perhaps the most notable example of international standard-setting by a private body is that of the International Accountancy Standards Board (IASB), which is driving a worldwide convergence of such standards. The east Asian economic crisis of 1997 persuaded a number of influential bodies, such as the World Bank and securities regulators, that common accounting and auditing standards were necessary for both investor protection and increased transparency and commonality in gauging the state of company accounts globally. This task has become the responsibility of the IASB, which, despite the public importance of its activities, is a private body composed of, and funded by, companies, stock exchanges and central banks, and with the ‘big four’ accountancy firms providing a substantial component of its revenue. The IASB is governed by a board of trustees that emphasize its independence and it is not directly accountable to governments. Inevitably, a number of governments periodically have expressed concern at the lack of representativeness and popular responsiveness of the IASB. National government-endorsed regulators, such as the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) in the UK, are effectively enforcers of standards (set by the IASB) rather than formulators. Nonetheless, despite the lack of its formal sanctioning power and reliance on the standing of its expertise and objectivity, the authority of the IASB also has benefited enormously from the support of governmental bodies, such as the EU, in insisting on the use and application of IASB standards as part


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of the regulation and opening up of EU-wide markets. Since 2005 it has become mandatory for International Accountancy Standards to be used for the consolidated accounts of publicly traded companies in the EU. As in many sectors, private and public authority has become conjoined in a common regulatory enterprise. A further key organizational component of global governance, alongside standardizers, is the meta-organization, where members are organizations themselves, such as the ICN grouping of competition regulators discussed above. Meta-organizations are regarded by Ahrne and Brunsson (2006) as crucial building blocks for the global order, in part because members are also organizations and are generally enrolled on the basis of their like-mindedness and common interests. Consequently memberships usually display high levels of durability. They help to establish a basis of transnational order for members, and make easier the processes of interaction and communication between organizations throughout a particular sector. They thus help to constitute a compartmentalized global order and as such are distinguishable from the individual membership and all-functioning characteristics of nation-states. In recent decades, especially in the fields of education, research and development, transnational meta-organizations have significantly expanded in number. Because such bodies rely on consensual decisionmaking in order to retain members and to display respect for their members’ autonomy as organizations in their own right, meta-organizations help to diffuse soft rules of governance globally. Peer pressure is a crucial mechanism in processes of regulatory governance where private actors predominate and in global arenas where the traditional liberal democratic model of clear lines of command and therefore accountability is not available. Consequently international organizations these days must act with considerable circumspection, reasonableness and suppleness if they wish to construct agreements with both states and private agents. The European Union, for example, has in recent years extended its Open Method of Coordination (OMC) for achieving policy and standards convergence among member states, based on softer processes of benchmarking and peer evaluation than traditional command-and-control procedures. There is no obligation on member states to follow specific policies where the OMC operates, although there is a commitment to ‘opening up’ their practices in a transparent way that enables outside examination and evaluation. Inevitably, softer forms of regulatory constraint, such as benchmarking and comparison, allow greater scope for local interpretation to suit specific national and institutional contexts than do more hierarchical command forms from the centre. They may even allow for greater evasion or for the adroit dressing-up of existing policies in ways that match the new dispensations and guidelines without

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changing much. But the overall focus is on whether overall Community aims, for example, have been met, perhaps in a variety of ways, rather than whether compliance with a strict rule has followed. The Bologna Declaration and its subsequent progress in European higher education may be regarded as an example of the voluntary but apparently quite compelling processes of benchmarking, standards-setting and performance comparison that is typical of the OMC. Generally the result of such approaches tends to be high levels of external auditing, comparison of performances, league tables and rankings. Member states – although key national regulators themselves – are also thus subject to regulation. Regulation globally tends to be multi-levelled and interpenetrative, and many organizations are both regulators and regulated. We have many examples of ‘regulated regulators’ (Jacobsson 2006), and states are nested, or ‘embedded’, within fields of both formal and less formal ideas, practices and rules. But, as we have noted above, alongside transnationalism sits nationalism. Internationalism, operating through a whole series of countervailing constraints on nations, also stimulates nation-building and the sense of being an important actor with recognizable features and interests. Being a rule-follower and accepting limits on autonomy do not necessarily debilitate the nation as an organizational entity but may provide the scripts and the cultural meanings that bring the notion of the nation-state very much alive. Nor are approaches such as the OMC necessarily examples of starryeyed naivety. They are often politically sensible. The description of rules as non-law appears less undemocratic and less authoritarian than otherwise, thus enabling pressure for compliance to be exerted all the more effectively. It is likely, too, that national recalcitrants may take more account of the actual achievement of their peers than of top-down fiats on standards from politicians and bureaucrats. Moreover, in time, what starts as soft law is capable of being turned by degrees into hard law (such as through linking soft rules to conditions in international loan agreements granted to developing countries in economic difficulties, by organizations such as the IMF and the WB). Nonetheless, soft regulation carries particular types of risk as well, especially in inter-governmental and supranational organizations. Real power may accrue to behind-the-scenes officials and private lobbyists. These insiders lack the democratic scrutiny and accountability of the politicians. Politicians have formal responsibility for policies and outcomes but may be less than involved in actual decisionmaking (Morth 2006). The growth of transnational organizations should not, however, be assumed to imply a globalization in every function. Morgan (2006), in a study of the increasing transnationalism of law firms but in a case that


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could be a useful point of reference for analysing the increasing globalization of universities, uses the case of competition regulation and the involvement of law firms in its diffusion worldwide, to distinguish their level of transnationalism as actors, institutions and spaces respectively. Law firms, in most countries until recent years, primarily have been local and have dealt with domestic clients. The growth of transnational corporations, however, has begun to change this preoccupation, not least as such companies, in pursuit of mergers and acquisitions overseas, have sought legal advice on competition and other regulatory issues that are increasingly subject to cross-border jurisdictions. At one level, as law firms deal increasingly with global clients and foreign regulatory practices by establishing offices abroad, they become transnational social spaces as organizations, within which flow people, ideas, products and intelligence across territorial borders. Yet law as a professional service, in comparison with, say, accountancy, is quite nationally rooted in terms of its knowledge base and its application. Consequently, the transnationalization of law companies as social spaces is also characterized by diverse national interests and fragility in its partnership model of governance rather than the creation of a common identity. Large US law firms especially – with anti-trust partners often with close connections to government, the judiciary and the universities in their domestic domain – often continue to act like national firms promoting their causes through transnational space, rather than acting as international actors. Often, as in the case of US legal interactions with the EU as competition regulator, for example, this may lead to conflict with emerging transnational institutions. As a result, it is important to take full account of the differing dimensions of transnationalism for organizational actors to avoid exaggerating the extent of change and to provide greater analytical distinctions for aiding empirical enquiry. In a similar vein in discussing the role of central bankers as an autonomous and self-governing knowledge community across the globe, Marcussen (2006) distinguishes between the network respectively as a group of actors, as connected meeting places, and as a producer of public policy. Not only do central bankers share a similar social and educational background, but the meeting places of central governors have become more formal and better organized (although intense informal discussions still occur), and also more globalized and diverse. Consequently, the group is able to operate authoritatively to produce standards that generally become adopted with the force of law (such as the acceptance by the EU of the so-called Basel accords on capital holdings’ adequacy). A successful characteristic of central banker global organization is the achievement of ‘scientific’ and ‘research’ status. Marcussen notes that such

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banks are regarded as ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘political’ organizations, and that central bankers tend to emphasize their neutrality and objectivity (in line with their increasing independence as national organizations, particularly over the setting of interest rates). In some cases, central bankers undertake the role of scientists and contribute to science journals, often citing their academic qualifications and backgrounds. In this sense, university leaders appear to possess many of the same attributes of objective knowledge and expertise as the central bankers. Yet the heart of central banker organization is more tightly interconnected and coherent than that found in, for example, most gatherings of university presidents.

KEY PROCESSES Although we have described the emerging world of transnational governance as characterized by soft rules and regulation – frameworks, advice, voluntarism and dialogue – it is often associated with heavy resources investment in auditing, comparison and coordination. Moreover, regulatory approaches of all kinds are essentially contestable (Hood 1998), and therefore potentially precarious, as well as generally deployed within a mosaic or hybrid of regulatory instruments. Consequently, the adoption of soft rules may be regarded as a first, politically adroit step towards envisaged harder, law-based sanctioning to follow later, although this is difficult transnationally. Alternatively, self-regulatory arrangements may be more beefed up with a host of soft rules, such as codes and more explicit frameworks, than hitherto in order to forestall the possibility of fiercer, state-backed external regulation later. In higher education, at least in the UK, there has been a major predisposition to try such forms in preference to more immediately legalistic interventions. In the field of transnational governance, nonetheless, especially in the absence of a world government of the kind found in nation-states, there may be stronger structural reasons why softer forms of regulation are likely to have more durability than in the national realm. Moreover, contemporary regulatory scholarship and approaches are increasingly sophisticated and converging towards views that command-and-control approaches work less well in the context of modern social complexity and educated populaces, and this is affecting national regulation too. The emphasis so far in our presentation has been on broadly dialogic processes, generating models or global blueprints that are voluntary but adopted broadly worldwide, and that culture, values and meaning play stronger roles in transnational governance than power, interests and the playing out of realism. Yet, as we noted in Chapter 1, it is important not


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to overlook the asymmetrical capacities of actors to determine the opportunities of others, and the need to avoid submerging analyses of power relationships within wider ‘non-political’ notions of technocratic-based governance where the focus is on ‘coordination’ and the solving of collective action problems. Not all nations are equal. Braithwaite and Drahos (2000) found the USA pre-eminent in its influence over global trade negotiations, in part to do with its regulatory expertise and technical resources, but also because it was able to use access to its large domestic market as a key bargaining tool in getting its own way. Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson (2006) also suggest that the US benefits from what they term ‘first-mover advantage’ and that the transnational regulatory explosion is an ‘Americanization’, and that American actors and blueprints are the most powerful agents in such processes. The critical institutional forces and essential overarching rules in transnational governing processes reflect the strength of influence and power of US organizations and networks. In part this stems historically from the immediate post-Second World War era and the role of the US in the construction of the major global agencies, such as the WB, IMF, OECD, UN and GATT/ WTO that have been key capstones for emerging global governance in subsequent decades. Consequently, US actors have regulatory processes and their understanding built into their DNAs and thus they have an advantage in the key first-mover steps in international regulatory architecture design that frequently reflect many of their key institutional beliefs. Nonetheless, in the case of higher education, the US federal government has a relatively low level of interest and responsibility for the sector in comparison with nation-states elsewhere, and this may limit its influence in inter-governmental forums. Nonetheless, as a source of emulation, the influence of the US system of higher education globally is very high.

TRANSNATIONAL REGULATORY LEGITIMACY An issue for both non-state and transnational forms of regulatory governance, in comparison with more directly national governmental types, concerns legitimacy and accountability in the absence of electoral mandates. Transnational non-state regulators, such as the International Accountancy Standards Board or the Fair Trade Labelling Organization, particularly face difficulties in establishing their authority and democratic credentials, and this increases the more detached are such bodies from state actors. As we have stated earlier, there is no system of world government or related constitutional and juridical processes that allow traditional notions of democratic accountability and legitimacy to operate, and

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no real delineation of a body of electors or similar for such bodies to be responsive to. Moreover, it is doubtful that levels of internal democracy, high responsiveness to those communities under their influence, or even close ‘principal–agent’ relations with elected politicians are sufficient tests of democratic accountability when so many of these regulatory organizations increasingly undertake key policy functions that are largely hidden from the public gaze. Nonetheless, given the role of transnational and non-state agents in effecting key policymaking on the basis of altering behaviours in others, it is clearly necessary that such entities are able to justify their right to function as they do and to have such claims taken seriously by those over whom they regulate. An important step forward in these debates has been taken by Black (2008). She suggests that issues of legitimacy and accountability be treated as empirical rather than normative matters. That is, transnational and non-state coordinators are legitimate if the people over whom they exercise authority regard them as such, rather than it being an issue of legal validity. Thus, ‘legitimacy rests upon the acceptability and credibility of the organization to those it seeks to govern’ (Black 2008:144). Reasons for such acceptance tend to follow from three main sources: legitimacy may be pragmatic and based on a perceived congruence of interests between the regulator and those being regulated; it may be based on values, in that the goals and procedures of the transnational or private governor are regarded as morally appropriate; and, thirdly, it may be cognitively based in that the regulator is seen as necessary or inevitable. Legitimacy, of course, is afforded to an organization on the basis of clearly specified roles, and if such roles change or exceed original designs then legitimacy may be withheld. For example, an extension of activity to wider political matters by a non-governmental organization from a narrower functional area of concern may result in lessened acceptability by key communities towards whom it bases at least part of its claims for authority (which is particularly important for bodies without the legitimacy and authority of the state). Nonetheless, not all accountability claims by those being regulated, and who provide the critical source of organizational legitimacy, can always be met, not least as stakeholders may hold contrary positions and interests that defy community and thus regulatory consensus. A critical task for transnational non-state standards-setters especially is recognizing the importance and priorities for it from a welter of community demands in order to ensure its effectiveness and perhaps even its survival as an organization. The rise of global legal pluralism, particularly informal and generally quite autonomous rule-making at the worldwide level without the guiding supervision of a state, provides significant challenges to well-established


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constitutional notions of law-making. Regulatory authority is often assumed by groups without formal delegation from any sovereign or wider democratic powers – it effectively is self-authorized and self-organized – generally with limited transparency and public accountability. Moreover, globalization facilitates the cross-border jurisdictional travel of legal norms and concepts, in part as a result of the modelling and ‘scripting’ activities of law academics and entrepreneurial legal practitioners, thus debilitating notions of law’s state-centric functions (Herberg 2007). In higher education these issues may be less pressing than in some other domains, not least as much transnational regulatory governance and standards-setting is inter-governmental and thus attracts reasonable levels of conventional democratic legitimacy. Yet, as we shall see in the following chapters, inter-governmental entities concerned with education increasingly enrol non-state organizations within their regulatory regimes, such as league-table compilers and their rankings of universities, and private experts and knowledge-brokers at, for example, OECD forums. Consequently, issues of legitimacy and accountability for non-state actors are likely to loom larger in the years ahead in the global governance of universities. It is clear that the conventional electoral, constitutional and juridical processes associated with liberal electoral democracy within the nation-state will not easily suffice. Rather, in transnational and non-state contexts especially, legitimacy and accountability may best be regarded as sociologically rather than legally based. Levels of legitimacy are thus best gauged by tests of acceptability by those groups over whom regulation and governance are being exercised.

CONCLUSION: A WORLD OF STANDARDS Increasingly we live in a world of standards, of recipes and of specifications of social norms, of ‘pieces of general advice offered to large numbers of potential adopters’ (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000:2) and which form key mechanisms for global regulation and ordering. Predominantly most are privately constructed, voluntary and non-hierarchical, and current processes of individualization and globalization promote their formulation and take-up as ‘standards facilitate contact, co-operation and trade over large areas and even throughout the world’ (Brunsson 2000: 21). Moreover, in comparison with more formal external and sanctions-based sources of authority, such as mandatory directives, standards appeal to the growing individualization of contemporary society and the rise of autonomous and self-directing organizations. Standards help to make markets and have been widely promulgated by the

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single-market policies of the EU, for example, and appear particularly relevant for pan-national regulatory bodies (although in some cases they may be adopted as protectionist devices against new market entrants or other competitors). Although a number of organizations describe themselves as standardizers (such as the British Standards Institute or the International Organization for Standardization), organizations of many sorts issue standards, such as the OECD and UNESCO in the field of cross-border education. Processes of standardization generate similarity amongst people and organizations scattered around the world, and frequently are framed in terms of procedures and processes that are claimed to provide certain outcomes, such as quality, or health and safety. But generally standards need to be persuasive and knowledgeable (‘best practice’), as they often rely on nonstate or non-mandatory compliance for adoption, are constructed at a distance from the organizations concerned, and thus tend to have to be rooted in the assumptions and values of those they seek to influence (such as with university league tables produced by media and other private companies). Although ‘scientific’, however, some standards may undermine professional knowledge by positing universalistic procedures and processes at variance with the more local diagnoses and practices of, say, doctors and academics. Consequently, it is not unusual to find that in occupations that are strongly professionalized, such as law and healthcare, standardization tends to run into very strong headwinds and often makes little progress from practitioners. Nonetheless, at the global level, standards tend to increase with globalization in the absence of strong formal organization at that level, including in sectors that remain quite strongly professionalized nationally. Moreover, private standards are increasingly harmonized globally, by international gatherings of standards bodies or by exporting standards to foreign markets through the compelling use of market power by strong nations or transnational organizations. Increasingly they are constitutionalized as a form of global law and governance, collapsing the distinction between legal and social norms. Both national and transnational governmental bodies also seem increasingly willing to delegate the detail of standards-setting to private bodies, including under treaty and other transnational governmental agreements (Schepel 2005). Nonetheless, rarely do we find wholly private processes in standards-setting, and national public authorities play important, if more high-level and authorizing, roles than before. In higher education, global standards are formulated by intergovernmental as well as by private bodies. In the case of the OECD and the European Bologna Process, for example, we see signs too of emerging central bureaucratic influence in comparative analysis and standardsetting, and in the next chapter we examine these processes in more detail.

4.

Transnational governance in higher education systems: Europe and the OECD

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we examine two examples of transnational regulatory governance in higher education, both of which contain a strong intergovernmental element but which also have broadened to include wider non-governmental individuals and organizations. One refers to the process of convergence across much of Europe to create a common structure of degrees, quality assurance and qualifications through the Bologna Process that was initiated by ministers through the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations of 1998 and 1999 respectively. The other example is an international organization – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – and we analyse it as a key influence in promulgating authoritative ideas and blueprints for transnational university governance, and as an important gatherer and publisher of data on national comparative performances. Three particular themes are explored in both cases: the way in which transnational regulatory and other policies reflect wider ‘world society’ models of the desired characteristics for contemporary university systems; the extent to which apparent structural harmonization and convergence in higher education architectures across territorial borders mask important variations in interpretation and application at national levels; and, finally, the increasing role of the supranational level, especially that of the permanent bureaucracy of international organizations, and the use of ‘soft law’ and voluntarism rather than hard-lined compulsion, for achieving ‘steerage’ of higher educational systems. The growing influence of the permanent officials in our two cases – the European Commission and the Department of Education Secretariat at the OECD respectively – suggest the importance of managerial and ‘expert’ power, and similar administrative resources, in providing levels of international organizational autonomy away from strictly inter-governmental policy determination and supervision. On the first point, we have outlined in the previous chapters how 101

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higher education systems around the world are increasingly influenced by a common view of the university as a highly important institution for knowledge-based economies and for nations’ wider social wellbeing. The corollary is that they should be accessible, autonomous (but accountable), diverse, and delivering economic requirements for innovation and for a skilled and adaptable workforce. Older notions of the university as necessarily isolated from wider humanity for the pursuit of truth – conveying a monastic, inward and rather ‘secret garden’ enclave for the development of self-contained canons of knowledge for their own sake – and for entrance to undergraduate studies limited to the relatively small number of students thought capable of higher-level work have generally disappeared in worldwide policy discourse. In large part, contemporary ideas of the socially relevant and accessible university are indicative of processes of emulation and policy learning from the USA, where such attributes of its higher education system are regarded as substantially contributing to its overall excellence and diversity. That is, the position of the USA as the leading knowledgebased and innovative economy in the world is regarded by policy analysts elsewhere as at least in part attributable to the US higher education system. Nonetheless, the federal US government is relatively inactive in worldwide inter-governmental higher education arenas, reflecting its smaller role in university funding and regulation compared to that played by central government counterparts in Europe and other parts of the globe. As we noted in the last chapter, it is not easy to infer that the strong global influence of the US education system is down to the impact of power relations exercised politically abroad as opposed to the normative attraction to significant actors in other countries of its postsecondary models. Ramirez (2006:241–2) notes that, for European universities, the European Bologna Declaration expresses ‘a common logic of mass higher education’ and that this emerged earlier in the USA. This logic reflects ‘universalistic models of progress and justice that transcend the national ecologies of universities’. Douglass (2006) also asserts close similarities between the Bologna model and the US system, not least in provision for wider credit accumulation and transfer between institutions. These transnational features, in this view, are linked to wider ‘world society’ developments, such as the modern esteem in which the values of science and rationality are held, the increasing triumph of democratic notions of individual rights, participation and choice (including access to the means of human development), and the key moral precepts of progress and social justice. As we observed in the last chapter, many of these influences emerge and are reinforced normatively by ‘soft law’, and by instruments such as voluntary codes of good practice issued by international organizations such as UNESCO and the OECD. They also stem from the beliefs

Transnational governance in higher education systems

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of accrediting and quality assurance bodies, and the criteria underpinning rankings found in league tables – often private and media-generated – and similar comparisons of universities. The outcome is a process of standardization in the world as universities seek both organizational autonomy and legitimacy through isomorphic conformity to the perceived characteristics of the modern university. Increasingly these aims are justified by processes based more on meritocracy and standards of multiculturalism than older authorizations emanating from religion and social elites. These dominant ideas are as much the outcome of emerging patterns in world culture as they are the results of conflicting interests and formal authority relationships within inter-governmental decisionmaking, or as somehow the ‘unforeseen’ consequence of the playing out of the market forces to which universities are increasingly subject. Nonetheless, international policy discourses and organizations help to constitute and diffuse the model of the modern university globally. The Bologna Process, for example, now adopted by 46 European countries to help harmonize national higher education systems and to make them more attractive worldwide, has helped to materialize the universal idea of the contemporary university. The Bologna Process, while extolling diversity (based on ‘institutional autonomy, academic freedom, equal opportunities and democratic principles’, according to a 2007 statement following one of its two-yearly meetings in London), also demands consistency within the national higher education systems of the Bologna signatories in order to achieve a single European Higher Education Area by 2010. The stimulus is global competition from countries such as the USA, China and Australia, not least for high-performing students and researchers, and for an increasing share of the profitable international student fees’ markets. A key objective consequently is the promotion of this more integrated European system worldwide, based on the perceived global attractions of a system of comparable degrees, a uniform structure of degrees, greater student mobility based on a European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), a European-wide Qualifications Framework, a Diploma Supplement document providing a full context and description of the studies completed by graduates, and enhanced cooperation in quality assurance through a network of registered national quality agencies.

BOLOGNA a)

Origins

For long the activism of the supranational EU secretariat, the European Commission (EC), in higher education (and non-vocational education

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generally) has been restricted by the ‘subsidiarity principle’ which, under Treaty law, allocates education ‘competences’ to the national member states and not to the EC. There are exceptions, such as qualifications’ recognition which generally operates under UNESCO Convention guidelines and with the European region arrangements and the role of the EC formalized by the Lisbon Convention of 1997. Initiatives for the EC to stimulate and fund student mobility and cooperation between the national states have also been permitted, and these have grown steadily since their introduction in the 1970s. Initially the focus for the mobility initiatives was on academic departments and their students through the first ERASMUS programme, but subsequent extensions and a new SOCRATES scheme have seen the emphasis move to curriculum matters, and also to agreements being concluded institutionally rather than scattered throughout the departments of a university. These programmes have expanded further with the admissions of the new members that have followed enlargements of the EU in the last decade or so, notably the ex-communist states of central and east Europe. The objective essentially has been on encouraging European citizen identity and cohesion through the promotion of scholarly exchanges, and the fostering of collaborative learning. However, academic staff international mobility appears to remain fairly limited and subject to considerable inflexibility and opaqueness in national schemes on matters such as pensions, professional qualifications and working visas (OECD 2008). However, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and its commitment to the single European market particularly reinforced the view that higher education has an important economic role to play in such an endeavour, particularly in the context of growing global economic competitiveness (Marginson and van der Wende 2007). Universities, and the ways in which they are constituted and governed, are considered to be important factors in the ability of territories to respond successfully to the challenges of globalization in an increasingly knowledge-based age where innovation provides important comparative economic advantage. Moreover, although member states have long protectively guarded their national responsibilities for education policy, particularly from wider supranational policymaking at the European level as exercised through the EC, during the turn into the current century there has been greater acceptance by the national states of the involvement of supranational resources in driving multilateralism forward. As we shall see, this is particularly apparent in the Bologna Process and the increased role of the EC within it. For some time Continental higher education systems particularly – less so the UK – have been regarded by policymakers as displaying key deficiencies that restrict their social and economic effectiveness, resulting in


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the loss of many high-flying students and researchers to the USA. These factors include outmoded and elongated degree structures that encourage students to defer entry to the labour market until quite a late age, and also the lack of institutional mission diversity, as all institutions generally seek to turn out research-trained graduates, producing a rather drab uniformity overall. That is, these institutions are thought to have become ill-suited to responding to the increasing specialization of labour market needs found across all advanced economies. Their features are believed not to match the more complex social reality of the modern world, unlike institutions in the USA, where focus is on particular strengths and markets. That is, European universities do not generate quality or particular social and economic relevance through differentiated missions. For example, the argument often runs, there are close to 2000 universities operating in the EU, nearly all of which seek to undertake research and expand postgraduate degrees. In comparison, fewer than 250 US universities award postgraduate degrees and fewer than 100 are recognized as research-intensive. Yet world-class research centres across Continental Europe are thin on the ground in comparison to the USA, and against some other countries such as key emerging Asian societies (as recent global league tables have shown). Many of Europe’s best academics work in the USA, and the prospects of this brain drain being reversed soon appear slim. In contemporary European (and wider) policy discourses Continental universities thus appear to lack the intellectual and entrepreneurial cultures of their US counterparts and consequently appear to contribute to low economic performances. A lack of institutional autonomy in comparison with the USA, and increasingly with other successful ‘exporting’ countries in cross-border tertiary education, such as Australia, has come to be recognized in EU (and OECD) quarters as a major issue that requires reform. Although the Bologna Process does not explicitly seek increased institutional autonomy for universities, it recognizes that greater competitiveness globally between higher education systems, reinforced by rising student and staff choice and mobility, requires more active and self-responsible organizations in the higher education sectors in order to make European higher education overall more attractive on the world stage. Displaying some form of common system designs across Europe is regarded as both constructing an attractive ‘brand’ to the rest of the world and easing difficulties in cross-border movement within Europe. As we shall see, Bologna seeks both to reform and to standardize the various national higher education systems, recognizing that curriculum reform is particularly essential. A key objective is to construct more comparative and more transnationally ‘readable’ degrees, based on a common three-cycle of bachelor, then master’s and finally doctorate degrees. This

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allows students and employers to recognize the worth of undergraduate degrees as a legitimate end-point qualification without the necessity to complete further years on research-based postgraduate studies. Some student unions, however, object that Bologna is focused too much on turning out business employees rather than on wider citizen roles, and that the new cycle of degrees devalues the bachelor degree and makes it more difficult to combine work and study. Moreover, while in the UK it is a common practice that progress from first to subsequent qualifications’ cycles is based upon application and selection, in some other European countries student progress appears more continuous and thus effectively undermines the idea of distinctive cycles (HEPI 2008). The Bologna Process started as a national initiative prompted by French concern that the deep problems in its higher education system required a European solution, and by France then persuading the ministers of education in Germany, Italy and the UK that such regionalism would help their countries also. The Bologna Declaration commits the signatories to reforming their national systems according to the key objectives that have been formulated in order to make the European ‘higher education space’ globally attractive to research and student talent from elsewhere (Balzer and Rusconi 2007:66). b)

Progress

‘Bologna’ comprises a number of critical texts: the initial Sorbonne Declaration by the four ministers of education of France, Germany, Italy and the UK at the celebrations to mark the 800 years of the Sorbonne University in 1998, which called for the harmonization of degree structures across Europe; the Bologna Declaration the following year signed by 29 European ministers; and the subsequent two-yearly texts agreed at the follow-up meetings in Prague (2001), Berlin (2003), Bergen (2005) and London (2007). The Process is supervised by the respective education ministries, whose aim is to steer and guide the Bologna development and to ensure effective substantiation, and also to gather the support of the various higher education institutions. By May 2007 the original country signatories had stretched to number 46. The Bologna Process is a voluntary, non-binding inter-governmental agreement to collaborate in order to secure the harmonization of the higher education systems of the varying European nations, and lies outside the formal EU institutional framework. (A number of the signatories are not members of the EU.) It operates through the issuance of texts and similar communications, especially following regular two-yearly ministerial meetings, and relies on benchmarking and comparative peer pressure


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– the open method of coordination – to achieve its ends. In this sense it may be characterized as an example of transnational ‘soft law’. The Open Method of Coordination (OMC), a regulatory instrument in the EU that was notably enhanced by the (separate) Lisbon Summit Agreement of the European Council in 2000, aims at enhancing interaction between nationstates and identifying and spreading best practice in the search for more effective systems. Although the OMC had been deployed as a form of soft law for some time in other EU policy domains such as employment policy, Lisbon extended it to pensions, social exclusion and education issues. The purpose of the OMC is less the prescription of a harmonized, mutually recognized and law-like set of regulations issued by command from on high than a means of organizing learning processes to advance the exchange of experiences and best practices. The objective is to utilize mechanisms, such as mutual learning, comparison, and national sensitivities to rankings and emulation (peer pressure) in order to achieve a convergence of ends while allowing a diversity of national instruments for reaching these. Although the Bologna Process started as an inter-governmental initiative, steadily it has also encompassed university leaders, and faculty, student and business associations within its deliberations and consultations. It is the first time that such non-governmental bodies have associated with national and European-level institutions in constructing higher education policy at the regional level. Supranationally, too, the EC has become more involved with higher education reform, including that of Bologna, largely as a result of the adoption by the EU of the so-called Lisbon Agenda of 2000 that aims to transform the EU into the world’s most competitive and knowledge-based economy by 2010, and which regards the universities as a key motor of change. For example, the Commission subsequently has established a European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), conceived as a future rival to the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It consists of virtual ‘knowledge and innovation communities’ of universities, research organizations and businesses working in areas such as climate change, renewable energies, and information and communication technologies. It possesses a budget of around £250 million of public money for allocation between 2009 and 2013 (THE, 20 March 2008). Similarly a new Joint Technology Initiatives programme with around £2.5 billion of public monies has been established by the EU. This comprises ten-year public–private partnerships between the EU and industry that aim to further industrial research and wider European competitiveness (THE, 3 March 2008). Moreover, the EC has also become a more direct participant in the Bologna Process.

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Balzer and Rusconi (2007:58) suggest that the supranational EC was never really absent from the Bologna deliberations, despite the overtly intergovernmental and voluntary nature of the initial enterprise. Normatively, many of the ideas associated with Bologna had long been promoted by the EC but had foundered on the rocks of members’ insistence that education policymaking was their domain and not that of the EC. Nonetheless, the Commission, although formally outside the decisional arena, resourced most of the initial groundwork during the initial stages of Bologna, helped draft the Bologna Declaration, and has been included formally in the follow-up work and meetings since the ministerial meeting in Prague 2001. The EC has increasingly gained authority in education, and as a result the university sector has become more established as an arena of international policymaking. That is, the EC not only reflects and acts upon intergovernmental initiatives, but also takes a strong part in formulating plans and securing implementation within the Bologna Framework. In large part this reflects growing member recognition that the resources and ideas necessary to take Bologna forward – including the experience and ability to help forge common agreements through well-established institutional processes – lie within the EC bureaucracy and outside the rather disparate national abilities of the member countries. The EC has a clearer and more cohesive European sense than the individual states and backs this up with critical means of coordination. Although there has been no change in the formal Treaty principle of subsidiarity for educational responsibilities, the ‘Lisbon Agenda’, derived from the Council meeting of March 2000, has provided the EC with important legitimacy for involving itself in higher education issues, including offering pronouncements on preferred governance arrangements, and has helped to ‘mainstream’ the Bologna Process and the higher education policy domain generally within EU institutions (Balzer and Rusconi 2007: 63). Lisbon articulated the idea that ‘a Europe of knowledge’ was a vital instrument to securing leading economic competitiveness in the world for the Europeans and one that needed to be based on rising standards. Lisbon also emphasized the need for a European framework articulating the skills for lifelong learning and the necessity of creating a European Area of Research and Innovation, thus providing the EC with a mandate to turn these objectives into concrete reality. The Copenhagen Declaration of 2002, which sought a European area for vocational education and training until 2010, also issued from the Lisbon meeting. It complements the Bologna Declaration, with both processes seeking standardization through mutual trust, increased transparency, peer pressure, and benchmarking. Moreover, increasingly throughout the world, not just in Europe, higher education is expected to deliver vocational qualifications and not simply


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provide a further step in broad-based general education. This reinforces the internationalization of universities, as the need for the cross-border recognition of qualifications is regarded by policymakers as essential for globalized labour markets, as this reflects the ability to pursue a career and not simply another course of study. Universities are conscious too that demand for their courses depends on gaining international acceptance for the qualifications that they teach. c)

Aims

Bologna emphasizes the commonness and cohesion of Europeanization, and the threat posed by global competition in a more market-oriented age, when many European universities and colleges are hampered by inadequate investment (especially that derived from private resources in comparison with that of the USA, although overall levels of public funding are broadly the same), excessive periods of study to achieve qualifications, and lack of systemic diversity and institutional autonomy. The aim is to create a common European image as attractive to students and academics worldwide, particularly in comparison with the USA. Moreover, while changes to formal higher education architectures and processes – on degree structures, mobility opportunities, quality assurance, and qualifications’ recognition through a European Framework – are important, it is clear too that the underlying model of the desired university that is being advocated is in line with the rapidly diffusing global blueprint of the socially embedded, economically critical, quality-enhancing, diverse and autonomous organization. As a result the Bologna Process has been used by governments to sustain and extend the increasingly universalistic idea of the modern university as part of the reform of their own systems. The EC has sought to regularly communicate memorandums to members around the theme of ‘Modernising Universities’, in which it proposes stronger action at the European level to implement necessary reforms in higher education and research. It argues constantly for a move away from the ‘uniformity’ that it believes complicates cooperation at national and international levels on the basis of complementary institutional strengths, and which it argues prevents universities from diversifying and focusing on quality. In the Commission’s view also, the purpose of a single and globally competitive economic market in Europe is restricted by national regulations that hamper academic mobility for studying, research training or working in another country. There is limited transferability of student loans or grants, pension rights reduce the opportunities for faculty to work in other member states, and immigration laws can be restrictive, curricula inflexible and financial incentives insufficient (factors that also undermine

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progress on Bologna). Moreover, a continuing lack of institutional autonomy provides few incentives for the alliances with business, and other industrial liaisons, that widen private funding sources for universities and help to develop the applied research that globally competitive economies require. In the Commission’s view, more user-pays elements in student finances, such as through fees and loans, are likely to increase rather than depress mass access to higher education (EC 2003). A key EC argument is that research funds should be concentrated into fewer institutional hands to enable the achievement of bigger and better academic and business-relevant payoffs. Institutional diversity and increased autonomy are best achieved in this view by a reduction in state micro-management of universities. Rather, member states should ‘guide’ or ‘steer’ the university sector through high-level processes, such as frameworks of general rules, policy objectives, funding mechanisms, and incentives for education, research and innovation activities. In return, however, universities should be held more accountable – ‘to society at large’ – for what they deliver. The premise seeks to position European universities as fuller-blown organizations, with corporate structures and with professional managers that both internally govern and can be held externally accountable through processes of ‘meta-regulation’ – the ‘regulation of regulation’ whereby internal procedures are turned ‘inside out’ for evaluation rather than being subject to external modes of micro-inspection. Thus the Commission regularly invites the member states to relax their national regulatory frameworks so as to allow university leadership to undertake genuine change. But this is a call not for the withdrawal of the state but rather for a new allocation of tasks. The outcome is intended to be a much greater likelihood that higher education institutions will focus on strategic priorities. Corporate drive is viewed as necessarily overcoming departmental and disciplinary identities in generating high organizational performance, entrepreneurialism, and support for the nation’s workforce. Increasing the global competitiveness of European higher education systems is clearly a major Commission objective. In the context of lower birth rates and rising migration around the world, a particular requirement is identified as matching the international attraction of the USA for fee-paying international students and researchers. Moreover, the USA proportionately has a much bigger comparative advantage in attracting more foreign students at advanced levels in engineering, mathematics and informatics, and is successful in retaining more people with doctorate qualifications. Around 50 per cent of Europeans who obtained their qualifications in the USA generally stay on for several years, and some fail to return at all (European Commission 2005).


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HARMONIZATION, DIVERSITY AND NATIONAL VARIATION There is little doubt that a plan to harmonize the higher education systems of over 40 European countries is ambitious. The danger is that the desire for convergence results in outcomes that are adequate at the level of high formalization, and which ostensibly meet the ‘letter of the law’, but operate at such a point of abstraction as to be effectively meaningless on the ground. After all, countries vary significantly in cultures and structures, and these are manifested in higher education systems. Moreover, it may be too easy to overestimate the ability of education ministries to engage with a global or even European view (in comparison with the EC and the OECD secretariats), as such departments often do not rank highly in domestic pecking orders and a major concern is to ensure that global developments do not materially diminish their own responsibilities and national interests. Furthermore, as displayed with the WTO/GATS processes, trade ministers may have little contact or even much in common with education officials in many countries and this is reflected in agreements that they reach internationally and which are unlikely to reflect longer-term education strategies. These factors tend to produce distinctive ‘path trajectories’ for nations that imply significant national institutional differences in receptivity to the changes being produced by the Bologna Process and the development of wider global models. For example, the majority of UK graduates undertake second-cycle qualifications through a 12-month taught master’s degree aimed at enhancing employment prospects, while most other Bologna countries provide a two-year master’s with a strong emphasis on research. Despite the same nomenclature, such differences raise considerable issues of comparability, with the UK emphasizing learning outcomes in justifying relative shortness and other countries focusing more on the length of the period of study undertaken (HEPI 2008). Similarly, the undergraduate engineering degree in the UK is a four-year MEng, leading to a master’s qualification, and this significantly reduces the amount of study time experienced in comparison with Continental counterparts. An engineering student in the UK needs to put in 4800 so-called effort hours while, to achieve a comparable qualification in Germany, a student must study for a minimum of 8000 hours. No matter UK claims that student learning outcomes are equivalent, such major input differences raise considerable doubt as to the real equality of credits within the European credit-transfer system. Moreover, it is not clear whether the desire for European-wide coordination and architectural consistency in key arrangements is at odds with

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another important European aim, namely institutional diversity. Given that the Bologna Process is a voluntary, inter-governmental agreement committed to an ‘open method of coordination’ and an associated range of soft pressures such as benchmarking and peer pressure, it could be surmised that a raft of competing incentives influencing institutions and governments (such as those encouraging national competitive positioning for attracting international fee-paying students rather than European coordination) could easily undermine the Process before its planned conclusion by 2010. Nonetheless, progress towards structural convergence by the Bologna signatories is impressive. All signatories appear on course and, minimally, have all started the process of reform. In some cases where the five-year undergraduate degree predominated, such as Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany and Finland, this has necessitated major reform. The threetier higher education system – undergraduate, master’s and doctorate – is under construction, and the development of registered and approved quality assurance bodies is close to completion. A European Qualifications Framework is also close to fruition (every country must self-certify that its national qualification framework is compliant with that of Bologna), while credit transfer and student mobility problems have been eased, although considerable work is still required on qualifications recognition, both professional and academic. However, considerable scope for local interpretation remains, and the ‘Bologna imperative’ continues to be used by national governments as much for their own internal policy purposes as for wider European goals. Furthermore, countries have not been slow to ensure that particular ‘sacred cows’ are reinterpreted in terms of the Bologna Principles, rather than Bologna securing substantive changes to existing arrangements. In the UK, for example, two-year foundation and other (accelerated) degrees, along with one-year master’s programmes, have been deemed to be in accordance with the three-cycle structure, despite being overtly at variance in durations for study with those generally found elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, too, the three-cycle structure has been introduced as an addition to existing structures, rather than as a replacement for the older arrangements. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, a new two-cycle system has replaced the existing long first-cycle degree system virtually throughout, leading to an increased variety of bachelor programmes and the first construction of specific research master’s degrees. Nonetheless, the idea of a research-based education is sufficiently strong on the Continent to generate significant reluctance to see the three-year bachelor’s degree as a natural qualifications’ end-point. It is regarded more generally rather as the first steps to the master’s degree, where


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students generally do a research project and a thesis. Such views incline some countries towards constructing a fairly superficial division between the first two cycles to meet Bologna requirements, with students simply being selected to move on to master’s programmes in a virtually seamless manner after completion of their undergraduate degrees. The danger is that cosmetic changes will be undertaken to comply with the Process, but without securing the overall objectives. National higher education cultural differences also have emerged over the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) adopted by the Bologna signatories. Conventionally this has defined credits in the context of student contact hours and workloads, while in the UK and some other countries there has been an increasing movement away from such input factors to outputs defined as learning outcomes. Although ECTS is moving towards a similar interpretation, a number of countries continue to emphasize the importance of student workloads in determining credits, thus making international comparison and standardization that much more difficult. On the other hand, however, in the area of quality assurance there is considerable sign of greater convergence, in part as a consequence of the EC decision to create a new European body for quality assurance entities, the European Network for Quality Assurance (ENQA), in 2000. ENQA subsequently has developed a set of standards, procedures and guidelines for harmonizing quality assessment approaches, including for the ‘metaregulation’ of the different national quality assurance agencies themselves through the establishment of a European Register for Quality Assurance. These measures were adopted by ministers at the Bologna meeting in Bergen in 2005. The positions of national politicians can also hamper progress towards a full-blown and coherent European-wide system. In the UK, for example, the Select Committee on Education of Members of Parliament consistently has sought to ensure that the UK model for higher education is not necessarily diluted by Bologna developments (House of Commons, Select Committee on Education and Skills, Fourth Special Report 2007). While broadly in favour of the Process the parliamentarians interpret it broadly as a desire by countries on the other side of the English Channel to move closer to the British system. The Committee is encouraged in making its representations to the UK government along these lines by the accompanying view that the UK model is the one that is encouraged by wider international trends and organizations. For example, the Committee has urged a strong focus on the importance of institutional autonomy, whilst recognizing that the variability in university autonomy across the EU, and even more across the proposed European Higher Education Area, provides a major issue that needs resolution inter-governmentally. Moreover,

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the parliamentarians worry about the prospect of Bologna imposing standardization (interpreted as ‘uniformity’) across higher education systems, as opposed to comparability and compatibility. They are concerned that Bologna’s current voluntary and non-binding processes may turn into harder law-like and mandatory processes, eroding a key principle of national determination of education policy and a loss of powers from the national to the supranational levels of governance. Nonetheless, both the UK government and backbench Members of Parliament also recognize the benefits of Bologna in adding to the increasing mobility of high-level skills and labour and thus (it is assumed) increasing UK employment, productivity and growth. In these and other views the overall benefits flowing from Bologna predominantly are economic, and the Process is regarded as in close alignment with the objectives of the Lisbon Agenda. Nonetheless, the necessity of keeping the Bologna Process formally outside the legal frameworks of the EU for its success in achieving reform through non-binding and voluntary processes is frequently emphasized by a number of European governments. In part this reflects a perceived lack of clarity concerning the operation of the open method of coordination and its relationship to more traditional and regulatory lawlike Community processes for reaching agreements. Elsewhere, too, as we have noted, national variety still seems strong when it comes to implementing Bologna. In France, for example, government plans for universities to be granted more autonomy (through state delegation and contracting rather than allowing legal independence), and the right to charge tuition fees at levels substantially in advance of current modest rates, have been difficult to implement in the face of concerted opposition from students and staff. Nonetheless, by 2012 French universities will be given powers to spend their own budgets, recruit and decide remuneration levels for staff, and own property such as university buildings, functions previously discharged by the state. More broadly, in comparing six countries, Alesi et al. (2005) found that there was no unified logic to the system of new degree programmes. In each country, for example, different groups of subjects have been excluded from the new structure, and varying periods established for their introduction and length. Faculty staff also experience considerable difficulty in translating the learning outcomes found in qualifications frameworks and similar processes into meaningful objectives on the ground. Marginson and van der Wende (2007:46) note that, within the Bologna Process, ‘despite such achievements as the convergence of degree structures and the introduction of common frameworks for quality assurance and for qualifications, certain tensions between harmonisation and diversity have continued’. This applies not just to differences between countries


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but also to diversity within countries. As we have noted in previous chapters, higher education institutions are becoming more disembedded from the nation-state as they compete within more marketized and globalized environments, setting their own organizational goals, developing their own particular niches, and establishing their own curricular range. Rather than governments making any sort of effort at directing universities, not least globally, increasingly universities as self-regarding organizations are responding to an array of market forces and opportunities rather than simply to inter-governmental and similar initiatives. Moreover, institutional diversity is increasingly promoted nationally and internationally by policymakers as enhancing both quality and participation. In some cases, such as the UK, this has resulted in the formal distinction between university and major non-university providers of higher education (binary) being dismantled. For some, however, the Bologna Process and the creation of European Higher Education and Research Areas raise the issue of whether diversity is becoming a pan-European rather than national division-of-labour issue, and that specialization across the European ‘space’ rather than within particular countries is the key for improving quality to international standards of excellence. Such views are reinforced by the greater readability and comparability in national higher education systems produced by Bologna. Moreover, transnational institutional collaboration (and improving the global competitiveness of the European Higher Education Area) is regarded by policymakers as best achieved through alliances by universities bringing complementary resources and missions to such ventures and these may best be forged across territorial boundaries. (However, work on university alliances by Beerkens, 2007, suggests that university consortia are quite poor in developing synergistic business-like collaborations.) Nonetheless, the more ardent supporters of Bologna and the idea of European higher education integration argue that it is at the European level that the apparently competing drives for standardization of national higher systems and institutional autonomy and diversity are best reconciled. Marginson and van der Wende (2007:48) suggest that future directions for pan-European diversity are not easy to predict. One scenario envisages a ‘centrally organised diversity’, the transparency of which would flow from the imperatives associated with the Bologna Process and which would be fundamentally underpinned by a single European quality assurance and accreditation system. Another vision sees Bologna as establishing an overarching standardization of coordination and regulatory governance but within which a variety of institutional purposes are able to flourish. As with other sector markets, in this view re-regulation at the

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European regional level is essential for the full realization of transnational marketization and competitiveness. A further model would be more anarchic, with institutions going their own way in securing their organizational futures and with no, or with very ‘light-touch’, regulatory provision. However, not only would this raise public and reputational concerns over quality, but it is clear from policy scholarship more widely that markets and the public interest are both constituted and secured though regulatory frameworks – markets and regulation tend to go together – and higher education could hardly do without some – and probably rising – metaregulatory provision to protect a wider public interest. Nonetheless, it is likely that national higher education systems and institutions increasingly will become evaluated by more transnational agencies (governmentally, and non-governmentally through, for example, newspaper and similar rankings and comparisons) in the context of the increasing globalization of the knowledge-based economy. One outcome may be an increase in national differentiation vertically with respect to quality and reputation, and an emphasis, especially for the research-based universities, on collaboration through global horizontal alliances based on reputational equivalency across borders. For example, European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands – and other governments around the globe – have embarked on investing proportionately great resources in selected institutions of research excellence in order to establish an echelon of ‘world-class universities’ capable of participating in high-value transnational alliances and networks.

BOLOGNA EMULATION GLOBALLY The Bologna Process is influencing other regions and countries, such as Latin America, North Africa and Australia. There is competitive concern outside Europe that convergence on degree structures, quality assurance, credit transfer and recognition mechanisms increasingly will favour European higher education in the global international student market and in the worldwide scramble for the best research talent. We have noted that a key aim of the Bologna Process is to increase the global attractiveness of European higher education through processes of structural and other standardization, not least in competition with the USA for the best research talent and for cross-border students. Adelman (2008) argues that the Bologna model may become globally dominant over the next two decades and that the USA has many valuable lessons to learn from it, not least concerning quality assurance, qualifications frameworks and notions of formalized learning outcomes.


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Inevitably perhaps, other regions and countries have reacted to the challenge posed to their own higher education systems by examining whether the Bologna model, or something similar, could work for them also. The body for ‘University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific’ (UMAP), for example, is introducing a credit transfer scheme across territorial borders along the lines of the Bologna ECTS. China has indicated a strong interest in using the Bologna blueprint as an instrument for reforming its higher education system, while Australia, concerned at the prospect of losing a sizeable share of the international student market to European universities, has also considered realigning its system with Bologna (a considerable number of international students entering Australian universities come from Europe, while the large component drawn from China and elsewhere in Asia could diminish if those countries also adopted the Bologna model). The Diploma Supplement is also being introduced in Australia. The University of New South Wales (UNSW), for example, is one of 14 reported Australian universities that has introduced an ‘education passport’ – a supplementary statement reporting both students’ academic achievements and key attributes such as leadership, teamwork and communication skills. It is designed to comply with the Bologna standard to promote the portability of qualifications across the European countries with the aim of making it easier for graduates to find places in universities abroad. Moreover, such statements also verify whether graduates satisfy professional accreditation requirements for entry into a profession such as accounting or engineering in Australia. The University of Melbourne, too, has introduced a model of a broad-based undergraduate curriculum that is consistent not only with the Bologna benchmarks but also with the pattern found generally in the USA. Regionally there are further signs of wider Asia Pacific collaboration in responding to Bologna, particularly through the so-called Brisbane Group, established following an inaugural meeting of ministers and senior government officials in Brisbane, Australia in April 2006. Attended by 27 countries, the meeting produced the Brisbane Communiqué (rather like those issued after the regular two-yearly Bologna ministerial meetings), in which they agreed to collaborate in the development of: 1. 2. 3. 4.

quality assurance frameworks for the region linked to international standards, including courses delivered on-line; recognition of educational and professional qualifications; common competency-based standards for teachers, particularly in science and mathematics; and common recognition of technical skills across the region in order to better meet the overall skill needs of the economic base of the region.

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The ministers also established a senior officials’ Working Group to consider progress and to report regularly to meetings of ministers, focusing on how these countries may work together to raise quality, create common points of reference in education frameworks, and enable much greater ease of movement across borders for the purposes of study, research and employment. Interestingly, in the context of growing multilateralism in higher education and consequent processes of standardization, the first meeting of the Working Group received presentations from UNESCO and other international bodies on work currently underway in transnational forums to raise education quality. Additionally, a representative of the Bologna reforms also gave a presentation to the Group on the advantages of multilateral action on education, and on practical ways to facilitate multilateral cooperation (Asia-Pacific Education Ministers’ Meeting, April 2006). Nonetheless, as in the UK, concern has been expressed from within the university sector that Australia’s system of higher education is different in significant senses to that of Europe, particularly concerning the independent role of the professions in Australia in accrediting courses. Yet such issues seem unlikely to derail a further example of the world’s growing standardization of its higher education systems, based on the increasing influence of blueprints, models and scripts available through and within transnational networks. The context is one of increasing global competition between nations and their determination to form regional and other multilateral alliances as part of competitive responses to the challenges of globalization and of policy-inspired reforms elsewhere.

GLOBAL ORGANIZATIONS There seems little doubt that the national state monopoly of higher education regulatory governance in many advanced societies is increasingly being challenged by global organizations and the market (Leuze, Martens and Rusconi 2007). In part this stems from the globalization of higher education activity – not complete but advancing rapidly in areas such as research-based networks and cross-border programme delivery. This necessitates states working together and with non-governmental actors in seeking responses to issues generated by increased global interconnectivity, such as through standardizing arrangements for transnational quality assurance and for the recognition of qualifications. A notable arena for such developments has been the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), founded in 1961, but increasingly active in educational matters following the increasing


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connections being drawn between knowledge and economic competitiveness in broader policy discourses since the mid-1990s. The generation and diffusion of comparative statistical and related performance indicators for education systems by the OECD are especially influential. Although membership of the OECD generally has been confined to around the 30 most advanced economies, on a range of projects it tends to involve a much wider set of national state and other participants. While its level of national inclusiveness on membership does not match that of UNESCO, one of the oldest and broadest-scoped of the global organizations undertaking education research and policymaking, its authority and influence transnationally are probably unsurpassed. Before considering the OECD, we should note the growth of a host of other international organizations that have dedicated more attention to education issues since the last decade or so of the last century. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, as well as the OECD, have helped to produce ‘new arenas of education governance’ (Martens 2007) in which national education policy is increasingly shaped by international and non-governmental actors operating across territorial boundaries, and through a process of transnational governance that national states themselves help to constitute. The inclusion of higher education commercial provision within the WTO General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) regime in 1994 is perhaps the most controversial example recently of national laws and rules regulating higher education becoming global (Scherrer 2007). Yet it is not clear how much weight should be given to this development in helping to further cross-border commercial higher education provision rather than to other factors, such as the increased autonomy and globalization of competitive, revenue-diversifying university organizations themselves. UNESCO also has become more active in higher education governance in recent years. Hartmann (2007), for example, describes the role of UNESCO as recently becoming ‘empowered’ in helping to order the emerging global knowledge-based economy. Notably, the established UNESCO conventions for the recognition of higher education qualifications have become a useful means for constructing a European framework for mutual recognition of such qualifications without the danger for countries of allocating more authority to the European Commission (or the European Court of Justice) than is necessary. Moreover, UNESCO’s regulatory framework is a form of soft law in that it does not possess a supranational means of enforcement – in contrast both to EU regulations and to the WTO GATS procedures for trade-in-services liberalization. UNESCO and the OECD have also cooperated to produce other forms of soft law, such as the 2005 ‘Guidelines for Quality Provision in

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Cross-Border Higher Education’, which includes advice to governments to establish widely scoped and transparent regulatory systems for approving foreign providers. UNESCO and the OECD are also collaborating to establish an international database of recognized higher education institutions, a further example of regional and national higher education regulatory competences moving to the transnational level. Nonetheless, the OECD/ UNESCO approach has been criticized for assuming that regulation is a necessary good but without considering the costs and benefits of such proposals, as current national governments are generally obliged to do. Blackmur (2007), for example, argues that UNESCO/OECD guidelines are defined on the basis that ‘reducing risk’ is an adequate basis for policy without considering the alternatives. In part the simple fact of membership of international organizations helps to introduce wider institutional pressures on national decisionmakers. We have already noted the impact of the Bologna Process on European cycles of degrees and other matters, while the EU (despite increased emphasis on softer forms of regulation as in the OMC) is able to impose legal and binding regulations on university systems (as is the WTO under the GATS procedures). UNESCO, however, operates more through the development of desirable practices and norms that are regarded as holding high moral authority, while the OECD seeks adherence to agreed standards through the soft pressures of expert guidance, research and peer pressure (Leuze, Martens and Rusconi 2007:10). There may be several reasons why countries converge on international standards, including those who are rule-takers rather than implicated as rule-makers (the great majority of countries tend to be rule-takers in many sectors; see Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). For rule-makers, one explanation for harmonization follows from the institutional pressures that are generated by negotiations in transnational forums and the sense of a level of obligation in keeping to the compromises reached in such bodies. Yet a particular feature of global governance, as we have already discussed, is the growing reliance on voluntary international standards or best practices in regulating the behaviour of private sector actors, such as increasingly autonomous university organizations, rather than on clear-lined legalized intergovernmental agreements. Why do such standards tend to receive quite widespread compliance? One reason for voluntary convergence on transnational higher education standards may lie in accelerating and rapidly globalizing market forces which produce considerable information symmetries for countries and organizations (see Hyoung-Kyu 2007 for an account of such processes in the case of financial regulation). The willingness to accept a regulatory


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standard by a university or national higher education system communicates to other market participants with whom it wishes to be associated its general reliability in business and similar transactions. In such circumstances, voluntary compliance provides a competitive advantage, as failure to sign up will be construed as indicating poor regulation and non-competitiveness for which markets will punish them. Governments concerned with the market competitiveness of their higher education sectors, for example, adopt relevant transnational standards, and universities then comply so as to avoid a detrimental market standing in the world. Nonetheless, there is little research in higher education that provides an evidential basis for such suppositions. Just as likely as market forces bearing down on universities, for example, may be regulatory pressure from domestic governments concerned that universities in their jurisdictions may be penalized when operating abroad by other regulators, and which therefore seek to provide a collective action solution to such concerns. Governments rather than markets may provide the major explanatory variable.

THE OECD Although the OECD was established as an economic association, the pressures of the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, and especially US concern at Russian scientific advantage, led quite rapidly to demand on the OECD for greater data and research on education performances (not least as rising global economic challenges from Japan and other parts of Asia also raised doubts about the relatively poor quality of US secondary education). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the OECD produced and distributed a wide range of policy investigations on education matters, and became particularly authoritative in applying its expertise to the evaluation of national education systems when invited to do so by the territorial states. Such one-off evaluations increased in the 1980s and into the early 1990s as national decisionmakers faced the task of achieving adequate public investment in education in the context of rising curbs on state expenditure across many countries (Mundy 2007:24). Yet it was not until the turn of the new century that the OECD created a distinctive Directorate of Education or began to produce the comparative data that had the potential to exert real peer pressure on national systems. This ‘comparative turn’ in OECD education policy has been well described by Martens (2007), who uses the term ‘governance by comparison’ to explain the essentially soft but growing regulatory authority of the OECD in the last decade, ‘shaping discourses and benchmarks’. In this view, although the OECD gained significant international influence

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initially through data collection and investigations that examined particular national systems in depth, in the last decade or so it has been able to compare ‘states with each other and against standardized criteria. Such direct comparisons put states under greater pressure to reform their systems because the OECD’s statistics on education performance have become more easily accessible and interpretable to politicians, the media and the wider public’ (Martens 2007:40). The move by the OECD to large-scale comparison, and especially increased use of rankings and ratings, has intensified processes of compelling peer pressure on governments. As in other policy domains, rankings provide a short-cut but powerful indicator of often quite complex processes to the public and to the media, and politicians are particularly sensitive to such impacts. Derived from the sports arena, league tables of performance generate high levels of competitive as well as normative pressure. Moreover, for an organization such as the OECD where membership is confined to those of a similar standing, the prospects of creating both standards and real normative influence are relatively high, especially around notions of ‘best practice’. As the Directorate of Education at the OECD has argued, ‘information feeding peer pressure and public accountability has become more powerful than legislation and regulation . . . and it has made international comparisons (and some international organizations) indispensable in the field of education that was thus far conceived as a largely domestic area’ (Andreas Schleicher, accessed at www.pisa.oecd.org on 12 February 2008). Moreover, rather as we found with the EC in the case of Bologna, with increasing staff expertise, specialized knowledge and experience, the OECD’s secretariat displays rising pro-activity. This does not simply reflect the outcomes of inter-governmental agreement to obtain improved evidence-based policy instruments and goals, and to achieve reductions in transactional costs for such endeavours through collective association, but reflects strong bureaucratic influence in its own right. Martens (2007:43) notes that the OECD has created ratings – perceived as ‘OECD rankings’ – far beyond the range anticipated initially by governments in the 1980s, such as the USA and France, which sought greater statistical activity and collection by the organization to guide their own national reforms. Moreover, establishing and coordinating the activities of acknowledged experts – governmental and non-governmental – in the forums and committees that are allocated the task of creating standards help to constitute influential ‘epistemic communities’ sharing common belief systems that have provided the OECD with significantly enhanced influence in education policymaking. The OECD takes over the task of comparison and evaluation, applies procedures in its own way, and establishes new internationally shared standards which were unforeseen by states.


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Two key OECD activities are those associated with indicators and peer review respectively. The production of worldwide indicators – particularly in measuring learning outcomes – is a central task for the OECD and has helped to establish its high transnational significance. This significance has grown as the OECD has turned towards the use of national rankings using comparative data. This importance is further established cumulatively as data are produced regularly and reliably, in part as a consequence of internal reorganization and enhanced dedication to the role. For example, the well-known (in the research and policy fields) Education at a Glance, published annually, uses 36 indicators that largely have remained the same over many years (with a few marginal modifications). This enables rigorous comparison between countries and soundly based longitudinal analysis for signs of improvement. Moreover, the emphasis in OECD publications on education focuses on learning outcomes, including subsequent employment, rather than predominantly, as before, on input measures of resource. In higher education especially this has helped to reinforce the notion of the desirability of increased institutional autonomy but with more public accountability ‘after the event’ for the quality of outputs. Nonetheless, the OECD’s permanent staffing is quite small. It focuses on establishing the framework and guidelines for comparative data collection, with the bulk of such work undertaken at the national level. Yet multilateral international organizations seem to be becoming increasingly dependent upon their permanent officials in both making and implementing policy, although such associations lack the more formal and established democratic accountability processes found at national state level. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which involves as many non-OECD as OECD members, is a particularly advanced method for producing wide-scale and comparable data on the education outcomes and skills of schoolchildren up to the age of 15 across a number of key subjects. The initiative came entirely from within the OECD bureaucracy when it was realized that new data for comparative performance outputs were needed. The result was the creation of a standardized method recognized globally that is able to measure the applicability of the knowledge acquired by students and also the ‘value added’ in student achievement by comparing incoming qualifications and abilities with those on exit in some key subjects. Undoubtedly the PISA programme has helped to engineer a major change of focus in evaluating secondary education performance, from an emphasis on qualifications to broader notions of competence (Dale and Robertson 2007). Considerable angst is caused to governments when national performance is seen to be poor and/or declining in OECD league tables. Sometimes this is a consequence of the changing performance criteria used in the rankings

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(which have penalized more traditional and exam-focused countries such as Germany as competency outcomes have become a key output). Conversely, high performance is paraded in the media and more generally as a highly symbolic badge of national honour. In later chapters we will see how criticisms of media-constructed and other rankings of universities, not least for omitting indicators of value added in learning performance, have led to calls – including from the OECD – for a ‘Pisa for higher education’, and the OECD is engaged presently in designing such an approach for postsecondary education. Currently, however, in the absence of a higher education PISA, the annual Education at a Glance reports do provide comparative data on higher education systems that attract considerable public attention. The 2007 report, for example, was covered in the Financial Times (19 September) as indicating that ‘Britain slips down the global league table of graduates’ and was based on the finding that the UK had fallen from third to tenth position among OECD members in the volume of university graduates it was turning out. It was a finding that both the UK government and Universities UK (the representative body for vice-chancellors) regarded as a ‘cause of concern’ and drew official recognition from the government that the UK ‘had more to do’. A second important OECD activity is associated with peer review (Martens 2007:49–54). Initially, this consisted of investigation of the education policies of individual countries, with invitations by governments to the OECD to undertake these, and which aimed often at securing endorsement of policies introduced domestically, or simply for acquiring new ideas. Predominantly OECD reviews are conducted now in a comparative manner across countries. These are often confined to a particular sector (such as higher education, as in the case of its recent Thematic Review, published in 2008 and begun in 2004) or theme (lifelong learning, for example). This ‘comparative turn’ provides the OCED as an institution with more influence in the review process than was the case with the individual national reviews. The OECD initiates the investigations by setting the framework, choosing the themes, driving the process and coming up with and disseminating the conclusions, in ways beyond the collective scope of individual members. For example, in preparing for a ‘Thematic Review of Higher Education’ across many countries in 2004, the OECD stipulated that ‘All background reports are to be prepared within a common framework. This is in order to facilitate comparative analysis and to maximise the opportunities for countries to learn from each other.’ The questions to be addressed in the individual country reports are grouped around a number of common problems and issues in tertiary education policy ‘that all countries must address’. The focus is on


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the differences between countries and enables territories to be more open to wider transnational governance and other influences through means of policy learning of ‘best practice’. These influences follow from the OECD being recognized as ‘expert’ rather than regulatory in its authority, reinforced by secretariat officials themselves being involved in research and policy analysis through wide networks that are generally detached from many governmental lines of hierarchical accountability. Standardizing through concepts established and deployed by scientific experts, however, involves more than theoretical argumentation and persuasion in OECD committees. Demortain (2007), in a study of the international HACCP food safety standard, notes that best practices, guidelines, working principles and similar voluntary standards need to be mobile and involve transferring the private and local settings within which standards originally are found as well as the transfer of the ideas themselves. The HACCP food safety standard started as a local private experiment and finished up as a general legal obligation for the EU. This procedural standard has become universal despite having to cross highly differentiated sectors and national practices. The key to its success lies in understanding that standards are interpreted rather than adopted. New meaningful interpretations gradually are added by a wider circle of adopters to illustrate the conformity of their system, and to enable exchange, certification and benchmarking with other users. These various elaborations are collected and contained within an interpretation of a standard’s integrity and universality by experts. Scientists and other members of an ‘invisible college’ of highly authoritative experts use a variety of positions and connections in epistemic networks to produce coordination and to interpret standards to their users. They link various efforts of standardization to a common generic logic, not least by enabling users to construct their own customized version. The process is less one of global diffusion than one of constant assembling, elaboration and reassembling so that there is no sense of one unique object being transmitted. The increased focus on ‘softly’ constructing international standards that are authoritative because of their perceived scientific rationality and objectivity has enabled the OECD to operate increasingly as a relatively autonomous global institution. Its managerial stratum has become increasingly influential and innovative within the organization. A consequence of the OECD’s influence in establishing best-practice ‘blueprints’ and ‘scripts’ worldwide in higher education is greater convergence towards forms of regulatory governance in national systems that enable universities to act as more autonomous entities. States feel constrained to adopt or adapt models that have worked better elsewhere and which are perceived as enhancing global economic competitiveness for their countries.

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Nonetheless, as in the case of Bologna, national cultures and structures are unlikely to have been completely superseded, and implementation of particular models, however universally applauded, may, with further investigation, indicate significant differences in interpretation and application ‘on the ground’. Armingeon (2004), for example, notes that OECD recommendations in the area of social policy have been highly consistent between countries, but that a high level of formalization and uniformity inhibits the reflection of OECD recommendations into immediate concrete policy decisions at the national level. The OECD tends to influence national social policy decisions by creating epistemic communities that guide longer-term policy orientations. The OECD aids national bureaucrats in learning from each other and can transform perceptions by developing a common language, technical tools and causal analyses (Marcussen 2004). Moreover, the OECD does not set particular targets or time frames for countries, thus helping to isolate OECD discourse from national political pressure. In focusing on the processes associated with the production of indicators, data and peer review, however, it is still necessary to refer to the role of the OECD, especially at regular meetings of education ministers, in clearly forging and articulating broad international consensuses on best policy practices and goals for national higher education systems. In June 2006 in Athens, for example, OECD ministers agreed on the necessity for reforms in six areas to secure: new sources of private funding, including through wider deployment of user (student) fees and similar ‘shared costing’ models, but balanced by targeted bursaries and financial aid to those most in need; wider social access to higher education; a clearer focus on learning outcomes and what students are actually capable of doing (including developing a ‘PISA for higher education’); the promotion of diversity and responsiveness with reforms aimed at improving incentives to make institutions more accountable for quality and outcomes, which is balanced by a loosening of other forms of (micro-) regulatory controls and increased institutional autonomy, and which would be underpinned by greater differentiation of university missions; supporting ‘world-class research’ and driving innovation more generally; and the elimination of unnecessary obstacles to staff and student mobility across national borders, including through reforms of migration controls as necessary. In the latter aim, the OECD ministers were responding to similar sentiments generated at the G8 meeting of education ministers in Moscow in 2006 endorsing UNESCO’s goal of ‘education for all’ and the need for policies to respond to growing migration (OECD Meeting of Education Ministers, 27–28 June 2006, Athens). Nonetheless, there was agreement that these substantive goals were best achieved through instruments that provided competitive pressures and


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benchmarking, improved information for the public and students, and comparative performance evaluation, including of university teachers in order to help root out the poorer deliverers. Powerful regulatory principles in such processes clearly are those of transparency and accountability, and the dissemination and adoption of good practices such as those promulgated by the OECD/UNESCO guidelines on quality assurance to eradicate poor-quality provision and disreputable providers. Moreover, a strengthened evidence base is regarded within the OECD as essential for providing a robust platform to compare national experiences and approaches, without necessarily moving at this stage to ‘harder’ notions of international accreditation and the harmonization of rules. Although some countries urged support for the development of internationally accepted standards of quality control, others felt that this responsibility should remain with national institutions. The OECD, with the above prescriptions undoubtedly in mind, has been described as ‘a key articulator of a predominantly neo-liberal reading of globalization . . . (it) is a bewilderingly complicated organization, connecting to both government and research communities and producing a vast number of publications ’ (Henry et al. 2001). Moreover, not every formal element of the OECD is predominantly governmental (although the Education Committee is). Membership of the long-established Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme consists mainly of individual universities, while much of the work of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) is aligned more with the research communities than with state officials.

THE EU AND THE OECD COMPARED The EU traditionally has operated through quite conventional legal and regulatory directives and procedures, including through case law and interpretations provided by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In this it is quite different to the OECD, which operates through ‘soft laws’ that are not binding but voluntary and which rest upon the scientific, objective and rational processes of research and careful deliberation by experts. However, we have also noted that, since the Lisbon meeting of the European Council in March 2000, the previously limited operation of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) had become extended to other areas, including education policymaking. This relies predominantly on benchmarking, voluntarism and peer pressure, and is not unlike the epistemic processes found in the OECD. Moreover, in the increasing role and institutionalization of their senior bureaucrats both organizations

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display signs that multilateral organizations that start life as primarily inter-governmental entities, in which administrators implement the wishes of national states, are also developing capacities to operate in a more independent and leading manner. This has been described by Balzer and Rusconi as ‘governance by coordination as a managerial tool’, which they distinguish analytically from ‘governance by opinion formation as a normative tool’ and ‘governance by legal and financial means as an instrument of enforcement’ (Balzer and Rusconi 2007). In governance analyses it is conventional to distinguish between coordination which is achieved by managerial authority, by normative or peer pressure, and by legal command and sanctions (usually state-backed). The first of these refers to the procedural, administrative and synoptic resources that enable senior administrators to promote initiatives in international organizations such as the EC and the OECD, apparently with limited accountability in a democratic sense. The instruments that tend to be deployed in managerial coordination are generated through networks of knowledge and dissemination (such as conferences and meetings) and the sheer ability by these officials to set things up – rather than hierarchical authority over a large number of bureaucrats in a traditional Weberian sense. Their ‘supranational’ authority is accepted by national state and other policymakers because managerial power makes collective decisionmaking more efficient and reduces the transaction costs for individual nations, certainly in comparison with practices where processes of coordination and leadership have to be devised inter-governmentally for each and every initiative. As we noted in Chapter 3, in the transnational world especially, legitimacy tends to be based as much on the acceptability (morally and pragmatically) of coordinating and regulatory organizations as on legal or constitutional notions of democratic mandates. The capacity for both the EC and the OECD to subject national education policymaking to wider international pressures in the last decade or so is even more remarkable against a backdrop of long years of monopolistic domestic state control over education in pursuit of nation-building, democracy and equality across most advanced societies. Consequently, the EU treaties have constantly emphasized the national competency for education and resisted notions of harmonization and an enhanced role for the EC. A decade or so ago, the OECD collected statistics and data at the behest of national governments, notably the USA, and often against its own established ideas about the essential non-comparability of such information. Yet both organizations have moved on considerably so that they have attained a coordinating and shaping power that rests above the capacities and purposes allocated by specific inter-governmental mandates. In the case of the EU and the growing involvement of the EC in the


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Bologna Process, for the reasons we outlined in previous sections of this chapter, it would appear from the time of the Prague meeting in 2001 that there was growing recognition that the professional bureaucracy and coordinating resources of the EC were necessary to undertake follow-up studies, chase progress, and generally coordinate activities and preparations between ministerial meetings in order to achieve Bologna objectives (Balzer and Rusconi 2007). Through new bodies – a Follow-Up Group and a Preparatory Group especially – and with the increased legitimacy of the Lisbon Agenda offering a favourable climate for its increased activism in European higher education policymaking, the EC gained a considerably amplified role in shaping the Bologna Process as the body with the ability to ensure that Bologna targets were implemented and met. The Commission officially became a Bologna player as a member of a newly created board and secretariat for the Process. It now plays a major part in regular stocktakes and similar information-supported efforts to maintain the Bologna momentum. Moreover, with the expansion of Bologna target-setting at the Berlin meeting in 2003 to include a common research area, further recognition of the Commission’s expertise, experience and strengthening role in this area of higher education was acknowledged formally. As for the OECD, in processes not unlike those for the EC and its recent Bologna role, we have noted that the Secretariat has moved from a position of policy implementation on behalf of its member states to relatively autonomous project and policy initiator and agenda-shaper. This is exemplified particularly by the way in which it has driven an increasing collection of data from national states through standardized frameworks and data identification. This has allowed well-evidenced processes of comparison and ‘global model’ articulation to be constructed by the OECD organization, the results of which are then despatched to be received by the respective national states. With greater emphasis on learning outcomes the OECD is able to compare directly the performance of the differing systems of education in the various national jurisdictions. Moreover, it is a compelling, competitor-driven process of peer review and normative pressure, based on authority derived from expertise and rationalistic objectivity, helping to propel systems towards ideas of ‘world’s best practice’. In secondary education PISA is a notable shifter of practice through the use of sophisticated and widely collected data to generate comparisons that governments do not find it easy either to shrug off or, if favourable, to desist from parading, depending on the position in which they find themselves. Inevitably, it is only a matter of time before the coverage of the PISA programme extends to higher education, where undoubtedly it will gain increased potency through media amplification and incorporation into various league tables of university reputation and performance.

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Both the EU and the OECD display a growing field of international governance in education, and gradually in both organizations developing organizational capacities enabled administrators to forge particular policy positions at a remove from those arising simply from members’ preferences. Moreover, they developed new modes of multilateral governance based on their highly valued managerial-based coordination resources which, when mixed with processes of opinion formation and similar epistemic authority, have proved compelling sources of transnational influence for national education policymakers.

POWER AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE There is a danger with the governance concept of treating standards and regulation as technocratic and focusing on consensual solutions to issues of collective action and coordination for national and other governments, thus ignoring issues of power and its ability to vary the capacities of different groups to realize their interests. Recent conceptions of power, for example, illustrate its many faces, such as ‘institutional power’ when states design international institutions and policies in ways that work to their long-term advantage, or ‘productive power’ involving the socially diffuse production of subjectivity and legitimation in systems of meaning and signification (Barnett and Duvall 2005). International organizations are able to use symbolic and rhetorical devices as part of peer and consumer pressure within certification techniques and wider ‘shaming’ processes, to seek from states, and other actors, compliance with the values and norms that the international entities are advancing. International organizations are able to use expert and increasingly rational-legal authority as a source of their increasing independent and bureaucratic influence (Barnett and Finnemore 2005). Together with the wider public perception of such bodies as ‘civilizing’ as well as advancing globalization (extending human rights, peace, modernity, democracy and economic development and as essentially rational, selfeffacing and apolitical), this gives them an autonomy and agency above that simply delegated by inter-governmental mandates, or as simply following ‘world cultures’. It is an authority that is structured through agenda-setting and through expert claims that there is no other way.

CONCLUSION There is little doubt that globalization has stretched the mobility and aspirations of both individuals and universities, not only resulting in increasing


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inter-governmentalism as nation-states struggle to coordinate policies and learn from best practice in order to accommodate to a new reality, but also reflected in international organizations beginning to play critical and relatively autonomous roles in higher education governance. Generally the most influential multilateral bodies here are those that have a restricted membership but which nonetheless reach out and seek to engage a wider range of partners in important projects, notably the OECD and the EU. Their modes of control and coordination in the field of education are characterized more by soft than by harder forms of regulation, epitomized by the extension of the OMC through the linked processes of the Bologna and Lisbon Agendas, while substantively their models of higher education are located within an assumption that competition, institutional autonomy and external quality evaluation are the basis for improved university performance and global economic competitiveness. This is not to suggest that law does not operate in globalized higher education: the EU, the World Bank and the IMF also maintain controlling instruments such as binding funding contracts, while the WTO GATS form of worldwide trade regulation is quite ‘constitutional’ and legalistic through devices such as binding arbitration findings following disputes between members. Yet less law-like and more subtle mechanisms of coordination generally are prevailing in the global governance of higher education. The relationships between national states and international organizations, such as the OECD and the EU, as partners in higher education governance are still undergoing adaptation and transformation. There is an assumption that increasing international comparison within the common standards and performance criteria of organizations such as the OECD, and based around increasingly sophisticated and longitudinal data collection, is generating greater similarity between national systems of higher education and particularly in their internal patterns of differentiation. Yet this is an area that would benefit from further comparative research, including on likely variations in national interpretations of internationally constructed and disseminated standards and other recommended policy solutions. Weymann et al. (2007) suggest that these shared governance partnerships between the key multi-level actors broadly take three forms. First, ‘shared governance’ takes place when the national governments, international organizations and higher education institutions are collaborating in the same area of policymaking, such as standard-setting and degree structure harmonization across borders (as found in the Bologna Process). Second, ‘complementary governance’ occurs when there is a division of labour across different areas of education policymaking, such as between standard-setting on the one hand and its enforcement on the other. Soft

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regulation especially provides considerable opportunity for nation-states to determine how they will discharge their retained responsibility for developing their education sectors within the frameworks and criteria articulated by international organizations. Finally, ‘conflictual governance’ is found when there are clashes or tensions between different levels of policymaking, not just involving multi-level governmentalism but between institutional and national/international goals and controls, such as when universities baulk at being subject to the trade regulations of the WTO. In actuality, however, multi-level governance relationships in higher education generally contain subtle and changing elements of all three types. It would not be inaccurate to describe transnational higher education as increasingly resembling ‘private governance’ as at least a complement to both private lobbying and inter-governmental rule-making. A process of institutionalism is occurring in which private organizations and public– private networks are developing, implementing and monitoring their own transnational regulations and rules, particularly certification and standard-setting, which are often learning- and discourse-based (Pattberg 2007). As we noted in previous chapters (and will consider in later chapters on privately produced league tables), such processes help to provide some element of ordering to the less organized system of international relations in comparison with that found between national states. The ‘steering’ of higher education actors is being accomplished increasingly not only by inter-governmental cooperation but also by private and transnational mechanisms – by both international organizations and global markets – as universities become more ambiguously linked to national and public forms of coordination. It is towards a more explicit consideration of these private and transnational forms of governance that we now turn in Part II, where we examine particularly the role played by private rankings and assessments. In Chapter 5 we look particularly at university league tables.

PART II

Standards, models and rankings

5.

University league tables

INTRODUCTION In previous chapters we have explored the increasing globalization and market-like mechanisms of higher education systems, and also the tendency for the transnational forms of regulation of such systems (and others) to be constituted by ‘soft’ law and the compelling authority of expertise. Universities now are more self-regarding corporate-style organizations than before, competing for resources and prestige, and establishing strategic directions in a more state-detached context than previously. National sectors of tertiary education also appear increasingly stratified, not formally so much, but by wealth, status and levels of research activity. In a number of the leading countries, such as the USA and the UK, the resources gap between the top research-based institutions and the rest is large and appears to be widening. Not all universities share the ability or desire of the top-ranking institutions to engage globally, or to diversify their sources of funding to more private instruments and away from high dependence on public expenditure. But globalization and marketization do not allow universities whatever their strategies to escape state-backed regulation. For universities virtually everywhere increased corporate autonomy and competition have been accompanied also by heightened governance ‘at a distance’. External evaluation of universities by governments or their agencies – or through state-endorsed self-regulation as found with US accreditation arrangements – seeks to protect public and consumer interests through more systematic requirements for accountability, but without disturbing the creative and innovative capacities on which a country’s global economic competitiveness is regarded as dependent. Yet the market, rather than antithetical to public oversight, has become a form of regulation itself for universities. Accountability is becoming more market-based, such as through an increased sense of students as consumers with the expansion of tuition and other user charges, leading to rising expectations and willingness for students to complain about the services provided. The growth of national and other surveys of student satisfaction and the remorseless spread of newspaper-based and amplified ‘league tables’ of university performance and reputation are 135

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further examples of increased ‘private authority’ being exercised over universities.

RANKINGS AS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON Over the last two decades or so university rankings or league tables have become a global phenomenon. We mean this in two senses. First, such evaluations can be found in virtually all the major advanced countries, and in others, too. Second, although university rankings predominantly have been national constructions, in the last half-decade or so we have witnessed the arrival of ‘world-class’ or ‘global’ hierarchies in which the leading universities around the world are ranked against common transnational criteria and against each other. It is likely that these global league tables will become increasingly influential for those universities that regard themselves as ‘top-rank’ internationally or at least have such aspirations. Nonetheless, the leading positions in national league tables are generally the same as those found at the top of the global rankings, with some exceptions. In the absence of official or governmental data across territorial boundaries, in comparison with the data often available and deployed by national rankings, methodologies at the global level tend to be based predominantly on research citations and awards, or on data collected through peer-collected surveys of institutional reputation. Before we examine the ‘regulatory’ role of private rankings for universities and why they have become so significant around the world, we might note that regulatory governance in higher education traditionally has relied on at least three non-commercial sources of accountability and quality assurance. These are: the disciplinary and professional training received by individual academics, including socialized commitments to academic freedom and critical review; the collective or ‘collegial’ discussions and decisionmaking of peers at, for example, departmental or examination meetings, but which, in countries such as the USA and in parts of Continental Europe, are expressed more widely and externally through self-regulatory accreditation arrangements; and, finally, the increasing processes of ‘meta-regulation’ for funding and quality assurance being discharged by governmental or governmentally supported agencies in higher education, with methodologies that turn internal corporate arrangements for managing risk and ensuring standards into data for external scrutiny. We should also note, however, that governmental quality assurance accountabilities focus more on learning and teaching processes than on a comparative evaluation of graduate learning outcomes. To date, most if not all private rankings of institutional performance also lack reliable data


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of comparative university learning standards within and across national borders, although there are signs that OECD-led moves towards the establishment of a ‘PISA for higher education’ that we discussed in the previous chapter soon may rectify such omissions. League tables of university standing may be regarded as a further instrument of accountability to add to those associated with scholarly selfregulation and governmental external quality assurance. Often provided by newspapers and other publishers it is a mode focused on providing consumer information in quite simplified form to users of higher education, such as prospective students, overseas funders and employers. Although competition between universities is not driven solely through market mechanisms based on price and maximization of revenues, but rather by status and reputational rivalry that can occur outside market contexts, league tables provide an increasingly significant driver of the private or consumer view of higher education. As we shall see, however, institutional university rankings particularly (as distinct from those evaluating particular departments or subjects) have been the subject of fierce and continuing criticism, especially from those working within the higher education sector. They are regarded as being ‘irrational’ in their methodologies and as overly simplistic in their compression of many variables into one overall system of numerical ordering. Furthermore, private authority of this sort appears to confound the more legitimated and democratic policies and processes associated with the state and public interest accountabilities. For many in higher education, governmental bodies are regarded as being much more responsive to representations and lobbying by the universities than are commercial entities such as the large publishers (Locke et al. 2008). More substantively also, the criteria underlying judgements as to ‘the best university’ performers in institutional league tables are regarded by many in universities outside the top echelons as too conventional, ‘elitist’ and backward-looking for the modern age. A recent investigation in England, for example, detected extensive views in a number of universities that the underlying criteria in league tables debilitated governmental and institutional policy goals for widening social participation in higher education. They do so by rewarding (through higher rankings) recruitment by institutions of formally highly qualified students at the expense of those students with less of a family or school tradition of university entrance but who clearly have the capability of benefiting from higher education studies. Consequently, it is argued, other public policy goals, such as the enhancement of systemic diversity through a variety of mission-distinct institutions, and for raising the standing of learning and teaching in comparison with that for research, are devalued

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by university rankings. The producers of the league tables, however, argue that they provide a valuable tool for determining and assessing student success. They make student learning outcomes more transparent, and they help to make institutions more accountable to the wider public for what they do (Locke et al. 2008). More obviously, of course, institutional rankings provide the simple heuristics or bounded rationality in a complicated yet often opaque informational world that social psychologists claim that we all gratefully seize upon in making decisions of many kinds (Kahneman and Tversky 1982). After all, league tables that rank organizations are produced for many sectors and not just higher education. As higher education systems become more complex, globalized and universal, their various stakeholders are being supplied increasingly with comparative data and interpretations about the standing of the respective institutions. In part the aim is to help newcomers or outsiders – parents, employers and students especially – to make sense of the increasingly bewildering array of colleges and universities that are found at home and abroad in many countries. League tables are the most controversial example of such processes. Whether they reflect a response to articulated consumer demand or rather an example of a demand created by clever, market-aware publishers and other private entrepreneurs is harder to disentangle. Undoubtedly both demand- and supply-side factors are at work as the growing range of state-collected and other standardized data on higher education institutions has made possible – and credible – the idea of formalizing and publicly disseminating judgements on the hierarchical standing of such institutions. Widely available data, alongside data collected by the compilers through specially commissioned opinion surveys of universities, have provided the basis for newspapers and other non-governmental entities to produce league tables at a cost affordable to them. Governments have sought increased information about the institutions that they fund as part of policymaking and accountability objectives, and this public function provides a key underpinning for the private authority exercised by the league table compilers.

THE GROWTH OF UNIVERSITY RANKINGS The beginnings of university league tables as a global phenomenon may be traced to the rankings of US institutions produced by US News and World Report (USNWR) magazine in 1983. These rankings were relatively novel in their hierarchical evaluation of whole institutions (although not all US institutions were included, an increasingly distressing experience for some of the excluded despite overt criticisms of such rankings) and followed


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from successful publication (in terms of increased copies of USNWR sold) of the rankings of ‘great Americans’. Nonetheless, other newspapers, and also governments and professional and academic institutes in other countries, soon followed over the next few years with their own hierarchical comparisons of higher education institutions. Not only (in the case of publishers) did such rankings boost circulation but their publication was also advanced as being in the public interest. It was argued that they provided much-sought-after consumer information. Moreover, they reinforced institutional motivation to enhance quality and to achieve a better ranking position. As institutional competition has increased in many higher education systems around the world, reinforced by rising institutional autonomy and marketization, and by declining public funds per student and rising private costs, university rankings have become more significant. Moreover, accountability and transparency have become dominant global regulatory principles for many sectors and organizations, public and private, and league tables appear a natural component of such processes. Rising tuition fees in the USA, and elsewhere, such as in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and England, and the prospect of steep increases to come, have also reinforced more critical media and other public scrutiny of universities. Rankings appear to offer useful advice on ‘best buys’ for students and others. Most rankings in higher education are usually composed of lists of institutions comparatively ranked in a hierarchical order, rather like the ‘league table’ positions of, say, professional football clubs in terms of the relative points gained from the outcomes of rule-governed competition for defined groups of teams. Apart from the global rankings (which are more ‘exclusive’ as to the universities that are listed) most league tables rank institutions within the confines of a national jurisdiction. They include the vast proportion of institutions in such territories although tending to screen out on the basis of small size and insufficient subject spread. In the case of USNWR there are simply too many US colleges to include all. As also with Canada’s Maclean’s magazine university rankings, USNWR institutions are compared to others with similar missions, and this produces a host of mini-league tables. Elsewhere some league tables, notably those produced by the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) in Germany in conjunction with Die Zeit, focus less on producing one final ranking position for an institution than on publishing a range of positions by subject or discipline. Others are dedicated only to particular programme areas, such as the Financial Times’ regular rankings of business schools. In some parts of the world, China for example, research performance and institutional reputation are the predominant variables used

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for constructing rankings (an approach reflected also in the Shanghai Jiao Tong global rankings), but less so elsewhere, particularly where rankings are confined only to undergraduate provision. In this chapter we focus on institutional ranking systems rather than the more specialized or subject ratings. Many rankings provide an on-line facility and website to enable anyone to construct their university league tables according to the criteria that they feel are important. The advantage of such interactive services is that they emphasize the differing informational needs and values of the individual, rather than offering a standardized solution for everyone, while also helping to recognize diversity in institutional mission. Nonetheless, as we shall see, league tables are as much about reputation and the role of media amplification in advancing or debilitating institutional esteem as they are about more private or discreet benchmarking processes. A league table produced and consumed through the privacy of one’s computer inevitably lacks the attention that publicized institutional rankings achieve. Similarly, when aggregated scores for an institution are not constructed (as is the case with the CHE rankings), leaving the reader with a plethora of data and rankings for individual disciplines, it is not easy for the consumer to make too much sense of it all. Wide and simplified dissemination is the key to the consumer function performed by league tables, especially those based on a consolidated ranking for a whole institution rather than on providing a more multidimensional arrangement of subject and other tables of performance. Consumers and stakeholders generally seek a quick grasp of what ‘really’ lies behind the often glittering corporate packaging that characterizes the marketing efforts of many universities today, as well as the ever-hard-topenetrate world of academia, before making their ‘purchases’ or investments. As Usher and Savino (2007:3) note, ‘League Tables, by their very nature, are meant to boil down the work of entire institutions into single, comparable, numerical indicators.’ Nonetheless, institutional rankings are often broken down by universities and their various stakeholders into their significant component parts. The respective ‘scores’ for particular elements (such as for research performance, student satisfaction, and so on) not only provide the basis for selective promotion in markets but internally are useful for internal planning and related management processes. There is some evidence that internal data management by universities in England, for example, is becoming more aligned with the external information requirements of the league table compilers (Locke et al. 2008). Usually league tables are constructed by using a fairly simple formula (anything else presumably would be very expensive for their producers), based on data collection from existing independent or university


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publications, or through devising and applying surveys of institutional reputations to a range of stakeholders. In long-established governmental systems of higher education, as found across Europe for example, where official data generally are available, such third-party information tends to be preferred to surveys by many compilers in constructing national league tables, as this appears more objective. Selection of the key variables from the collected information (such as staff–student ratios or research performance) is a key next step in ranking, along with standardizing and weighting the selected criteria. The final production of a ranked order follows from the comparisons of the data per institution by variable and its weighting. Of course, these outcomes are heavily influenced by the decisions of newspaper and other teams on the importance they attach to particular factors and what impact they should have in the overall formulations. The rankings do more than provide listings but are premised on a view of what higher education should be like as these are expressed in the criteria that the compilers operate. That is, the tables seek to constitute standards and benchmarks for assessing the modern university which often differ from models and aspirations driving institutions and government policymakers. Although most league table compilers take advice from key higher education stakeholders, and adapt methodologies as necessary, inevitably they are required to exercise their own judgements as to which is the preferred and standardized model for higher education. As we shall see, it is almost impossible to please all constituencies in devising a league table of university standing based on a simple numerical score. The methodology, combined with the diversity of institutional missions found in most higher education systems, hardly allows it. So compilers make judgements that carry a reasonably high expectation that they will be regarded as ‘authoritative’ (such that ‘leading’ universities are located in the right place and do not feel obliged to withdraw their data and their support for the ranking exercise). Besides, it is easy to be drawn into too rationalistic an interpretation of institutional rankings, as though some perfect ideal is achievable, as opposed to examining more closely how they align or otherwise with wider public policy and institutional concerns. League tables are valued more for their perceived authority, expertise and knowledge of higher education sectors, and for their very significance in the eyes of many market participants, rather than for the actual precision and numerical correctness of each rating. Furthermore, league table ‘rationality’ is also undermined by the activities of universities in contexts of high competition. It would be natural for universities to seek to gain maximum advantage from the league tables by ‘optimizing’ their returns in ways not easily checked by the compilers. This

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increases if they fear, but do not know for certain, that others are ‘gaming’ the system and obtaining unfair comparative advantage. Although there are constraints on the ability and willingness of university administrators to ‘play the system’ (it results in too many conflicting and confusing data records internally, and administrators generally display high levels of professional rectitude, for example), the possibility of such activities casts doubt on any claims for precise levels of league table objectivity and accuracy. (The German-based CHE tables overcome this by relying on a high survey source for their data – around two-thirds – drawn from students and staff, and by declining to use university-sourced data. However, survey-collected data have problems of their own, such as being reliant on subjective views, and possibly reflecting closed and established versions of reputation that may outrun actual performance.)

COMPILATION An indication of the motivations of the league table compilers is provided by Sanoff (2007), who introduced and supervised the first rankings of undergraduate institutions for USNWR. In his account it is clear that the original reason for the introduction of university and college rankings was to increase the magazine’s circulation (and followed the popularity and sales-enhancement of previous ‘lists’ and rankings, such as ‘greatest US leaders’ and so on, also devised by USNWR). However, public demand for the ratings in the USA as parents and students especially sought to differentiate between institutions in a context of continuous above-inflation rises in tuition and other costs, and with substantial information asymmetries on institutional quality and performance, sustained the initial sales impetus of the USNWR assessments. They clearly met a demand for more consumer information in a readily digestible form on the relative positions of higher education institutions. The timing of the publication of the college rankings – at the start of the final high school year and when student thoughts are turning towards the tertiary institutions to which to apply – indicates the strong objective of the original USNWR compilers in aiding prospective undergraduate students and their advisors in their applications decisionmaking through the provision of easily understood and timely data. Based on the respected Carnegie Foundation classifications, institutions have been grouped by USNWR in a number of categories appropriate for their purpose and mission. This reflects recognition of the diversity of the higher education system in the USA, and the outcome, as we have noted, is consequently a range of ‘little league tables’ rather than one overall hierarchical construction.


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The subsequent publication of the USNWR rankings in a hardback book – supplementing the annual ‘one-offs’ found in the weekly magazine – ensures that the rankings have a more permanent and continuous influence than the high perishability associated with daily or weekly publications. The rankings thus require serious and ongoing senior attention in the institutions. Subsequently, similar book-based prints have become associated with university rankings in other countries also, such as the good universities guides in Australia and the UK. The initial reliance on survey data has been reduced in recent years by the inclusion in the USNWR rankings of more objective sources of information as it became available in a more standardized and thus more comparable format in the USA, such as indicators of student selectivity, faculty quality, institutional resources and student retention. Over time, and following quite widespread and regular consultations by the publisher, new variables have been added and the weightings altered in the rankings, although credibility demands quite high levels of ongoing stability for institutional positions and this is reduced by high annual volatility. Moreover, increased transparency over the rankings has followed recognition that underlying processes and their implied judgements could be defended by the compilers more effectively from institutional criticism if more of the methodology and criteria were in the public domain. USNWR claims that the rankings have incentivized institutions to improve their performances and internal administration, such as by installing better data management systems. These are beneficial not only for ensuring the best possible picture for institutions in the league tables from the data supplied, but also for enhancing their internal planning systems more generally. Such improvements have also led to better alumni records as a means of raising the game on fundraising (an element in the rankings). Interestingly, although USNWR does not include every institution in its hierarchical rankings (arguing that it seeks to highlight good performers rather than ‘name and shame’ those at the bottom who may be there ‘for understandable reasons’) it has gradually increased the numbers of colleges that it does rank. In part this follows complaints from those excluded, which felt that they were more disadvantaged by their exclusion than if they appeared at the lower end of the tables. This suggests, as Wedlin (2006) argues in the case of business schools, that league tables do bring some sense of identity and orderliness to fast-changing sectors and that not appearing at all is regarded by many as a worse outcome than the embarrassment suffered from propping up the rankings. In this sense, being ‘noticed’ by the rankings for institutions is at least a minimum requirement for being regarded as a legitimate member of the organizational field that constitutes higher education.

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Despite the best efforts of the USNWR compilers it is clear that a number of college and university heads remain unhappy with an exercise that so clearly places them in the public spotlight and under possible extra scrutiny from their trustees. A number of US institutions in recent years, although generally not from the first or second tier of the ranked institutions, have refused to fill out the reputational surveys sent to them by USNWR for anonymous evaluations of their counterparts, while some university presidents have agreed to the self-denying ordinance of not using the rankings in their marketing material. Yet boards of trustees and other lay governors clearly do regard the rankings as significant and as potentially a source of valuable comparative information. It is unlikely that withdrawal of support by college heads for supplying data to the compilers could be sustained by many in the longer term. There is evidence from an English study that such boards are particularly interested in league table performance, not least because it appears a more independently validated and easier-to-understand performance measure (and one that is increasingly familiar to them in their non-university spheres of activity) than evaluations produced from within the university itself (Locke et al. 2008). Universities have ‘hidden gardens’ of academic activity at the heart of their enterprises that are not easily penetrated by outsiders, including by independent governors, and this raises issues in the minds of some boards as to whether such values serve to protect complacency or poor performance further down into the organization. On the other hand, however, there are strong norms suggesting that scholarly freedom and the academic regulation of standards should be inviolate from too close attention from trustees, and this places constraints on how far governors may go in pursuing accountabilities in certain areas. Clearly league tables are imperfect instruments. College presidents and university vice-chancellors constantly berate the compilers for ignoring institutional diversity and for debilitating widening participation missions as part of an unhealthy ‘standardization’ of higher education sectors as a consequence of the strong isomorphic effect of the rankings. Particularly compilers are criticized for using inappropriate proxies for learning outcomes and other variables, and for relying overmuch on input and process factors. In turn, however, it is apparent that ‘gaming’ and overly robust and optimistic data submissions from institutions also occur, although it could be argued that such behaviour is incentivized in states of high competition by the fear of the unknown. Competitors may be stealing advantages through ‘playing the system’, and all universities are aware of the significance in some tables that quite small differences in institutional scores have for the final overall ranking position.


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Yet university and college rankings strike a chord with the new moods of consumerism in the world. Many parents have benefited from the expansion of mass higher education over the last 30 years or so and are determined to secure the best education for their children, and league tables apparently offer a guide to greater discernment. Simply going to university used to be a widespread objective for many with little or no familial practice of higher education participation, but contemporary aspirations are aimed more at securing positions in the ‘best universities’. As students and their parents are paying more and more for the privilege of attending university, they want value for money. It is arguable that league tables may only validate the more tacit reputational knowledge used in the comparison of universities by students and other stakeholders that has been going on for decades. But university rankings appear to be increasingly valued by the public as these informal and closed systems of knowledge become less useful or available. The growth of transnational opportunities for study and research, and the necessity for students and employers to understand more about new and little-known institutions around the world, fuels the demand for the apparently objective and independent analysis provided by the compilers of both national and global rankings. Universities and colleges also are rarely reluctant to trumpet good positions in league tables, or to extract highly favourable elements for wider promotion. In this sense, institutions, often within a context of wider dissatisfaction with rankings, help to sustain league tables at the same time as they denounce them for their ‘irrationalities’. In a competitive age when the spending on university marketing and promotion has risen considerably – and when glossy prospectuses contain a portrait of a ‘highly satisfied’ student on every page – the private authority and influence of league tables, alongside the web-based social networking sites and other blogs that contain often highly unvarnished statements by students about their experiences at university, may be regarded as providing a useful corrective to such corporate hyper-selling. It is also becoming clearer from empirical studies on the impact of league tables on institutional behaviour and policies that the rankings are used internally by senior managers in universities as useful managerial devices to institute change and lever enhanced accountabilities (Hazelkorn 2007; Locke et al. 2008). Data collection and internal administrative systems are immeasurably improved by the influence and requirements of the tables, and there is stronger institutional focus on enhancing the student experience and promoting student learning facilities. Positions in institutional rankings are becoming established as key performance indicators for university leaders and governors and as part of a more professionalized approach to strategic planning. Rankings are rapidly becoming

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integrated by administrators into the routine practices of university operations as part of ‘normal environments’. They contribute also to wider practices of benchmarking and learning for organizations that have become established features of wider institutional life in modern societies. Subject tables and other sub-components of institutional rankings also are becoming useful additions to managerial methods for internal comparison and performance management at head-of-department levels, not least by heightening peer pressure among middle managers. Although there may be a collective sympathy for departments that come out less well in subject or similar external evaluations, nonetheless there is also pressure from colleagues for them to improve standings as a contribution to the overall institutional position, as this has an impact on everyone.

THE GLOBAL SPREAD OF UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE RANKINGS Most analysts of league tables in higher education comment on their rapid diffusion around the globe in the two decades since the first USNWR evaluations in the mid-1980s. ‘University rankings or “league tables”, a novelty as recently as 15 years ago, are today a standard feature in most countries with large higher education systems . . . copycat ranking systems began popping up all over the world, usually shortly after the introduction of – or rapid rise in – tuition fees’ (Usher and Savino 2007:1). Everywhere, too, they have been consumed eagerly by the wider public and largely attacked by the institutions. Yet mostly they tend to use different variables, weightings and methods to each other, in part no doubt reflecting variations in local cultural views of what constitutes the best (and worst) universities. They also reflect national differences in the data collected by governmental and other agencies on universities. Even the two global rankings – the THES/QS World University Rankings (the THES) and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – adopt quite different approaches in the absence of comparative transnational official data: one is based almost entirely on research outputs (ARWU) and the other relies heavily on reputational surveys. As a consequence, some institutions that do well in one table (UK and Australian universities in the THES, for example) may be positioned much lower in the other. Similarly, not all universities featuring highly in their national league tables show up as prominently in the global rankings. For example, in the UK the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) generally features in the top five of the Times and the Sunday Times national institutional rankings but is way down in the


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ARWU, primarily because it lacks the citation and related ‘scores’ from subjects other than its social science specialization, a field where citation rates tend to be lower than in the sciences or the medical areas. However, there does seem a general stability of agreement by compilers concerning the institutions placed in the very top echelons of most national and global league tables, despite variability in methods and the different criteria that league tables adopt as to what constitutes quality, and how these are used to compare institutions. It is claimed by some (Wedlin 2006) that close attention is paid (and exceptions made) by the compilers to any ‘counter-intuitive’ findings that place the ‘wrong’ institutions at the top or bottom of the rankings, partly at least because such outcomes would destroy the reputation of that particular league table and reduce the prospect of high-status universities supplying data and cooperation for future rankings’ exercises. Towards the middle of many national institutional ranking systems, however, there appear to be much greater levels of volatility in positioning from one year to the next. This reflects changes in methodology, institutional responses to previous publications of the rankings, and the very fine differences in ‘scores’ between institutions that nonetheless can lead to apparently sharp differences when arranged in a numerical hierarchy.

THE IMPACT OF LEAGUE TABLES ON WIDENING CHOICE In considering the influence of league tables around the world for student participation and choice, Clarke (2007) remarks on the paucity of research on such issues. Rather, the information available tends to be anecdotal. Moreover, we might add that investigations of the impact of rankings on higher education systems tend to focus on institutional respondents rather than more directly ascertaining the views of ‘non-producers’, such as employers, students, parents and schools (Hazelkorn 2007; Locke et al. 2008). It is not as though such policy researchers are uninterested in the impacts on those found outside the institutions but rather that the views of the ‘non-insider’ stakeholders are generally derived from the opinions gathered from the institutional members. That is, it is the ‘producer’ perception of the consequences of league tables for these other groups that we have rather than the results of more rigorous and direct investigation of the perceptions of consumers. Clarke suggests that the consequences of rankings are likely to be adverse for the admittance prospects of low-income and minority students, at least in gaining entry to many of the more highly esteemed

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universities. The criteria employed in many university rankings systems tend to encourage entry from formally highly qualified students and, in the USA especially, this encourages the growth of merit-based rather than financial-need-based enrolment incentives (Kirp 2003). There is concern in England also that the widening social access to higher education schemes being encouraged by government policies, not least as part of drives to increase institutional mission diversity, and adopted with enthusiasm by some of the newer universities, is being confounded by the influence of the rankings on institutional admissions schemes that favour more traditional entry applicants (Locke et al. 2008). In reviewing the US evidence, Clarke suggests that rankings help to stratify even more the system of higher education by motivating institutions to select applicants who will be ‘assets’ in terms of achieving good league table positions. USNWR, for example, rewards colleges and universities for recruiting students with high test scores, for the ratio of students that graduated in the top 10 per cent of their high school year, and for having the ability to refuse entry to a high proportion of applicants. As a consequence, universities offer considerable financial inducements to such students to make early and exclusive offers to them, and take steps to raise more applications from larger numbers of school-leavers than they intend to admit. Furthermore, institutions engage in a student consumption ‘arms race’ to invest in student facilities aimed as much at providing a high-level hotel as educational experience. This reduces the funds available to invest in programmes for supporting students from traditionally underrepresented groups. Research from England also suggests that the league tables have the greatest influence on students from higher-social-class backgrounds with high achievement goals (Locke et al. 2008). The private or independent school sector appears particularly adept at scouring the league tables as part of concerted efforts to point their students at the ‘best’ universities (for which, too, these schools are rewarded by higher positions in some league tables devised specifically for their sector). Moreover, employers and governments increasingly have incorporated institutional league table performance into selective funding decisions (such as bursaries to study), while some public funders of international students abroad also restrict individual choices to institutions found in the higher reaches of the league tables. The Australian Technology Network of universities is reported to have called for the outcomes of league tables to be part of wider governmental performance evaluations of institutions. As regulatory governance increasingly becomes more ‘risk-based’, as we have seen in the case of the US credit ratings companies in the field of financial services, such as Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s, private rankings and ratings become a


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useful short-hand for identifying funding risk and become incorporated into national and other regulatory procedures by public agencies as a form of risk management (Sinclair 2005).

LEAGUE TABLES AND THE CONSTITUTION OF ORDER We have referred so far to many of the concerns and alleged perverse consequences of league tables, expressed predominantly by those within universities and colleges, although less so by students, schools, employers, boards of governors and the wider media. Particularly, national university rankings are believed by employees in lesser-ranked universities to be operating with outdated reputational and other criteria – those of ‘Oxbridge’ in the UK, for example – that fail to reflect current institutional diversity, ignore the benefits of governmental and other demands for widening social participation to equip a nation’s workforce better to compete globally in high-value markets, and spur universities into ‘zero-sum’ financial spending sprees that are organizationally dangerous and ultimately self-defeating. There are methodological criticisms as well, such as those levelled at the construction of simple numerical hierarchies that are based on very thin differences in actual totalled scores, and the inability of the compilers to devise satisfactory tests of ‘value-added’ contributions to student learning outcomes. Rankings are believed therefore to reward institutions for the selection of highly qualified student entrants (which tends to lead to high retention and good degrees) rather than for their development of student capabilities. Higher positions, in this view, should reflect ‘added value’ (when student end performances are compared to levels at entrance), a method potentially to the advantage of institutions taking students from wider social groups based on their perceived abilities rather than necessarily on the basis of high formal examination achievement at school. Government ministers generally take a rather mixed view of league tables even though the impact of league tables may be regarded as at variance with key policies, such as increased social access and heightened institutional diversity. Yet even social access goals are often tinged with elitism, such as found in UK governmental statements that wider access should be aimed at enabling more students with poorer backgrounds to be admitted to ‘the best’ or ‘the top’ universities, by which is meant those at the higher end of the league tables. As we have noted, university rankings are used by public bodies as part of selective, ‘risk-based’ approaches to funding and regulation, and politicians in many countries appear magnetized by the

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need to increase numbers of ‘world-class universities’ in their jurisdictions in order both to enhance national prestige and to enable their countries to compete more effectively for the top-flight researchers required for economic competitiveness. Students and their advisors undoubtedly are influenced also, and in the UK it would appear that a considerable number of incoming undergraduates find the league tables an important element in their applications’ decisionmaking (Locke et al. 2008). Research into the rankings covering more specialized fields and units than institutions as a whole also reveals more beneficial perceptions of league tables than usually articulated by ‘insiders’ or ‘producers’ on institutional rankings. These advantages are often recognized by some academic practitioners also. A good example is found in the sphere of management education, especially as explored in Linda Wedlin’s Ranking Business Schools: Forming Fields, Identities and Boundaries in International Management Education (2006). A key theme is the location of higher education league tables as part of the wider global movement towards the use of classifications and standards in forming social order (see also Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000, and earlier chapters of this book). In this view categorizations and rankings are key elements in new modes of transnational governance, and these are characterized more by private than by governmental authority. In management education, rankings help to define the legitimate players in that field and also provide a stage on which contestation over the criteria for determining organizational standing is played out. As with institutional rankings, league tables of business schools in newspapers and magazines originated in the USA, in this case in the early 1970s, and they have never looked back. During the 1990s the influential Financial Times (FT) steadily increased its coverage of business education matters and introduced rankings in the late 1990s to boost circulation and interest. Wedlin notes that the FT from the beginning sought ‘authority’ for its rankings, not only to increase sales but to attract wider influence. It is clear, however, that the FT was operating on fertile ground, as the field of management education was expanding rapidly in the 1990s. Moreover, although this growth was worldwide, it was especially marked in Europe as institutions began to compete with the highly regarded elite schools in the USA. There was rising international competition both to deliver into global markets and to attract the best students from around the world. The expansion of the MBA market has been especially marked (and has operated as a ‘standard’ classification that makes comparisons of business schools ostensibly easier). Business school education is by no means all located in traditional university departments but increasingly embraces new corporate providers


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as well. While the more established players in the universities compete with other departments in their institutions for resources and prestige – and where research is especially highly prized – the newer, often private, corporate providers adopt more commercial goals and focus on providing effective, relevant and well-delivered programmes to executives for a good financial return. Inevitably, this plethora of often untested and unknown providers generates a market need for systems and guides that start to sort out the wheat from the chaff, that authoritatively define ‘excellence’ and ‘legitimacy’ in the field of business education, and that evaluate suppliers for the benefit of consumers. The FT business rankings reflect this requirement for increased and robust consumer information, and also the desire by providers themselves to have some sense of their own perceived hierarchy. There was a growing need for a more ‘orderly’ and disciplined market in business education than was prevailing in the ‘gold rush’ of the 1990s, as individual provider claims for their own prestige and excellence for the various business studies programmes on offer lacked realistic external validation. Although self-regulatory expansion of accreditation was growing at this time also in response to the need for a more orderly management education ‘market’, and becoming stricter, it was nonetheless operated by the producers and appeared to lack independent verification. Mostly too it specified the accomplishment of minimum standards on an approved/non-approved binary basis rather than providing the more fine-grained evaluations and hierarchies generally published by league table compilers and which were apparently wanted by consumers. Accreditation does little to differentiate in an authoritative way between the multitude of even accredited providers in a manner sought by students and employers. As business education has expanded globally, other forms of regulatory transnational authority have seemed necessary to distinguish the genuine and the serious from the less serious and even the fraudulent. And, as we have noted in previous chapters, such authority in the modern form of globalization tends to be private, or at least located within wider public–private communities of experts. The FT and similar rankings of business schools in other publications were, and continue to be, a response to the demand for a more orderly sector by both providers and customers, for one that, once constituted, attracts standing and esteem to business education as a field of activity as legitimate as other areas of knowledge-production and education. A key contribution of the compilers has been their attempts to set standards and devise notions of the principles that help to determine the standing of the major education suppliers. The criteria adopted in rankings, particularly those with the authority of the FT, help to disseminate norms, values and

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key notions about management education as well as indications of those players that match such ideals through a hierarchical league table arrangement. A critical assumption, especially for international ratings, is that such ideals are universal and quite regular around the globe, thus allowing for comparative investigation of the standing of business schools on the basis of a similarity that overcomes differences stemming from local cultures. Consequently, not being included in the FT, and in some other league tables (such as Business Week), appears worse in the eyes of some providers than appearing in their very lower reaches. Minimum requirements such as length of establishment, size and turnover militate against new and smaller providers making an appearance and help the league table compilers to maintain a certain level of stability in their rankings. The FT assessments also seek to compete with existing US-dominated rankings of business schools by incorporating European and other non-US providers within the higher echelons of its league tables. This aim coincides with wider inter-governmental policy discussions to create a more standardized and converged higher education arena in Europe, epitomized by the Bologna Process instigated in 1998/99 (and discussed in the previous chapter). In time, too, more Australasian business schools have been included in the top tiers of the FT, and US monopolization of the highest rankings has become less marked. The comparative evaluations and assessments found in the FT’s business schools rankings have also been aided by a form of internal standardization within the field, notably diffusion of the common label ‘MBA’ (Master of Business Administration), which in turn has aided globalization processes. Moreover, the FT utilizes the self-regulatory processes of accreditation as a form of initial ‘sifting’ for its own private authority by excluding from consideration for its rankings those that have yet to receive such a status. (Generally the FT uses the three main accreditation systems – AACSB (USA), EQUIS (Europe) and AMBA (UK) – which, although accrediting internationally, tend to be used respectively by business schools from their own region.) Accreditation and newspaper rankings together help to constitute a wider global market for suppliers of management education by constructing a regulatory architecture and levels of transparency and accountability within which both suppliers and consumers feel some level of rule-like, but not legal, protection. As in other fields, growing competition both generates and is dependent upon increased regulatory frameworks (if also involving lessened state micro-management). As national higher education systems generally have become subject to the processes of both globalization and the worldwide policy diffusion of the ‘new public management’ template, which delegates considerable autonomy to the universities for their organizational futures and the effectiveness of their operations away


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from national states (see Chapter 1), increased consumer guidance of the kind provided by newspapers and other private sources of assessment has seemed more urgent. But rankings also meet the organizational needs of the providers. Wedlin suggests that lists are part of the ‘certification contests’ between organizations, and thus part of their reputation-building status, competing for symbolic resources and image control. These are particularly important in fields where the quality of ‘products’ is difficult to assess and where the goals of the education organization are ambiguous. Consequently, rankings generate modelling and emulation of the elite schools that appear (quite consistently) at the top end of the rankings. Partly such outcomes are self-confirmatory, as league table publishers cannot afford to have the acknowledged leading players unwilling to be involved as a result of not having their elite positions confirmed. Such an outcome would severely diminish the much-sought-after ‘authority’ that compilers are anxious to build up and maintain. These processes contribute to the legitimacy and regulatory coordination of the field but, in comparison with accreditation for example, nonetheless create tensions and competitive pressures for the business schools themselves. They generate uncertainty and risk – how others are ‘playing the game’ is never that obvious or particularly revealed – and require the schools to maximize their efforts to achieve good ratings (not necessarily aiming at the very top but with the objective, at least in the short term, of being competitive within the ‘set’ of institutions within which an institution is usually compared). Rankings clearly pose major challenges to institutional identity, which we might define as the corporate view about itself, including ‘founding myths’ concerning the ‘narrative’ and purposes of the organization. Poor league table positions challenge the proclaimed virtues and standing of a business school or university, not least in comparison with peers and competitors (Elsbach and Kramer 1996). When the old polytechnics in the UK were designated as universities in 1992, an ostensible policy purpose was to enable them to compete on equal terms with the more well-established universities. The granting of university title aimed at providing them with a marketing fillip in both domestic and overseas markets. A university was a university was a university: this was the thinking. All possessed common standards and values – this was the prevailing, or at least formal, egalitarian view, of both the government and the higher education sector at the time. UK league tables, however, nearly always have placed the new ‘post1992’ universities below the rankings of virtually all ‘pre-1992’ universities, helping to undermine claims to equal standing with older university counterparts. At the same time, prospective students, schools, employers and others were confronted by a much more heterogeneous set of players

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in the higher education sector after the ending of the binary line between the universities and the old polytechnics that was implemented by the new university designations. The title of university seemed insufficient by itself any more to guarantee ‘top-of-class’ standards or even to justify the formal view that all degrees were of the same standard. League tables offer a simple solution to the information problems that stakeholders face. In that sense they play a similar role to that played by the credit ratings companies in the field of financial services. These offer categorizations of companies, based on researched and authoritative assessments of their ability to repay debt, at a time of escalating globalization and the rise of junk bonds. The next section looks more closely at university rankings within a comparative context provided by the role of these credit ratings agencies.

UNIVERSITY LEAGUE TABLE COMPILERS AS ‘EMBEDDED KNOWLEDGE REGULATORS’ We take the description of university league table compilers as ‘embedded knowledge regulators’ from Sinclair’s view of the major debt rating agencies in the field of financial services – notably Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch – as ‘embedded knowledge networks’ (Sinclair 2002, 2005). The term ‘regulator’ rather than ‘network’ is preferred because we are generally, throughout this chapter especially, analysing the governance or standards-setting influences of university rankings as a form of private regulatory authority. Moreover, in a world characterized by open source learning as part of key global flows, university rankings particularly operate as ‘status-reproducing’ regulators for institutions at least as much as influencing prices and similar economic market values such as the commercialization of intellectual property (Marginson 2008b). Nonetheless, although the similarities between newspaper league tables and the credit ratings are not exact, some interesting parallel developments may be observed, not least as both function to privatize policymaking, reinforcing and reflecting a restricted role for governmental authority in an era of rapid globalization. These similarities may indicate how university rankings may develop in the future, a theme pursued at greater length in the following chapters. Sinclair’s investigations are particularly helpful in that regard. Like the credit rating agencies, newspapers and other private university rankers operate as expert and authoritative judges of the organizations that lie within their scope of interest, and particularly of their key reputations, capacities and other characteristics. Their evaluations shape


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the purchasing and investment decisions of the important stakeholders in higher education, including students, their parental and schools advisors, employers, and governments themselves. There are other parallels with these financial debt assessors, notably the spreading global influence of such private regulators from early origins in the USA so that either US-owned or more local entities employing methodologies drawn from the USA can be found conducting rankings in many parts of the world. Ratings agencies and league table compilers are key instruments for the diffusion of global templates and standards in their fields – financial services and higher education respectively. In higher education, this form of global governance increasingly finds expression in hierarchical global rankings of institutions, while the credit ratings agencies assess organizations, including nation-states, according to worldwide classifications and bandings. Moreover, while the credit agencies are often regulated by states such as by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the USA – albeit to date in a fairly light-touch way, although this may change as a consequence of the recent difficulties in worldwide financial markets, which, in part, have been attributed by some in government to the inability of the credit agencies to successfully evaluate and price risk in securitization processes – newspaper rankings are not subject to legal regulation in national jurisdictions. However, private forms of regulatory influence – ‘soft law’ – are emerging for compilers, such as the recommendations of good practice for league table producers associated with the development and publication of the Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions in Berlin in 2007. The Berlin Principles are the outcome of the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG), a joint initiative established in 2004 by the UNESCO European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) in Bucharest and the Institute for Higher Education Policy in the USA. They set a framework for the elaboration and dissemination of rankings – notwithstanding whether they are national, regional or global in coverage – that ultimately is intended to generate a process of continuous improvement and refinement of the methodologies that are employed in the rankings. Nonetheless, the broad mode of governance in both the credit ratings and the university rankings is essentially control through influence (although governments may also incorporate their assessments as part of ‘ruling authority’ or legal decisionmaking). We may define a ‘knowledge regulator’ as an entity that authoritatively assembles and analyses data from a number of sources, makes comparative assessments of organizations based on these data and on their own assumptions, and communicates its judgements to market and other participants seeking simplified information when confronted with a maze of

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information that limits their own abilities to undertake the task. The source of authority is expertise and knowledge, not rule-making legal power, and such entities possess what is often described as ‘epistemic authority’. Their products are knowledge outputs in the form of benchmarks, models and, of course, comparative assessments, which in the case of university league tables often (but not always) take the form of institutional aggregation of data to provide overall numerical scores and hierarchical ranking from the best (top) to the worst (bottom) performers. In this sense, university rankings help to constitute national and global markets. That is, their standard-setting, information and judgements are functions which facilitate exchanges and purchases between buyers and sellers that help to promote marketization, competition and increasingly globalization. As a form of private authority, league tables are ‘embedded’ within higher education sectors. Compilers use public and collected data to exert influence over market transactions, and institutions have to operate with the recognition that the compilers are important market participants. Despite claims from universities that the rankings are ‘irrational’, ‘subjective’ and ‘unreal’, institutions nonetheless have to act as if they were very real in their consequences. Compilers are constituent parts of higher education sectors and are not simply outside influences; they are endogenous rather than exogenous actors. An important process for understanding the expansion of embedded knowledge networks in financial services is a process described by Sinclair as ‘disintermediation’, which is at the heart of the new global finance. It refers primarily to the growth of a range of newly established entities and products alongside more traditional providers in a globalizing world that makes it difficult for older forms of established authority in national jurisdictions to control excessive behaviours through possession of direct information about the marketplace. That is, in transnational markets there is an increasing information problem that hampers transactions and investment if not rectified. Under the more territorial-bounded processes for financial services of a couple of decades and more ago, the banks had generally performed the gate-keeping function of guaranteeing prudential behaviour, and the maintenance of borrowers’ ability to meet debt obligations and to remain solvent, to investors. That is, they knew the customers to whom they had extended finance. In more disintermediated markets, however, it becomes more difficult for lenders to make evaluations about the possibilities of repayment. The high cost of gathering such information from many disparate sources for any one individual investor has produced specialized bodies, such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, to undertake the task centrally and with the advantages of economies of scale. Similar processes of disintermediation may be observed in higher


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education as it globalizes, deregulates (operationally) and marketizes. Consumers and producers require centralized authoritative evaluations of universities and colleges, including as sellers of a range of services (research, teaching and applied knowledge) and as sources of alliances and networks. Newspaper and other non-governmental rankings undertake this function. Like credit rating agencies they have depended for their growth on the increasing availability of standardized outputs and data that are required by governments and their agencies from the institutions, and which form the basis of comparative judgements about the institutions nationally and, increasingly, on a global scale. Although governmental bodies, such as quality assurance agencies, are increasingly coming together to operate across borders to devise common protocols and approaches – as found within the Bologna Process, for example – it is the private league tables that provide the more granulated assessments that may be of most benefit to university clients in their purchasing decisions. Cross-border exchanges in an age of marketized globalization in higher education are facilitated better by imperfect but broadly accepted hierarchical rankings than by the relatively undiscriminating or minimalthreshold outcomes emerging from those public agencies performing accreditation and quality assurance functions. University rankings, especially as they increase the range of their institutional coverage and assessments, help to include newer universities within the wider market assessments needed to gain legitimacy and leverage in fragmentary markets, and allow purchasers and investors to give consideration to these recent newcomers on the higher education block. (Nonetheless, this does not prevent overseas governments and others declining to consider seriously institutions at the lower end of such tables for support through, say, financial scholarships to students, although some overseas students may still be attracted to some such institutions for ‘non-elite’ or even non-education reasons, such as a quiet/lively location.) Although we cannot describe the expansion of higher education providers in recent years as equivalent to the creation of the junk bond or ‘Eurobond’ markets for credit in financial services, the phenomenon nonetheless indicates the passing away of more local, intimate and tacit knowledge conduits in favour of the more explicit, formal and ‘scientific’ communications of the league tables for solving consumers’ transactional problems in choosing between universities of many different hues and origins. Of course, as we have seen, the claimed rationality by compilers for their rankings is often hotly contested by many in higher education institutions. In a way this hardly matters (although it matters to the extent that the rankings must live by some form, even veneer, of scientific methodology,

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not least when they are dealing with universities that are the high priests of such canons). But universities have to deal with the rankings as having substantive consequences for their identities, reputation and general wellbeing whatever the doubts about their rationality and objectivity. Others take them seriously, so universities have to also. To paraphrase the famous social psychologist W.I. Thomas, if something is perceived to be real, it is real. In financial markets too, if an issuer of credit such as bonds takes against the rating given it by Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s on its creditworthiness or ability to meet promised repayments (AAA being the highest rating, all the way down to D or ‘payment default’) it does not mean that rating judgements can be disregarded. Rather, they are ‘facts’ of the marketplace and have to be dealt with as such (including by paying higher interest charges on loans). In the way that educationalists will refer to a ‘top 20’ institution in the university rankings then so do financial traders commonly describe companies as ‘triple A rated’ or similar, as though such a label and positioning were relatively uncontroversial (Sinclair 2002). As with league tables in higher education, there is concern in Asia and Europe especially that credit ratings are overly influenced by US or Anglo-American models and ignore the local cultural criteria operating elsewhere in the world. Rankings and ratings inevitably mould the actions of those dependent on their judgements, including by weakening wider public policy initiatives. As we shall see in the next chapter, in England, for example, there is evidence that widening participation and social access initiatives promoted by the government are attenuated by the influence of newspaper league tables and their rewarding for the application of more selective criteria for undergraduate admissions than those aiming to recruit less qualified but socially disadvantaged students (Locke et al. 2008). In this sense rankings act as a form of quasi-governance, relying to some extent on public data but able to exercise magnetisms that pull policies away from the intentions of democratically elected governments. Sinclair (2002), referring to the major US credit rating agencies, suggests that embedded knowledge networks do not possess two key resources normally enjoyed by public agencies – wider social as opposed to market legitimacy, and the executive ability to respond to crises through rule-making (as illustrated in the global credit crisis of 2008 and the collapse of banks and insurers as a consequence of their de-rating by Moody’s, and by Standard & Poor’s, and which required governmental intervention). Consequently there is an ‘accountability gap’ with such private authority. As has been found with university rankings there appears not to be the same responsiveness to concerns by those most affected of the kind expected from governmental agencies.


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In return, however, in financial services governments may rely on the judgements of the credit agency rankings rather than make their own in determining risk sensitivity, such as restricting the investment activities of banks to instruments of low credit risk (Kerwer 2002:293–315). In higher education, governments have directed funds aimed at helping talented pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds to obtain places in higher education at ‘top universities’ to those that are the highly ranked institutions in the league tables (as occurred in the UK in 2008; see THE, 21 February 2008). University rankings compilers, nonetheless, are under no obligation to explain or defend their actions, and some of the calculations are not always transparent or readily reproducible (Locke et al. 2008). However, many such rankers do seek to consult with the higher education sector and have made more details of their methodologies open to wider scrutiny than before (see Sanoff 2007 for examples of the increasingly consultative processes adopted by USNWR in the USA). Nonetheless, despite more transparency on the data and the variables, compilers tend not to reveal the basis for their final judgements, not least perhaps to retain that element of confidentiality and flexibility that they may feel adds to their overall ‘mystery’ and impact. Another reason is that such judgements will always contain a qualitative factor that is not easily codified. Moreover, although league table compilers are less secretive than before and seek to explain more roundly than ever the reasons for their judgements, such efforts may be part of establishing better relations with the sector, whose cooperation is highly important to the publishers, rather than seriously amending the basis for their judgements. It could be argued that university rankings are the purveyors of privately constructed and voluntary standards (apart from instances when governments make them mandatory in public regulation) that people are free to adopt or disregard, unlike the law-like manifestations associated with public regulation. In comparison with the involuntary application of legal-backed rules, with private authority of the kind exercised by league tables, people and organizations have the option of constructing their own standards, or adapting those distributed by alternative standards-issuers (Brunsson 1999). By definition, private standards always contain some element of accountability deficit because their originators cannot be held to account ‘publicly’ for what they disseminate – although, of course, too many mistakes result in lost authority and increase the incentives for other standards-setters to enter the marketplace. Standardizers tend not to invoke bureaucratic authority or penalties but rather offer them as voluntary and as able to be followed by anyone. They seem quite suited to contemporary higher education systems that generally are composed of autonomous universities that are likely to bridle at direct

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command-and-control regulation, not least from the state. Standards preserve organizational independence while offering the promise of orderliness through models of rationality that institutions may wish to follow. In globalization even autonomous university and other organizations feel a strong need to cooperate and collaborate, including across territorial borders, for competitive advantage or security (Brunsson 1999). ‘Soft law’ in transnational contexts works through recommendation, advice and guidelines supported by processes of peer pressure, and where standards adopted by organizations provide key forms of coordination across the globe in the absence of a world government (see Chapter 3). In their assumption of scientific universality and rationality most standard-setters and assessors see their measures as both globally applicable and a valid source of organizational comparison. In part, some standards and rankings operate at quite a high level of ambiguity, allowing global dissemination and local adaptation but running the risk of loss of effectiveness. But generally the result of private rankings and similar ratings is high influence but little responsibility, except to provide good and expert-based justifications. Unlike accountancy, where auditors enforce the standards set by others (professional associations or governmental regulators, for example), university rankings and credit ratings assessors both set the rules and enforce them. However, in the USA, credit rating agencies are regulated and monitored by the SEC, a public supervisor, in contrast to the lack of formal regulatory oversight of organizations disseminating university rankings. Nonetheless, the development of the Berlin Principles (above) provides an opportunity for some form of ‘soft regulation’ of the league tables, possibly as part of the inter-governmental measures associated with the Bologna Process for creating a common European higher education space.

AUTHORITY AND INFLUENCE IN LEAGUE TABLES As with the credit agencies in financial services, the essential functions of private league tables of university performance are probably best viewed as not providing a precise or accurate gauge of comparative institutional position. At best they may be seen as offering some approximation of university reputation according to a particular model. However, as ratings are required to accord with scientific and rational canons, they clearly cannot be works of fiction and must have demonstrable evidence bases (much of which is provided in the data collection of national public agencies in Europe, if less so in the USA and Canada, for example). Nonetheless, their significance stems less from their empirical correctness


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than from their judgements as a constituent market participant, and recognition that these outputs are facts of environmental life that are viewed by many as very real. That is, other actors do not regard the institutional and other hierarchical rankings as necessarily correct but rather as important sources of influence that cannot be ignored. More particularly, the rising influence of rankings in the last decade or so may be traced to the growing globalization of higher education institutions, in which suppliers and consumers are increasingly ‘distant’ from each other, and where students especially, but also other stakeholders, seek increased information when faced with overwhelming yet inadequate market information upon which to make purchasing or investment choices. The demand for the simplified, condensed and formalized outcomes of the league tables increases as previously informal, insider and tacit knowledge is no longer regarded as sufficient for market participants operating more as ‘strangers’. The expansion of cross-border operations by universities, and a concomitant sense of heightened risk and uncertainty, intensifies the requirements by stakeholders, and particularly consumers, for obtaining apparently objectified knowledge from those who are ‘detached insiders’ within higher education – that is, who are embedded knowledge brokers and private regulators. These requirements for independent but authoritative analyses reflect greater fluidities and uncertainties in higher education markets. Many institutional names are less well known and trusted than in pre-mass and pre-globalized eras. Moreover, there is wider consumer distrust these days of self-regulatory and professional processes for assuring quality across a range of sectors, as well as concern too with command-and-control state practices and use of communication techniques by university executives for ‘spinning’ issues favourably in the media. Some form of ‘independence’ as well as inside authority and knowledge is sought from those seeking to avail themselves of university services, and private league tables appear to suit such purposes. Moreover, they do not simply constrain other market actors but actually facilitate marketization and globalization in higher education through processes of ordering. It is this function that attracts considerable legitimacy to the league tables and reinforces perceptions that increasingly they are an internal constituent of higher education sectors rather than simply an external force. Although league table compilers generally stipulate that consumers should not rely solely on the rankings and should use other sources of information, the simplicity of numerical institutional rankings is inevitably regarded as conveying a high heuristic by prospective students and others, and such headline evaluations provide at least a useful ‘first sieving’ in applications’ decisionmaking. The evidence is of expanding league table influence in these and other processes in comparison with other factors.

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The growth of global rankings, notably those associated with the THES and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is likely to compound the influence of university rankings amongst the most prestigious universities and also for ministers aiming to make their higher education systems more competitive globally. They are likely to reinforce the strategies of those universities seeking ‘world-class’ standing, despite the difficulties for both sets of compilers in obtaining verified and comparable data across territorial borders, particularly outside the research realm. Essentially global and national university rankings seek to make the world of higher education more knowable, more orderly as markets, and more amenable to a pattern of governance suitable for the marketized, competitive and increasingly transnational organizations that universities have become. This form of governance is control at a distance and employs modes of soft regulatory influence that appear appropriate for entities with their futures in their own hands and not those of the state.

CONCLUSION The relationship of league tables to wider public policy is problematical. On the one hand, ministers speak of ‘the best universities’ with the top-ranking institutions in mind, as if the rankings expressed at least an approximation to objective reality. They frequently incorporate the rankings as risk-reducing and selecting processes in funding and similar policy initiatives. As quality assurance methodologies by governmentendorsed agencies increasingly depend on ‘meta-regulation’ or ‘regulating regulation’ – namely turning the internal and self-regulatory processes and procedures of universities into the facts of external evaluation – then the abilities of universities to manage risk will be a key component of quality regulation. Similarly league table outcomes are also forms of risk, particularly to reputation, that require effective management and careful communication. A number of countries are seeking to create more ‘world-class universities’ in their jurisdictions through selective funding policies that seek to propel at least a core of institutions into the top-ranks of either the THES or Shanghai global rankings. Politicians and journalists increasingly scrutinize these annual rankings and they bring pressure to bear on governments. Moreover, the rankings of universities as used in other countries influences ‘sending’ countries for international students to limit opportunities in their funding support to those going only to the best-ranked institutions rather than also include those that may be more appropriate for particular individual needs. Government agencies also provide much


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of the data utilized by national league tables in a number of countries and presumably could more closely specify what is collected in their name in the direction of, say, student learning outcomes or social access that compilers would be compelled to take account of. Yet league tables while of use and support for some governmental policies also appear to diminish the force of some national public policies, such as those encouraging widening participation and institutional diversity. Ministers, understandably, are reluctant to become involved either in making overt declarations concerning the private tables or in producing ones of their own. After all, why enter such controversial areas where inevitably some institutions will always feel hard done by in the rankings? Although the leading global credit ratings agencies in financial services are regulated by the SEC in the USA, this is quite long-established (since the mid-1970s). It would be more difficult now to establish law-based regulatory arrangements for university league table compilers. Besides, such regulation may severely diminish the critical attributes of private rankers, namely their independence, their perceived (or at least claimed) objectivity, and their reputation. However, there is a sense that league table compilers should be at least ‘soft-regulated’ through the establishment of ‘best-practice’ recommendations such as those constructed at Berlin in 2006 (see above). Voluntary principles based on expert advice and relying on processes of peer pressures of the kind found in the Berlin Principles, and adopted inter-governmentally, say, within the Bologna Process or formally by the OECD or UNESCO, could be quite compelling for compilers. Yet league table compilers know that too much codification diminishes the space to exercise their qualitative judgements and may resist. Universities are free to ignore league tables. Yet they know that these set the benchmarks that others organize themselves around. Inevitably the rankings shape the actions of institutions and the perceptions of those seeking to use their services in a world of imperfect information. If universities seek the high regard of a number of key constituencies it is hard for them not to adjust their actions to attain good rankings, even if the opportunities for doing so are moderated by the availability of resources, the pull of competing priorities, and the restrictions implied by the criteria employed by rankers that appear to severely disadvantage some types of institutions, such as the post-1992 new universities in England. Rating universities is not new; it has probably occurred as long as we have had universities. But until recently these judgements were rather private acts and involved the assessment of fairly homogeneous institutions in a clublike world of tacit understandings. Now everyone – publicly – knows the organizational story, and it may not be the one that lowly ranked university leaders prefer to promote. For those that are down the tables, media

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amplification results in public ‘naming and shaming’, and feelings by some of victimization and scandalization. Some others feel worse, however – those that do not feature at all in the rankings. This is a worst fate than appearing at the lower end. At least those in these lower positions are recognized as legitimate universities, as part (albeit a lowly part) of a natural order. Others that are excluded from the rankings, perhaps on grounds of size, recent establishment or spread of subjects offered, are often very anxious to be included as quickly as possible. In the UK, when the polytechnics became the new universities with the abolition of the formal so-called ‘binary line’ demarcating them from the established universities in 1992, and very soon ran into the hierarchical differentiation in the league tables that they thought that they had left behind, a consolation at least was that they were at least included in such league tables – they were, somewhat perversely perhaps, confirmed in their (lowly) university identities whereas before they were excluded. It was maybe a small comfort at the time. A decade and more later this inclusion perhaps no longer acts as such a balm for the pains of those lowly ranked. But many colleges and specialist universities yet to be ranked meanwhile are seeking the recognition and identity that university league tables undoubtedly confer, by becoming included even if it means a lowly ranking. University league tables are rather like the major debt repayment evaluators, such as Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s, analysed by Sinclair (2005), in that they ‘produce knowledge that is socially and politically partial, and then objectify this knowledge, making it authoritative’ (p. 59). Those both inside and (especially) outside higher education believe that league tables compilers know what they are doing. Yet social scientists especially understand that knowledge is not external, free-floating and neutral but tends to reflect the outcome of the clashes between different social interests. The social particularity of knowledge does not make it necessarily any less authoritative, although a successful exercise of power is to have such particularistic knowledge widely recognized as ‘commonsense’, ‘everyday’ or even ‘universal’. University league tables and their formulations are similarly vested, and largely accepted, in higher education markets too. The compilers are not simply private commercial entities but ‘public regulators’, except that they do not seek to convince others to conform to their view of the world but only to take this view as highly significant and preferably authoritative. The hierarchies in the rankings are not simply the outcome of technical exercises and calculations but involve judgements based on qualitative and often undisclosed interpretations. If we are claiming, however, that the significance of university league tables lies in their impact rather than their irreproachable and rational


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methodology, then we need to examine the consequences for institutions of the rankings before we are able to arrive at a fuller understanding of the phenomenon than we have so far. This is not easy, as many academic and other analyses of university league tables have focused on their methods and techniques, normally to demonstrate how unsatisfactory they are. However, recent work, not least by Ellen Hazelkorn at the OECD, and a team of researchers (including this author) commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Locke et al. 2008), has begun to outline the behavioural and policy impacts of the rankings on universities. It is to these that we turn in the next chapter.

6.

The impact of rankings on institutional behaviour and policies

INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter we examined the role of non-governmental league tables of university reputation and performance, notably those produced by newspapers and other private entities, including the rankings produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong Institute of Higher Education. Particularly, we described these rankings as a source of private authority that was becoming globalized in two senses. First, rankings of universities as whole institutions or through subject evaluations are found across the world. Although originating in the USA they operate now in nearly all the major national systems of higher education. In this sense, rankings are an example of localized globalization, or globalization materializing in national locales. Second, we are witnessing in recent years the growth of global university rankings, with ‘world-class institutions’ compared with each other through indicators judged to offer the basis of comparability and standardization, predominantly research performance and transnational reputation. The proposition we advanced was that compilers of league tables may be described as ‘embedded knowledge regulators’. Increasingly they operate as significant influences on institutions, and many higher education stakeholders regard them as authoritative and knowledgeable market participants. This is not to overlook the criticism that institutional league tables especially attract from within universities – for their alleged poor methods and apparent obliviousness to increasing institutional diversity, for example. But university rankings are best judged less for their technical accuracy than for the impacts that they have on institutional behaviour and on those seeking to avail themselves of university programmes or products. What are the effects of rankings on university decisionmaking? This is a question that is not easy to answer, not least because much of the analyses of league tables have focused on the adequacy or otherwise of the compilers’ methodologies and their assumptions, rather than on their institutional significance. Moreover, research indicates that institutions are reluctant to admit that they are ‘driven’ by league tables although the evidence suggests that they exert a growing influence on institutional 166

The impact of rankings on institutional behaviour

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strategies (Hazelkorn 2008; Locke et al. 2008). Rather, rankings are offered as reinforcing existing organizational policies and actions, and as facilitating internal data collection and accountabilities, but not as determining what institutions do. There is something not quite respectable for such organizations to admit to sizeable external factors impelling their actions, particularly when such factors appear to flout the canons of methodological rigour and scientific awareness of contingency and complexity. Although universities are increasingly responsible for their futures in situations of high competitiveness, they are nonetheless conscious that their ‘rationality’ as autonomous actors requires at least ostensible purposefulness and choice rather than appearing to be buffeted by influences over which they have little control. However, there are two studies that have examined the impact of rankings on universities, and their analyses offer useful perspectives for seeking to gauge the significance of the league tables for university policymaking and other actions. An OECD-supported study by Hazelkorn (2007, 2008) uses a cross-national survey of university leaders to assess the impact of university rankings in a number of countries. The other investigation, for the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which was conducted by a team from the Open University (UK) and Hobsons Research, focused only on English universities but used both an on-line survey of attitudes and more in-depth analyses based on six institutional case studies (Locke et al. 2008). The purpose in both investigations was to gain an insight into the views and actions of those within the institutions rather than to explore the perceptions of a wider group of ‘non-producer’ users of the rankings. This non-inclusion of wider stakeholders and other users potentially is quite significant. A major objective of league tables is to measure institutional reputation, but such a phenomenon is less an inherent characteristic of an organization than how others outside regard it. Consequently, further research is needed more directly on other than university employees, to include such users as prospective students and employers, to arrive at a fuller picture. For the moment, however, more indirectly, we are able to rest upon views from within institutions that report perceptions on league table usage by these other groups. We start with the Hazelkorn findings, as some of the survey methods in her work were subsequently replicated by Locke and his colleagues for the HEFCE study.

INTERNATIONAL SURVEY The international survey of higher education leaders and senior managers by Hazelkorn (2007, 2008) clearly identifies a majority of respondents (57

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per cent) who regard the impact of league tables as having been broadly positive for their institution’s reputation and as generally helping its development, such as in attracting students, forming academic partnerships, other collaborations, programme development and staff morale. Moreover, a similar percentage had established a formal internal process for reviewing their rankings, usually led by top management. The study appears to indicate quite a significant if minority interest by university councils or trustees to locate league table performance within their wider governance responsibilities and to seek regular reports. Almost 50 per cent of respondents used the rankings for marketing purposes, including in media statements, advertisements and prospectuses and on their websites. This indicates that almost as important as the overall rankings in establishing institutional reputation is the ability of higher education organizations to amplify significant components of them in the media and elsewhere to their competitive advantage. Inevitably perhaps, the majority of respondents were found to incorporate the outcomes of rankings into their strategic planning processes and to take policy actions based on them. The rankings are used also for managerial processes, to identify weaknesses and to resolve institutional issues, and to develop better management information systems. Despite the widespread cynicism attached to league tables by the respondents in Hazelkorn’s study – the methodologies were described as simplistic and as lacking transparency, and as placing too high an emphasis on research and reputation rather than learning and teaching performance, or on student outcomes, while many of those from lowly ranked institutions were particularly scornful of the league tables for creating a cycle of disadvantage by reinforcing traditional hierarchies – nearly three-quarters monitored the performance of other higher education institutions in the rankings and used the information before seeking alliances and joint ventures. Underlining the expansion of international university networks in recent years, such as Universitas 21 and Coimbra (Beerkens 2007), around a third of respondents reported that other institutions were influenced by league tables in determining whether to support admission to prestigious academic and professional groupings. This is unsurprising perhaps, as esteemed affiliations are often featured on university websites or in their staffing and student recruitment literatures, and appear to be used as a mark of some kind of quality. These findings from the Hazelkorn investigation may be located within the increasing pressures and challenges facing universities and colleges in a world of globalization, not least the scramble for high-quality staff and students, and for more secure sources of private funding. Governmentally too, there is much greater demand for universities to display wider public


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accountability, not just for the taxpayers’ monies that they receive – which for a growing number is a declining proportion of their overall financing – but also to their clients and consumers. State-backed quality assurance, standardized data returns and benchmarking exercises have turned these accountabilities into a much more formalized and systemic regulatory set of procedures than generally existed before. Private governance influences are also growing, such as the rankings, but so also is increased investigative journalism by the media into university activities. The popularity for students of social networking and similar internet-based sites for ‘blogging’ institutional experiences to the wider world is also adding a consumer experience to institutional accountabilities, especially in a transnational context as international students particularly are adept at advising potential successor applicants of their experiences through such sites, sometimes in terms detrimental to the institution. In the Hazelkorn investigation, institutions seemed as concerned with achieving higher rankings as they were in doubting the approaches of the compilers. Almost 60 per cent of respondents felt that their current institutional rankings were too low, while over 90 per cent wanted to improve their national positions in the tables. In terms of longer-terms aspirations Hazelkorn found that 70 per cent wanted to be in the top 10 per cent nationally, and in the top 25 per cent internationally. Nonetheless, although some institutions looked carefully at the rankings and sought to use the components as aids to future planning, others, especially in the top tiers, used the results mainly to reassure themselves about their standing in the world. In some cases, despite overall criticism of league tables or their positions in them, institutions were not slow to extract ‘good news’ elements to assist the wider promotion of the organization. Despite the claims of some respondents that subject or disciplinary rankings were both more realistic and more informative to students than simple hierarchies of institutions based on aggregated scores, twice as many respondents favoured the apparently more simplistic institutional rankings than those at programme or departmental level only. Increasingly the world of higher education, and the providing institutions within it, is perceived by symbols and simple representations, and league tables and the uses to which they are put fall into that category. As we have noted in previous chapters, there is considerable psychological research noting that individuals seek simple heuristics or bounded rationalities in their general decisionmaking, rather than approach such matters on the basis of sophisticated and fully rationalist empirical enquiry. Institutional rankings may be regarded as examples of such representations. They provide an easy and relatively undemanding guide to users who are faced with the prospects of information overload or uncertainty

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in their decisionmaking, such as when applying for a university place, for example. These difficulties are compounded as higher education suppliers and markets expand around the globe and accurate consumer knowledge of foreign higher education systems becomes more attenuated. But institutions worry that university rankings have significance far beyond that originally intended. They do more than distribute informed information to prospective students or provide a fair assessment of university performance for consumers, but act as major sources of institutional change too. Yet a substantial majority of Hazelkorn’s respondents felt that the rankings were a poor guide to overall institutional capacities because they focused overmuch on indicators of performance in research and in attracting postgraduate students, and on the strengths of the generally well-endowed and long-established universities particularly. The result, in these perceptions, was unfair competition – a rigged market – in an age when universities were forced to play the rankings game in order to maintain their legitimacy and visibility and did not find it easy to opt out of such evaluations and face being ignored. Moreover, there was widespread doubt expressed by respondents about the intentions of the compilers in providing credible discriminations or standards. As commercial or private entities they are regarded as having other than the public interest at heart, seeking increased newspaper circulation for example, and as lacking the objectivity of more independent agencies, such as autonomous research organizations, accreditation entities or international organizations such as OECD or UNESCO (although whether the positions or overall role of such bodies are always more palatable to many within universities is also questionable).

NATIONAL IMPACTS The findings of Hazelkorn’s international research are broadly supported by the investigation of Locke and his colleagues (2008) of English universities for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The approach combines an on-line survey with in-depth case study analysis of six higher education institutions that were identified as broadly representative of the sector as a whole. The case studies especially add further elaboration to the Hazelkorn study and reveal the increasing significance and ‘routinization’ of league tables as part of the higher education environment, and their impacts on market-making and organizational planning within universities. Moreover, the research indicates that the two global rankings (the THES/QS, which commenced in 2004, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong, which preceded it in 2003) are increasingly entering


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the frames of reference of a number of English universities, although this impact is confined to either those in the top echelons of the English rankings or those with a realistic aspiration to rise in these worldwide tables. But for many institutions further down the hierarchy, global rankings have little or no significance. Survey of Higher Education Institutions The on-line survey in the Locke et al. study for HEFCE aimed to collect perceptions of higher education league tables and their impacts on institutional behaviour and policies drawn from across the higher education sector in England. The focus was on the ratings of institutions as a whole, not the evaluations of subjects and programmes, which are also found in most of the rankings. The highest level of agreement by respondents was for the statement that ‘league tables often reflect idiosyncratic views of what constitutes a good university that are often at considerable variance from institutional and government policies’. That is, many respondents regard the league tables as somewhat ‘irrational’ or unsound in the criteria that they employ for their comparable judgements and as likely to distort the preferred strategies and identities of universities. Furthermore, they are seen as undermining the declared policies of democratically elected governments. Yet the responses to other questions also illustrate the high significance that the university rankings have for institutions. There was large support for the statement that ‘rankings may affect institutional reputation and damage these beyond repair’, and also a high level of agreement that ‘achieving good rankings was important’. League table influence was felt to be exerted most on ‘the general reputation’ of the university, followed by student recruitment, employers, the building of networks and alliances, then the key performance indicators (KPIs) adopted by the top levels of the university, and finally (and equally) the recruitment of academics and attracting financial resources. Consequently, most of the respondents reported that their institution had responded in some way to the rankings, although, as we noted above, there was strong emphasis on denying that the institution was ‘leaguetable driven’ or that league tables were substantially changing institutional agendas. The majority of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that the league tables gave impetus to implementing change of which, it is claimed, much would have happened anyway. One most frequently mentioned institutional response to league tables was the establishment of a senior team to provide systematic internal analysis of the league table methodologies and the reasons underlying the institution’s ranking. Many universities had established dedicated

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working parties to undertake the task and to recommend actions, and around a third of respondents were looking closely at their data and their submissions to both compilers and the governmental Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA), the body drawn upon by compilers for much of their information. There were signs that universities’ performance measures were also aligning more closely with components of the league tables for internal strategic, planning and managerial purposes. In some cases direct communication with compilers had been initiated to take advice on how to optimize data returns, to gain an insight into how the rankings are constructed, and to seek to influence methodologies. It is clear, however, that league table influence can run with the grain of other forces. The HEFCE’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is such a case, as it reinforces research selectivity and hierarchy based on quality assessments. Similarly, the recently introduced National Student Satisfaction (NSS) survey returns instigated by HEFCE not only are used by league table publishers as a proxy for teaching and learning performance, which consequently reinforces the importance of these data, but appear to be exerting a pull on institutions in their own right. Universities reported that they take the NSS positions seriously as an independent factor outside the tables, not least because they provide intra-departmental comparisons internally and also chime with current maxims concerning students as customers. A few institutions reported that they had improved academic infrastructural and other student facilities as a result of the NSS. They had increased library and information technology expenditures, had enhanced student services, and had introduced strategies to improve teaching and learning experiences. However, sporadic reports in the education press allege considerable efforts by some universities to ‘rig’ the results in various ways, such as by warning students that comments to the NSS that were adverse to the university could harm the value of their degree. Nonetheless, it would appear that after planning and data improvement, and the incorporation of rankings into institutional output measures, most changes in functional areas as a response to league table publications occur in marketing and promotion, and in press relations. In some cases the aim is to enhance the institutional ‘profiles’ that often accompany league tables (as in The Times Good University Guide) or to counteract a relatively low institutional position with more direct marketing to students and obtaining better press coverage, sometimes using selective extracts from the league tables or from the NSS. Careers services investment with the aim of gaining improvements to graduate employment prospects (a general league table variable) is amongst other moves reported, while initiatives to improve staff–student ratios (another factor in the rankings), or at least ensuring that all staff are counted in the returns, are also found.


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Nonetheless, there is also recognition that a number of key league table measures lie outside immediate direct influence, such as levels of research or the number of top-class degrees awarded (although it was reported in the THES in late 2006 that a university in Wales was changing the way it calculated students’ degree classifications so that it could award more firsts and upper seconds and thus improve its league table position. Evidence of rising numbers of students graduating with firsts and upper seconds has led to claims of ‘grade inflation’ that some attribute to league table influence). Respondents suggested that the areas that had been influenced least by the rankings were in the core academic areas of staff recruitment, course programmes, and research (although this picture is modified a little when we look at the institutional case studies in the next section). Case Studies Locke and his colleagues undertook case studies of six English higher education institutions drawn from across the sector, including senior management, representatives of the boards of governors, and staff from a number of functional areas, such as careers, marketing and promotion, student recruitment, and planning, and academic and administrative staff at departmental level. In this section we outline the findings from each of the case studies before subsequently drawing out recurring themes. The findings are an abbreviated version of those contained in the HEFCE study. Three of the case studies were undertaken by William Locke (WL) and three by this author (RK), and this is indicated below. University College (UC) (WL) UC is a small, single-campus higher education institution near a small city, and its programmes are geared mainly to the humanities, social sciences and teacher education, while half of its student population is recruited locally. As a non-university institution there is general frustration that UC does not feature in some tables, making it difficult for the college to become more widely known. Nonetheless, the student completion rate is declining, little research is undertaken, and it has a relatively low level of expenditure per student. UC tends to compare its performances with those of other small colleges, and institutions in its region, notably on student satisfaction returns, which it regards as a significant selling point for a small college. There is some doubt in the absence of hard data whether student applications are particularly influenced by league tables, although it is conceded that parents and other school advisors may be more preoccupied with them than the applicants. There was a strong view that university rankings

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generally reflected the reputational status quo in the sector and that they undervalued commitment to providing quality learning and teaching. As with other non-research-based institutions in the study, more and better measures of value-added student achievement were regarded as a key reform that was necessary for the league tables to overcome suspicion that traditional hierarchies were being perpetuated to the detriment of those outside the leading tiers. Nonetheless, league tables are regarded as significant for public relations and for the possible impact on student recruitment. Moreover, the tables are acknowledged as having helped to generate a more analytical approach to marketing within the institution, although UC acknowledges that more needs to be done to turn this new market intelligence into strategic change. However, this new approach was expected gradually to inform the development of new course programmes and to facilitate improvements in learning and teaching methods. There was the feeling that even those subjects that recruit well could improve their student support. UC is beginning to use league tables to highlight areas for improvement and has included ranking positions in its current strategic plan both as key performance indicators and as specific targets. Although senior managers are sceptical about what league tables measure, and feel that they should be seeking to raise quality rather than rankings, there is resignation that, as key stakeholders take the rankings seriously, then institutional leaders have to do so, if only to avoid charges of incompetence for neglecting them. A dedicated group has been established with responsibility for advising on how UC can improve its ranking positions. It is envisaged that departmental plans will come to reflect the league table targets established in the strategic plan and provide operational routes forward. UC is seeking to improve student retention, graduate employability and alumni engagement as a response to league tables. Undoubtedly the lay Council members take the rankings seriously and have queried whether expenditure could be more focused on achieving higher league table positions, although there is a reluctance to place the college into financial jeopardy through excessive spending on, say, new facilities. Pre-1992 University (RK) Pre-1992 University regards itself as a ‘top 20’ institution in league table terms. It has aspirations to be recognized as ‘world-class’, including moving up the global university rankings, and regards the upper echelon of the national tables as both more stable and more accurate in denoting high reputation and performance than further down. Other universities similarly established in the 1960s tend to be used as peer competitors. The university is aware that its outreach and widening participation


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push could damage its league table position. It seeks to ensure, with the league tables in mind, however, that ‘non-traditional’ student entrants nonetheless possess high traditional qualifications and that local partner institutions count them as their students. There is a quickening organizational awareness of league tables and their significant contributing elements as part of growing market pressures. With the introduction of variable tuition fees regimes has come increased organizational interest in league tables. The prospect of charging premium fees with the possible raising of government restrictions on fees limits for domestic (and EU) students on undergraduate programmes, and a desire for these to be set at the same level throughout the university, is linked with league tables in senior manager policy discourse. It also reinforces the use of league tables as an internal management tool. The executive body that oversees student recruitment and related marketing regularly examines league table influences on student applications, while the planning unit has become well versed in both understanding league table methodologies and responding to their requirements, not least on data returns. The senior management team all receive regular reports on rankings, and heads of academic units are held to account by top management for NSS and league table performances. Nonetheless, the university’s analysts are at pains to ‘routinize’ league table publications and to have them contained within regular administrative procedures and decisionmaking, rather than generate over-excited responses, including to the press, by staff or even the Council. The Council takes the rankings seriously, although it is conscious of not being blown off strategy by them. Previously informal discussions about the league tables recently have become more formal and explicit. Moreover, some of the KPIs used by the Council are modelled to dovetail with elements of the rankings. The Council is concerned to get the direction of travel in the rankings right and to move towards an eventual top ten position. Ranking position is regarded as a short-cut to reputation, especially globally. High research performance is taken to be the key, although the Council is anxious that graduates get good jobs. There is concern that widening participation will impact negatively on ranking positions, while a relatively poor ranking is seen as tempting excellent researchers to move to higher-rated institutions. However, there is also satisfaction that a good NSS score does ‘balance’ the importance of the learning experience with the traditional emphasis given to research. The university is not hostile to league tables and regards a premier tier as inevitable anyway and as part of increasing marketization and competition. It simply wants to be in the highest reaches. Rankings are viewed as helping to focus institutional energy on tackling weaknesses and contributing generally to less tolerance of poor performance. However, although a list of

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KPIs has been devised that is aligned with the rankings, there is reluctance to accept the description ‘league-table driven’. Although the university genuinely responds to elements in the league tables, it views it as rational decisionmaking not to pursue a particular ranking explicitly. Senior administrators believe that it is an issue of professionalism to be realistic and not too alarmist about the league tables, and to provide a down-to-earth interpretation to the Council and to the rest of the university. Modern Specialist University (MSU) (WL) MSU is a post-1992 specialist university ranked around the middle of the national league tables. Being a specialist university raises issues for it about direct quantitative comparisons with multidisciplinary higher education institutions in the league tables. MSU does not feature in the world rankings, despite having a good research record relative to other post-1992 universities, being regarded as a flagship domestically within its particular disciplines, and as beginning to develop an international reputation. Doing well in league tables is important for MSU as a source of peer esteem and institutional pride and, it is anticipated, for future student recruitment. A league tables working group was also set up to investigate how the league tables were compiled, the data submitted to national agencies, the ways in which research scores were calculated, and the impact of the NSS. The rankings are acknowledged as having helped to obtain institutional backing for internal changes that might not have been forthcoming otherwise. The university does not use league tables per se as key performance indicators, although it uses particular components. It monitors competitors’ positions as well as the top institutions to discover what these others may be doing from which it can learn. The board of governors regularly discusses information relating to KPIs and student satisfaction, and this includes benchmark data that position the university alongside selected other UK higher education institutions. The board appears to welcome the element of market discipline that league tables bring and believes that the rankings prompt senior managers to question their own assumptions. However, it also feels that benchmarking may be a better way of targeting resources, managing performance and being forward-looking, and that league tables are but one source of evidence. There is also a concern shared with senior managers that rankings may encourage risk aversion in some areas, although there was no real evidence of this. Post-1992 Low University (PLU) (RK) PLU is quite lowly placed in the national league tables for its size and reputation as a large post-1992 university. The rankings are felt to impact


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negatively on general institutional reputation, staff morale and student esteem and to influence (negatively) the board of governors. While sizeable student applications offer some protection against the perceived negativities of the league table position, it is recognized that future years could see national volumes decline and leave it vulnerable in some areas. Consequently the university is anxious to rise up the league tables. Although PLU accepts the inevitability of league tables it regards much of their methodology as weak or obscure. The most striking example of this is related to assessment of a particular subject provision offered in partnership with a neighbouring pre-1992 university. The provision is jointly provided with the same students, staff and facilities, yet PLU was ranked at 52 for this and the partner at 10 in one of the national subject league tables. Governors especially are influenced by league tables, as league tables provide something that they can ‘get their teeth into’. Moreover, governors read newspapers, and league tables have an immediacy and an impact. The board has set an institutional KPI of improving the position in the league tables, but the preoccupation with league tables is perceived as giving rise to pressure to move away from widening participation commitments. Some governors would prefer, especially in the ‘selecting’ course areas with high levels of applications, to focus more on raising the A-level tariff for entry and to be more selective generally and more research-focused, seeing this as a way of rising up the tables. Claims by senior managers that the league tables are ‘irrational’, as ‘reflecting Oxbridge models’, and as having perverse consequences for access and diversity, while recognized as having validity, are regarded by some governors potentially as special pleading, and lend weight to their view that staff performance must be managed effectively. Although governors are aware of inconsistencies and perceived biases in the league tables, they believe that the key components of the tables are potentially useful sector comparators. They would prefer to see action to secure improvement in some key areas (student satisfaction and retention especially) as leading to improved league table position rather than any data manipulation. Governors wonder why more first-class and upper-second-class degrees are not awarded, as the low numbers depress league table performance, but also recognize that issues of academic standards and autonomy need to be treated with care. PLU is still quite a devolved organization at the faculty level, and the aim of improving league table position, inter alia, is encouraging moves to stronger central and corporate management for some functions. It has established a senior working party to examine the league tables and the university’s current positioning. The rankings have been examined for genuine institutional messages. Initial key actions have focused on data

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issues, and the university has taken advice from league table compilers, although with mixed results. Frustration is expressed that commercial league table compilers are less amenable to normal public policy representations than other significant, generally governmental, sector agencies, and they also often refuse to expose the underlying methodologies. The aim of the senior group established for dealing with league table issues is to make ‘intelligent returns’, feeling that in previous data submissions PLU had remained relatively uninformed as to how the submitted data could be used. League tables generally are seen as encouraging gaming, with institutions now over-engineering their data submissions and feeling that, in an increasingly competitive environment, they cannot afford to be disadvantaged in their information returns. Although league tables are not yet regarded as having the same order of financial consequences as major government funding initiatives, they are regarded as a major nuisance, impacting adversely on the perceptions of overseas governments, students and large employers. Moreover, senior managers and others criticize government ministers for being as similarly partial as the league table compilers in their Oxbridge-based caricature of what is a ‘good university’. Value-added measures for student achievement are regarded as the key to legitimizing and performing well in the league tables for the post-1992 universities, but, although this variable is found in the Guardian newspaper rankings, these are generally missing elsewhere. Broader notions of ‘graduate jobs’ with extended longitudinal timelines for destination returns are also seen as necessary to counter biases against arts and humanities areas in particular. In some respects league tables are regarded as less important for local, first-generation and often more vocational student markets. Geographically mobile applicants tend to be from a very different (higher social class) background, and they seem more aware of league tables. Some schools prime their students about league tables, while some independent and grammar schools employ staff whose sole job it is to go through the league tables to guide applicants from their schools. Parents also are increasingly interested in league table information. At postgraduate level there is high awareness of both the institutional and the subject league tables, and often such students want to go to a more prestigious university for their postgraduate study than where they studied at undergraduate level. Many large employers are focusing more on league table rankings when supporting the education and training of their employees, although less so the local small businesses. Currently PLU is reviewing all student entry requirements as part of a more centralized approach than the more distributed current arrangements. In future, admissions tariff points requirements for students will


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be ‘negotiated’ with academic departments. But it will ensure that this is balanced appropriately with institutional commitment to the widening participation agenda. Broadly the aim is to continue to widen access to enable a larger pool of reasonably well-qualified (formally) applicants to be available, to ensure that less traditional entry does not lead to wastage, poor league table scores, and employment difficulties that would impact adversely on the league tables. All staff wonder what a low league table position says about them – they work hard, think that they are doing well, and then find that they are not ‘rated’ very highly. Staff morale drops and sometimes they blame senior management, other departments or those responsible for the data returns. Academic staff members in the departments have difficulty reconciling their performances with the central data submissions that lead to final league table outcomes. Despite important subject and professional external evaluations that are regarded as increasingly important in the academic departments, these are largely ignored by the league tables. As departmental level league tables are felt to devalue practitioner teachers and to undermine links with industry and the professions, in comparison with the emphasis in the rankings on attracting PhD-qualified teachers doing traditional academic research. League table position undoubtedly influences capital expenditure plans, such as on learning resources. Governors, however, do not believe that PLU needs to move into financial deficit in order to move up the rankings. Post-1992 Mid-University (PMU) (RK) PMU does reasonably well in the national league tables for this group of universities, at just below mid-table. It is recognized for its success in attracting students from overseas and for pockets of highly esteemed research. As a leading polytechnic, it had been used to being part of the top echelon, and being at the lower level in the league tables has required some adjustment. Governors get ‘quite exercised’ about PMU’s ranking position. Senior managers have presented the board with proposals that large expenditure, carefully targeted, could drive PMU up the tables, but neither managers nor governors would contemplate risky spending in this way and are aware that, if taken too seriously, league tables could have a detrimental effect on widening participation, with a huge potential for mission drift. Nonetheless, there have been a number of debates about league tables at the governor level. The view of the board is that they will come more into play and are especially important in international markets (on which the institution is highly dependent financially). Moreover, the board feels that

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the rankings are also becoming more important domestically with growing student and parent pressure for information, not least on employability and the student experience. Governors have used league tables to compare the institution with competitors in the sector, which was deemed useful in understanding more about student choice. The board of governors expects to turn its ‘unwritten statements’ and ‘conversations with the vice-chancellor’ on league tables into more explicit policies and they will become part of the university’s KPIs. However, governors are aware of the gap between league tables and government policies, particularly concerning widening participation and the skills agenda, and it is thought that government could publish a wider set of metrics and benchmarks. Governors feel that academic standards should not be compromised to enable more top degrees to be awarded in order to improve rankings. League tables and particularly the NSS are regarded as part of the managerial toolkit to correct deficiencies at departmental level. A league tables working party, chaired by a pro-vice-chancellor, has taken advice from compilers to submit data differently. The university makes sure that the data returns are ‘optimal’ and that they are collecting everything that they should be doing (such as departmental library and IT expenditure, and counting all staff). Data collection and verification are felt to be improving all the time, and this is seen as the major consequence of the league tables, not least because it is felt that many other variables are outside its control. Variable fees are also thought to be increasing the importance of the rankings, especially in the eyes of parents. The marketing department focuses considerable attention on securing ‘good profiles’ in the commentaries that accompany the tables in The Times especially, and has increased resources for these purposes. At local level, academic and other staff are keen to help the university’s league tables position but are never quite sure if their actions have that effect. League tables have influenced some departments to seek to raise their A-level entry requirements. The publication of league tables, although PMU does relatively well for the post-1992 universities, creates more of a ‘malaise’ that lingers for staff than dramatic slumps in morale. But it is felt that a well-constructed league table can contain a decent set of performance indicators that, when broken down, can be used selectively and constructively. The university is particularly concerned about the impact of league tables on international student recruitment and on fee income, constituting around 12 per cent of the total teaching income. This is a big income stream for the university, and such considerations are relevant in all its overseas markets, and especially in Asia. The role of third parties in using


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UK rankings to inform student application routes is quite marked in Asia (parents and agents especially), making them very influential. PMU has an eye on variable fees and the extent to which the tuition fee cap on domestic undergraduate fees may be raised after a 2009 governmental review. A significant lifting of the ‘cap’ leading to considerably increased variability would require careful pricing policies, and league table positioning would be a significant part of the scenario planning. Research Intensive University (RIU) (WL) RIU is a research-intensive university consistently near the top of the national league tables and in the top 30 of the world rankings. It presents itself as a globally focused university with a greater interest in the global rankings than the national league tables. The external impact of the rankings, particularly internationally, is regarded as more important than their internal use. The rankings have helped to associate the institution with other highly ranked universities and largely reflect where the university – and others – believes it should be. Successes in the league tables are presented in a relatively low-key way in publicity and marketing material. Nevertheless, the league tables have a significant impact on institutional thinking about what a highly ranked university should be doing, such as whether it should be admitting any students through the last-minute national system of ‘clearing’. A league tables working group was formed and met for nine months. This was prompted by some academic departments failing to make the top 20 in subject rankings. In addition, there was awareness that other institutions were taking actions and that to do nothing would risk the university falling behind its peers. The working group focused on improving institutional understanding of the methodologies used in compiling league tables and presenting the university as positively and as clearly as possible to the compilers. It was ‘a fairly low-level group’, and the outcomes largely focused on registry functions and, particularly, data submissions. The university Council has used national and world rankings since 2005, along with other KPIs, but it would not agree a strategic goal of improving its ranking position as such. There was a broad recognition that a sudden drop in ranking position would prompt serious consideration, despite the prevailing scepticism about league table methodologies. Indeed, such an event had been identified as a ‘top risk’ to be managed, and a Council respondent agreed that relative failure in league tables would have more impact than relative success. The university has benefited from the use of league tables by foreign governments and funding bodies in making decisions about which UK

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institutions to send overseas students to with bursaries and scholarships. It is also aware of their use by potential higher education collaborators abroad looking to ally with UK universities and in directing early career researchers to where they should apply when going overseas. The rankings have influenced university decisions on which foreign universities to work with and in its recruitment of academic staff from outside the UK. Students – including international students – increasingly use the subject league tables although some doubt was expressed as to how influential they were in the final stages of applications’ decisionmaking. The university, nonetheless, is increasingly concerned with the student experience, prompted by the appearance of it as a measure in national institutional rankings.

MAIN THEMES FROM THE CASE STUDIES National and Global Rankings The national institutional rankings are regarded as still more influential than the global rankings for virtually all universities. However, the research-intensive university (RIU) suggested that, as an internationally oriented university, the global rankings were now more important to it than the national ratings. Pre-1992 University also displays growing aspirations to climb much higher in the world league tables. There was broad agreement that the domestic league tables were being used increasingly by those abroad, although their significance differed by geographical market. Nonetheless prospective students, bodies providing (selectively) public bursaries to students planning to study abroad, academics considering working at a UK university, and organizations providing authoritative advice on the recognition of foreign degrees to students and employers were beginning to be quite strongly influenced by rankings. Influence of the Compilers There is a widespread view that the compilers of league tables benefit most from their publication, mainly through improved circulation for their prints. Institutions did not feel that they were able to elicit the responsiveness from commercial entities that they receive from public agencies, or have the same levels of influence with them, although there were clear indications that institutions were consulting the compilers in order to improve their understanding of league table methodologies and the quality of their data submissions.


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Models Found in the Tables A marked finding from the relatively lowly ranked new universities was that the criteria for ranking used by the compilers were too traditional – the ‘Oxbridge’ model – and focused too much on research performance at the expense of learning and teaching processes. That is, they disadvantaged the ex-polytechnics especially because they made little or no allowances for widening participation strategies and institutional diversity missions. Rather, it was felt that some way should be found for incorporating robust value-added measures of student performance against original qualifications in the tables. Nonetheless, the older universities more clearly regarded research as the primary function of the university and one where both established opinion and robust comparisons were available transnationally, in comparison with those measuring student learning outcomes. Influence on Admissions Prospective domestic students from the higher social classes – geographically mobile, and influenced by school advisors and parents – are most likely to take account of league tables, not least in putting together a first ‘sift’ or a long list of highly ranked universities before determining their final choices. First-generation applicants from the local regions, however, were regarded as less likely to consult the tables and tended to look at their local university without real competitive scrutiny. Indeed there were suggestions that such students may be put off applying to universities with high rankings as too competitive and not suitable for them. Nonetheless, surveys by two of the institutions – Pre-1992 and PMU – of incoming first-year undergraduates reveal quite high usage of the rankings more generally in applications’ decisionmaking – at around 60 per cent – and the level appears to be growing. Moreover, international students were viewed as especially likely to be swayed by the league tables, partly because they possess less available information and ‘tacit knowledge’ than domestic students and thus are more in need of the short-hand guides provided by the rankings, and partly because advisors, agents and government sponsors found the league tables a cost-effective way of selecting overseas universities for supporting their prospective students. However, we possess little direct research on the impact of the rankings on the views of ‘non-producer’ stakeholders, although the case studies provide useful reported if indirect attitudinal data. It is not clear from the investigations, for example, the extent to which the more traditional school-leavers were using league tables to confirm choices of university that had already been made on the basis of other influences. At the

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postgraduate level, however, once students possessed some experience and knowledge of the sector, and the reputation and strengths of universities within it, league tables do appear to be being consulted more frequently, not least because such students appear to aim at more prestigious departments than were chosen for their undergraduate degrees. Again, however, it is unclear without further direct investigation whether league tables provide confirmation of decisions made on other or more tacitly informed grounds, or the influence of league tables when compared with other factors at work in applications’ decisionmaking. Institutional Strategies The criteria and methodologies employed in the rankings are clearly influencing top-level processes and objectives in the institutions. Universities may profess that they are not ‘league-table driven’, but increasingly the major components of rankings are being used to bring internal planning processes more into alignment with them. Partly this is technical, as it would be administratively complex to cope with parallel processes within any organization. But it also signifies the impact of the league tables on institutional behaviour. Although strategically setting sail to achieve a specific ranking may be rare but not unknown within universities, there is a broad concern that institutions should aim to rise in the national rankings and for the top-tier universities also to achieve progress up the global league tables. In some cases, the vice-chancellor’s targets set by Council or boards of governors are based on achieving higher positions, which then cascade downwards to departmental levels as part of their accountabilities. Nonetheless, the professed aim is to focus on doing things better and then rising up the tables as a consequence, as organizational autonomy and a sense of agent responsibility for institutional futures rule out submission to external drivers that are perceived at a rational level to be flawed and as not being especially legitimate, albeit significant. Data Management and Submission A major consequence of the increasing impact of league tables on institutions is the much greater attention and resource that now go into the task of gathering, analysing and submitting data to agencies that are charged by government with collecting standardized and comparable institutional information. As the league table compilers utilize the agencies and their data to a considerable extent in their formulations, it is hardly surprising that universities should scrutinize their returns more closely than they did before, not least for their league table implications. In many instances


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universities have established working groups or similar bodies at a very senior level to consider data collection and submissions. For administrative staff, what once used to be a function characterized by the need for efficiency and rather unreflecting processing without too large a call on resources now involves tasks imbued with much greater institutional significance. Top-management and governance oversight ensures that heightened attention is paid to league table impacts within university offices, and a routine function has become a strategic one. Although there is an obvious temptation to ‘game the system’ which is encouraged by the competitive nature of rankings and the sense that an institution cannot be quite sure what its competitors are up to, not least in the management of data, the survey and case study findings suggest that professional rectitude, and the sense that data manipulation would play havoc with internal systems, militates against information returns that are quite removed from actual reality. Nonetheless, there is also recognition that such processes require managing – they are not simply an administrative function that can be left to existing processes and those undertaking such tasks. The data are too important for that, and institutions, particularly those that are more lowly positioned in the rankings than they feel that their performance and reputation warrant, regret what are described as ‘rather naive’ returns in the past. Undoubtedly, planning and information systems in universities appear to have become immensely strengthened as a result of the league tables, and this is also leading to enhanced strategic, managerial and marketing intelligence capacities. Staff The impact of league table influence on academic staff recruitment appears to have been more limited than for student admissions. However, there is a recognition that this is changing with the rising enrolment of foreign staff by UK institutions. These are more inclined than domestic academics to consult the rankings in the absence of other easily available and apparently authenticated information. With increasing international competition to recruit young and established researchers from abroad, not least in response to innovation drives by governments, and institutional (and state-endorsed) aspirations in a number of countries to feature highly in global university rankings as ‘world-class universities’, it is not difficult to envisage that the impact of the global rankings in this area will grow. The prospect of the government ‘cap’ on tuition fee levels that may be charged for full-time domestic (and EU) undergraduates being lifted in England after a review in 2009 may also heighten the influence of league

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tables on academics, especially internationally rated teams of researchers, who may have more incentive to move to institutions that are more highly ranked. That is, ‘world-class’ universities may be able to attract greater resources across a whole range of their activities than those universities that may lack the imprimatur of top ratings to levy premium fees. This could enable them to entice elite units from institutions that lack both the financial means and the esteem of the very leading universities. As institutional differentiations on esteem and resources, especially for research, become more marked within higher education systems, and as the worldclass universities operate in both competition and cooperative alliances globally and across borders, then it will become difficult for institutions that are not part of this transnational elite stratum to retain their pockets of international research excellence and for these to be picked off by the richer and more highly ranked universities. Consequently the consequences of comparatively low positions in league tables (judged against peers and those institutions in the same ‘set’ in the rankings) for lowering staff morale may become larger. Current high demand for higher education programmes, particularly for those institutions that are lowly ranked, including student number gains from widening social access and buoyancy in international student recruitment, has helped to cushion the blows from the rankings for some institutions. Yet there is apprehension that such relatively benign market conditions are about to turn much more adverse with demographic and funding downturns, thus elevating concerns about the effects of the rankings in the medium to longer term. Risks The anticipation of more variable tuition fees, an impending demographic decline in UK school-leavers, slowdowns and increased competition in international student markets, more selective and declining public funding, and the growth of private providers is removing short-term comforts concerning the league tables for those in the lower, and perhaps even the middling, positions. Nor is it clear that such institutions can spend their way up the rankings and attract additional resources that outweigh the original costs, thus joining some form of ‘virtuous circle’. The case studies show that league table payoffs for high investment in some areas by way of additional resources that exceed such additional costs are not clearly evident, that the variables may be changed by the compilers subsequently and thus cancel out the benefits of raised and temporary expenditure in an area – which cannot be spent again – and that councils and governors are conscious of their fiduciary responsibilities for maintaining the solvency of


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their organizations despite the impacts of university rankings. Even those institutions at the top of the tables will hardly be lacking in concern, as the influence of the global rankings grows and institutional competition becomes fiercer. As we shall see in the next chapter, it is estimated that a world-class university costs around a billion US dollars annually to operate, plus a further half a billion for a medical school (which tends to produce higher global rankings because of its high citation rates). Generally this would require many universities increasing their overall funding by 40 per cent (Sadlak and Liu 2007; Usher and Savino 2007), which is beyond most institutions or governments without damaging other objectives. The ‘world-class university’ movement has every chance for some of turning into an ‘arms race’ that threatens their financial security, yet remains essentially a zerosum game in which for every winner there must also be a loser. Participation and Institutional Diversity As we have discussed through this and the previous chapter, the standardization consequences of university ranking raise concerns that public policies seeking wider social participation and institutional diversity are debilitated by the criteria used in the league tables. The league table models are regarded by some as too conventional and reputationally elitist to reflect the variety of provision that universities offer and the requirement that institutions should be ranked for their quality in meeting their mission objectives. A simple aggregation of data and its expression in a single numerical hierarchy in the institutional rankings particularly are regarded as failing to meet tests of multidimensional adequacy. Yet it is not clear that subject ratings, which are more pluralist in their institutional implications, are as highly valued as institutional ratings by stakeholders (Hazelkorn 2007). Moreover, opportunities for interactively creating a personal league table based on what is important to an individual of the kind provided by the CHE in Germany through its website, for example, lack the wider media amplification necessary for the reputational enhancement to institutions provided by the league tables. Furthermore, there are some public policies that league tables appear to enhance. Ministers in a number of countries, not just the UK, seek more ‘world-class universities’ in their domestic jurisdictions and some (such as Germany, China, Korea and Japan) adopt selective funding policies that aim to achieve such a goal. Public research funding is becoming more selective, and researchers and professors move more readily in response to higher salaries and better working facilities as a consequence of such policies. Similarly, in public discourse it is clear that politicians regard

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the innovative and creative capacities of world-class universities as critical for meeting the challenges of global economic competitiveness where comparative advantage lies in high-value knowledge-producing sectors. Funding increases on science research in England, for example, in recent years have outstripped those for learning and teaching. Even with governmental initiatives for widening participation, ministers talk blithely of creating more opportunities for the socially disadvantaged to be admitted to ‘the best universities’ and to those at the top of the rankings. Within the institutions too, the apparent conflicting pressures of widening social access and rising up the rankings are often reconciled by taking a view that widening the pool of well-qualified applicants is the way forward, perhaps by establishing liaisons with further education colleges where students may not count as being on the books of the well-established university (thus protecting rankings). Governors also may be ambivalent about governmental ‘social engineering’, and this attitude is reinforced by the rankings. The case studies reveal pressures from such sources to move away from widening participation initiatives, at least for the high-demand programmes in the institution, in favour of more traditional recruitment of the kind that improves league table positions. Consequently, governments tend to adopt mixed views of private league tables and undoubtedly would not relish the controversy surrounding the rankings being transferred to them as a consequence of publishing their own. Yet governments have provided a key plank in the rise of the rankings through increased collection by governmental bodies of more standardized and comparable data on higher education performance than before. Presumably they could at least seek to influence what is collected in their name and could, for example, seek more value-added information on student learning outcomes than is available at present, or aim to prolong the timeline for measuring graduate employment, thus reducing biases against some subjects and thus institutions. However, any more direct attempt to regulate such commercial entities by a government would face considerable problems. Inter-governmental efforts to exercise voluntary regulatory authority through adoption of the Berlin Principles of good practice for compilers, perhaps as part of the Bologna Process, may be a more acceptable way of ensuring increased consistency and acceptability while sheltering national governments from criticism through the security of an international agreement. Similarly, governments may wish to support recent efforts by the OECD to conduct transnational investigations of the knowledge and skills achieved by students at graduation, an initiative that seeks to extend the OECD’s successful and highly influential PISA programme that operates currently at secondary school level.


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CONCLUSION In this chapter we have examined the international impact of league tables on universities, initially through a consideration of the OECD-supported survey undertaken by Hazelkorn (2007). This elicited over 630 responses from 41 countries. We focused particularly, however, on an in-depth analysis of the influences of the rankings on universities in England that was undertaken on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England by a team that included this author (Locke et al. 2008). Although this book is about the global governance of universities it was felt that a greater understanding of what is now a global phenomenon warranted closer analysis of how such worldwide influences play out on the ground in a national context. That is, globalization refers to processes that operate within national jurisdictions and not simply to transnational institutions or worldwide integration. Examples of private authority being exercised through university league tables, predominantly conducted by media organizations, may be found throughout the world and have grown in the two decades or more since the first USNWR surveys in the USA. Sadlak (2007) estimates at least 30 such major rankings worldwide. Usher and Savino (2007) studied 18 university league tables from around the world and remark on their varying purposes and criteria, and this number by no means exhausted the complete list. (Both pieces also disregarded those tables dealing with smaller or more particularistic factors than whole institutions and their subjects.) Nonetheless, we still require more comparative research on these issues, taking in a range of countries and examining both similarities and differences in national contexts. We also need to understand the growing importance of global rankings as a source of private regulation and motivation for the ‘world-class university’ movement that has developed in recent years. We turn to this in the next chapter.

7.

Global rankings and regulating the world-class university

INTRODUCTION In the previous chapters we have examined the role of league tables as a source of private regulatory authority for universities. That is, whatever reservations universities may have about them, university ratings nonetheless are regarded as highly significant market factors and exert considerable influence over university behaviour and actions. Particularly, the standardizing consequences of the criteria used in the institutional rankings for determining the ‘best’ universities are often criticized by newcomers or those institutions established in the lower levels of the hierarchies as outdated and conventional (‘Oxbridge-focused’) in an age of diversity and widening social participation in higher education. League tables appear to be able to make public policy in ways at variance with important governmental objectives, although reinforcing others, and ministers send mixed messages about how they are regarded. They have no wish to embroil themselves in the controversies and antagonisms that the rankings can engender, but may incorporate such assessments into their own funding and regulatory approaches. In the increasing tendency around the globe for governments to encourage world-class research-based universities in their higher education systems as a source of comparative economic and status advantage, there is increasing public policy focus on the global university rankings, and the institutional characteristics of those in the top echelons, as providing a guide and a set of goals for achieving world-class standing. So far we have tended to focus on national league tables and their consequences for universities, particularly in Chapter 6, and mostly these are produced by publishers. Yet the recent emergence of global university rankings, alongside the growth of freer trade in higher education, increased worldwide research collaborations, and the increasing isomorphism and convergences in regulatory governance across jurisdictions, is significant in contributing to higher education as a nascent ‘world system’. As we shall see, research performance is the key to international institutional reputation. Although competition between universities has 190

Global rankings and the world-class university

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accelerated recently with increasing commercialization, within and across territorial borders, nonetheless universities long have engaged in seeking strong positional ranking around the essentially non-commercial criteria associated with research and scholarship. Marginson (2007b:43) notes that ‘positional competition in higher education is more widespread than the presence of economic mechanisms such as prices’, and is based more on comparative reputation. Moreover, such competition is found within many types of higher education systems, from the most state-controlled to the most liberalized. Marginson concludes that, as long as there is an inequality between institutions in resources, functions and social regard, so that it is possible to secure a private advantage by attending one institution rather than another (that is, as long as there is a hierarchy of value in private goods), positional competition will be found.

The two main global university rankings, both private, are produced by a university institute (Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University – SJTU) and a specialist higher education weekly (the THES/QS) respectively. The research by Locke et al. (2008) on the impact of league tables on English universities, referred to in the previous chapters, indicates growing aspirations to rise up the global rankings among leading universities. However, we lack really systematic research on the behavioural and strategic impacts of the global tables for universities, governments and other stakeholders, in particular national jurisdictions. Such work would help to materialize globalization as a form of local institutional practice in higher education. We are able nonetheless to piece together a picture that provides strong pointers to the global rankings becoming increasing salient for universities around the world and as influencing the actions that they take (although not necessarily in the USA, as the predominant league table influence there is the domestic USNWR, and the US higher education system appears little influenced by arrangements in other countries). Before doing this, however, we need to consider the two tables in more detail and, before that, also analyse the role of the ‘world-class university’ movement in reinforcing the authority and significance of the global rankings.

WORLD-CLASS UNIVERSITIES The notion of ‘world-class’ universities is by no means clear cut, and there are different models of highly esteemed universities that can be found in the different parts of the globe. SJTU, however, is particularly interested

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in standardizing the phenomenon of the world-class university, not least as it underpins its interest in publishing annual worldwide comparative university standings. The appearance of its first rankings in 2003 flowed from an official governmental policy interest in establishing how China rated in its share of world-class universities compared to other countries and what might be needed to close any gaps. SJTU has also organized since 2005 a regular international annual conference of experts on ‘WorldClass Universities’, and contributions subsequently have appeared in print (see, for example, Sadlak and Liu 2007). Despite a variety of interpretations about the criteria for such a description, the concept ‘world-class university’ nonetheless refers to a number of recurrent and largely agreed elements. First, it is expensive. As we noted in the last chapter, an annual operating budget of around $1–1.5 billion, is required and that level of expenditure needs to be sustained over a number of years and across a large range of disciplines. Unsurprisingly therefore, except for the USA, where the elite private entities predominate at the top of reputational hierarchies, world-class universities generally are publicly funded universities, and most have medical schools. Second, research excellence and institutional reputation are the keys to high rankings, and both are related. The significance of this relationship is rising with the growth of metric bases for measuring research quality by national governmental agencies for their research funding allocations to universities. Additionally, in setting a challenge for Continental European higher education to achieve world-class quality for example, the European Commission (EC) gives special attention to research performance. This focus is reinforced by the relative non-competitiveness of Continental institutions in the global rankings and in attracting talent from abroad. Consequently, research factors will continue to significantly influence the world university rankings for some time, although as we shall see they are particularly influential in the SJTU. Whatever the merits of including measures of excellence in learning and teaching provision to offset the dominance of research performance in university rankings, until a recognized and standardized method for comparing teaching quality and student learning outcomes across territorial borders is devised, and to which institutional incentives are linked, then research will continue to predominate in conferring reputational standing and increased levels of public and private funding on universities. Some observers spell out further the characteristics of a world-class university and the critical influences on reputation and perception. Niland (2007) suggests, for example, that, in addition to research reputation, such institutions should possess first-rate academics and undergraduates, along with good global alliances and excellent top-level management. World-


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class universities also appear to be engaged in a global competition with each other for the best researchers and students (Sadlak 2007). Increasing migration flows both reflect and intensify such pressures, not least as the USA appears to be the prime net beneficiary of so-called ‘brain circulation’. The OECD estimates that in 2003–04 there were over 80 000 foreign academics at US universities, or 7 per cent of the total. Britons formed the largest contingent with over 3000 US-based academics representing 2.1 per cent of the UK’s senior faculty, although Canada and Israel had much higher percentages of their faculty in the USA (at 12.2 per cent and 25 per cent respectively) (THE, 28 February 2008). Yet increased efforts by traditional sender countries to the USA and elsewhere, such as Korea and China, to increase their number of international students and postgraduate scholarships suggest that US predominance in ‘brain capture’ globally may eventually come under serious challenge. Furthermore, increasingly public research funders, such as research councils, are being called upon to support research projects spanning more than one country. Some are constructing common review criteria, leading to simpler and less costly mutual recognition processes, thus avoiding the multiple territorial decisionmaking that generally has prevailed to date. On the other hand, however, government departments do not always demonstrate joined-up approaches. The zeal of tax authorities produces counter-pressures to cross-border traffics, such as the UK’s recent decisions to tax the offshore income of non-domiciled residents or to charge them a £30 000 annual levy to be exempt, leading to university claims that the flow of distinguished scholars to the UK will be damaged. National homeland security officials also insist on universities more strictly monitoring foreign students than previously, such as the UK’s insistence that non-EU students who miss lectures should be reported to the authorities, running the risk of hampering efforts in other UK government departments encouraging universities to increase their share of international student markets. As we shall analyse later in the chapter in our consideration of the global rankings and the criteria that they adopt, by definition the notion of a ‘world-class university elite’ implies reference to a limited number of institutions. In the SJTU rankings especially, it helps enormously to be large, multidisciplinary, research-intensive and strong in science, and these factors provide a form of exclusivity. However, Sadlak and Liu (2007:17) suggest that every country that cares about its future wants to have, if not a world-class higher education system, at least one institution which can be realistically considered to aspire to become a ‘world-class university’ . . . [it] can play the role of

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a research hub and academic leader for the whole system of higher education with regard to teaching and research.

Claiming to be ‘world-class’ and having such a description authenticated are clearly quite different processes, although we have noted that the very top tier of many national league tables tends to be composed of the same universities, while the top dozen or so institutions in both major global rankings tend to be quite interchangeable, despite variability in methodologies employed in the two rankings. An articulation of ‘worldclass standards’ as a comparative template is an obvious prerequisite for seeking to validate claims for world-class standing, and the THES/QS and the SJTU rankings attempt to provide these as private but authoritative ‘regulatory agencies’. A number of countries are introducing schemes to raise the number of world-class universities in their jurisdictions, such as China, France, Korea, Japan and Germany. The German government, for example, announced in 2008 that, after two rounds of review, nine of the country’s universities are now officially recognized as ‘elite’ and have become part of a funding scheme to compete with top US and UK competitors in international research ratings and also in the global rankings. The Joint Federal Government and Lander Initiative for Excellence aims to establish excellence in research to attract the best students and academics to Germany from an increasingly competitive global research market. The newly designated elite universities, along with 21 graduate schools and 20 ‘excellence clusters’ (centres of research excellence at individual universities), receive total funding of around two billion euros over five years, with most of the money coming from the federal government. The trend for the introduction of tuition fees in some Lander (states) and the extension of English-language master’s programmes with high fees to attract high-performing international students are complementary to these ‘world-class’ efforts. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether the internationally uncompetitive remuneration rates for academics in countries such as Germany, set by collective wage-bargaining for public servants, will continue to act as a barrier to these governmental ambitions to incentivize the elite universities to attract the best researchers from around the globe. In France, Operation Campus is a government initiative that aims to create at least ten ‘centres of excellence’ of higher education and research to help overcome poor showings in the global rankings. Ten alliances of several universities, selected after stiff competition, share 5 billion euros of state funding to help place French universities among the highest-ranking universities in the world by 2010. In some countries it would appear that governments use the global


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rankings as a means of pursuing domestic reform agendas. In Australia, for example, an education minister regarded the presence of only two Australian universities among the world’s top 100 universities in the SJTU rankings as an issue that required addressing (Chubb 2007). Yet the transnationalism of the leading research universities is resulting in more autonomous and joint organizational responses to elite positioning than reliance on state-initiated policy changes, such as increased selectivity in governmental research funding, to achieve it for them. ‘World-class universities’, for example, tend to operate their own self-regulatory processes to govern entry to their networks and alliances, including reviews and evaluations of aspirant members (Sadlak 2007). Nonetheless, although formal benchmarks and quality standards may be applied in judging applications for membership, to a large extent more informal reputational instincts are at work. Appearing in the higher reaches of national and global rankings may operate as a form of eligibility criteria for elite groupings.

GLOBAL RANKINGS We noted in Chapter 4 in our discussion of international organizations, particularly the work of the OECD, that increased comparative evaluations of education performance are made possible by common models, methodologies and data collection applied over time. Although predominantly confined to the earlier stages of schooling to date, there are plans by the OECD to extend the comparisons of learning outcomes to the tertiary level through a so-called PISA for higher education. The approach generally provides normative justification for comparison of organizational and national system educational performances against each other and within standardized frameworks and methodologies. In bodies such as the EC and the OECD, again as we noted in Chapter 4, increasingly these are driven by the internal bureaucracy rather than through inter-governmental policy coordination. Global university rankings may be regarded as a further step in the normalization of comparative performance evaluation across borders and as providing hierarchies of leading universities (especially at the very top where consistency in ranking tends to be found) that may be categorized by the number of such institutions per nation. The desire for high ranking as a consequence is found as an aspiration as much among national governments as by the universities being ranked. There is a so-called ‘world-class university’ movement among governmental policymakers (Marginson 2008a). Until the last decade or so in most countries, the notion of being an elite university was generally located within a non-mass national context. This

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consisted of small institutions in a system not characterized particularly by systemic competition on either a national or a global stage, although awareness of institutional status differentiations based on scholarly outputs was still quite sharp. Rather, more informal hierarchies prevailed and students appeared not to discriminate overmuch outside the very leading universities as to where they studied (Altbach 2006). But, as we have been describing in previous chapters, the world of higher education now has become more competitive, globalized and externally evaluated, particularly for the leading universities. Major benefits flow to universities regarded as ‘world-class’ with high global reputations. We have already noted more selective research funding from both private and public sources for such institutions, including special governmental programmes in some countries to help create elite universities to compete on the world stage. Endowments and similar philanthropy of the kind associated with the US ‘Ivy League’ universities are also more likely to be elicited by the leading institutions. Moreover, attracting excellent researchers and high tuition-fee-paying postgraduate students from abroad, not least to key science programmes, is clearly aided by possessing some form of global kite-marking such as a high position in the global rankings. In burgeoning higher education sectors such as found in China, for example, where high regard is attached to top-rated research-intensive universities, there are signs that only the elite foreign universities are being considered for longer-term strategic partnerships. Moreover, the best students are also advised to consult the league tables (national and global) before applying to universities overseas and are only likely to receive official funding support if attending highly ranked institutions. Consequently it would be surprising if the global rankings did not come to be regarded as a major market and reputational factor for leading and aspirant universities. Achieving or maintaining a high ranking, perhaps the top 50 or 100 in the SJTU or the THES/QS, becomes a critical institutional strategy for some, while for others actually registering on the ‘radar’ (say the top 200–300) of the worldwide ratings becomes a key short- to medium-term aim. Institutional policies in these latter circumstances often lead to the shedding of research-inactive staff, the hiring only of academics with strong research backgrounds, and investment in research and student facilities. But if there are problems with university league tables in a national context (outlined in the previous two chapters), and often where official standardized data are available to the compilers in ways not found in transnational contexts, then it is unlikely that global rankings will be free of controversies. Yet these issues are not quite the same as found in national rankings and, although they have growing significance, not all institutions are directly affected. Rather, the global rankings are


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contributing to processes where there appears much clearer differentiation between institutions in national higher education systems, with many ‘mass’ providers adopting more local and regional aims that are at striking variance to the global ambitions of the elite research-intensive universities. The latter, however, appear much more in control of their fate than the former, which are highly dependent on national governmental funding that is eroding and which face increasing competitive pressures from the fast-expanding for-profit private providers. The SJTU and the THES/QS Key analyses of the higher education global league tables are found in Marginson (2007a) and Marginson and van der Wende (2007), and these provide a useful basis for considering both the methodologies and the impacts of the two main world rankings found in the SJTU and the THES/QS respectively. There are other global league tables that we do not consider as they lack the institutional reach and broader assessments of the two major compilers. The Financial Times, for example, is a primary example of a programmatic ranking, focusing on business schools and management education only. Others look more closely at departmental, or a cluster of departmental, performances, or cover only a particular region. The Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) in Germany, for example, produces a league table aimed at helping European students find the best postgraduate places in areas such as biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics across around 250 universities in 20 European countries. Moreover, it eschews straight-stepped institutional hierarchies in favour of awarding gold, silver and bronze medals to departments in four research-related categories. The SJTU and the THES/QS, by contrast, provide hierarchical institutional rankings that purport to cover the globe, and it is these that we concentrate on. SJTU The SJTU global rankings for universities have been published annually since 2003, although additionally SJTU has published annual sets of disciplinary rankings since early 2007. These annual hierarchies are based entirely on research indicators and not on a more holistic appraisal of university performance. The SJTU compilers make this clear in their publications and websites, arguing that the lack of reliable and comparable data across countries in areas such as learning and teaching, or other desirable features, rules out the inclusion of the data in the criteria that they employ for determining university performance and reputation globally. As we have noted earlier, it is possible that this gap may be filled

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eventually by the extension of the OECD PISA programme in the next few years. Currently the PISA programme evaluates student learning outcomes up to the age of 15 years in a number of ‘core’ subjects in schools, and it is planned to extend the scheme to evaluate the knowledge and skills outcomes of university graduates across a range of countries. But for the moment SJTU believes that only certain research-related variables are sufficiently robust transnationally upon which to base a global rankings system, believing such objective data to be more superior to subjective and institutional data of the kind found respectively in peer surveys and in national data submissions from universities. Nonetheless, the media, governments and other analysts tend to overlook these restrictions in commenting on the SJTU, regarding the published hierarchies as signifying the extent to which universities may be regarded as ‘world-class’ institutions in the whole. Furthermore, the variables and the methods adopted by SJTU are also not without their controversies, as we shall see. Publication and citation are the major factors used by SJTU, mainly publications that are medical and science-based rather than those located in the social sciences, the arts and engineering. In the 2007 tables, citation in leading journals accounts for 20 per cent of scores, 20 per cent also is gained from articles in Science and Nature, and a further 20 per cent is derived from inclusion in the category of ‘highly cited researchers’ on the Thomson/Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) citations database. An additional 30 per cent is allocated to those institutions currently employing (20 per cent allocation), or having previously employed and trained (10 per cent allocation), Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and economics, and Fields Medal recipients in mathematics. A residual 10 per cent is allocated through scores gained from the above divided by the number of academics in a university. Invariably, US institutions dominate (in 2007 the USA had 17 of the top 20 and 54 of the top 100), followed by the UK. Marginson (2007a) points out that the SJTU rankings tend to favour some institutions and countries more than others. Essentially they advantage large multidisciplinary institutions that have had the opportunity to build up strengths in research across a number of fields. However, science-based institutions are particularly favoured, as these fields attract high levels of external funding and their academics publish more, and more highly cited, papers than those in other disciplines, and these advantages are enhanced if a university possesses a medical school. Moreover, as English tends to be the global language of publication and citation, universities in English-language countries also benefit from the criteria. Such researchers tend to cite those operating in the same language (particularly researchers in the USA), and highly cited academics as found in the Thomson/ISI database (where US researchers totally dominate) have a


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marked accelerating effect on institutional positions in the SJTU. Altbach (2006) notes that while English is increasingly the language of science it is less essential for communication in other subjects, such as the humanities, law and some social science fields. Global rankings adopt methods that generally reflect the weight and methods of the major powers. However, with economic development and a shift in worldwide power distributions at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Asian (and other) countries, such as China, Japan, Singapore and Korea, are using their rising wealth to establish more world-class and highly SJTU-rated universities (Cheng and Liu 2007). Apart from partiality in its consequences, the SJTU rankings have been criticized on other grounds. The timeline for inclusion of Nobel Prize winners in institutional scores goes back an inordinate amount of time (to the year 1918) and raises difficulties as to which institutions have the largest claim to these scores (those that trained and nurtured the winners, or those with the largest financial pockets to lure them more recently). Moreover, Nobel Prizes are allocated often following a quite politicized submissions-based process covering a limited number of fields (excluding the social sciences and humanities), and it is not clear how fully strict scientific merit becomes the sole awarding criterion. Publication and citation rates may also be subject to various forms of ‘gaming’. Nobel Prizes and research citation (and also periodic governmental research evaluation exercises) also offer evidence bases that are quite dated in terms of indicating current performance. Successful research takes a while to show up in the Thomson/ISI database, and there is a further interlude before it starts to count in the global rankings. It is possible, for example, that a number of universities in Asia that have been developing their research and related strengths for a few years may still not have these efforts properly captured in the SJTU, for example, for a few years longer yet (Marginson 2007a). Governments, such as those in Australia and the UK that are constructing or reviewing methods for assessing institutional research performance for the purposes of allocating public research funding for core activity, are moving closer to the use of metric indices, including levels of research income and numbers of postgraduate students, as well as publication and citation indices, for their methodologies. It is part of a move away from more subjective, apparently more expensive and time-consuming, peer review processes. Difficulties arise, however, in determining effective relationships between expert judgements and ‘objective’ metrics, and also in recognizing that the latter methodology is also open to possible distorting processes. Such problems, of course, also apply to the SJTU rankings and their reliance on research-based metrics. Among the potential problems for both the compilers of global rankings

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and the instigators of metric-based research assessment methodologies, in addition to those listed in the analysis of the SJTU rankings above, we may identify the following. First, it is not clear that citation necessarily reflects quality as opposed to some other characteristics, such as controversy and even a lack of scholarship that turns a publication into a wellcited ‘straw man’ or, in extreme cases perhaps, an example of how not to do things. Does the inclusion of self-citation in some schemes allow for perversity by possibly favouring the self-publicist over the more demure? Moreover, the Thomson/ISI ‘Web of Science’ database may not be necessarily ‘clean’ enough to justify the weight of impact on funding and reputation decisions in the rankings or research allocations, as it contains many examples of missing or inadequately titled (institutional) publications. Second, cunning academics may collude to cite only their own work, to avoid reporting negative results (as these do not get cited), to publish safe and conservative research in fields that are covered by Thomson/ISI, or to publish only in journals with high citation rates and avoid new and innovative prints. Third, important collaborative and interdisciplinary research with industry or government may not count for as much as more detailed but less valuable reports in top-cited academic journals. Fourth, books and policy reports apparently count for less (where they count at all) as forms of scholarly communication than even the most obscure journal article. Finally, it is not clear that, if a metrics approach is allowed to run unhindered, it would produce, in both government funding allocations and private world rankings, the well-established hierarchies with the familiar institutions at the top. If not, what forms of intervention and judgements (probably not transparent) would be necessary to restore the ‘correct order’ and avoid many leading universities on which governments and compilers depend for innovation and economic competitiveness withdrawing support? Do the global rankings associated with the THES/QA, based on a different and less research-cited approach to the SJTU, provide a path out of these difficulties? The THES/QS rankings The THES/QS rankings, which appeared for the first time in 2004, the year after first publication of the SJTU tables, differ from the latter in not focusing exclusively on research reputation. Rather, they profess to establish a more holistic account of global standing through the collection of peer and employer data on perceived university ratings. In 2007, 40 per cent of institutional scores in the THES evaluations were gained from how they fared following a reputational survey of academics, with a further 10 per cent derived from a survey of global employers. As we have remarked


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previously, in the absence of officially collected data on broad crossborder university performance of the kind available to national compilers of university league tables, purposefully designed surveys and the data collected become the next best proxy. Additionally, two factors are introduced as a test of internationalization: the international make-up both of an institution’s student and of its staff population respectively (5 per cent each). Finally, 20 per cent is provided through analyses of student-to-staff ratios (small ratios being taken to signify teaching quality) and 20 per cent is determined by research publications’ citations per number of staff. It could be argued that the THES methodology provides a more rounded approach to gauging university reputation than the SJTU index, which is based entirely on research performance, although the SJTU rankings are picked up in the media and in government circles as also providing a fully rounded account of world-class university standing. The THES/QS publishers argue that their data are not subject to the manipulation undertaken by universities in official information returns. The SJTU, however, distrusts what it regards as subjective and rather non-transparent survey data and prefers to focus on objective knowledge such as scientific citations that, it believes, is less subject to institutional gaming. It thus produces an index focused on what it believes is the primary function on which worldclass university standing is gained, namely research. Marginson (2007a) suggests that a better set of citation measures and practices to those found in the SJTU have been developed by Leiden University. Here there are citation controls for the size of a university and also controls for the disciplines, an important feature given the strong subject biases that we discern in the SJTU. (The significance of such an approach is perhaps highlighted by the formal contracting of Leiden University to advise the HEFCE in the UK on citation, as it develops a new metrics-base for its new Research Excellence Framework – the REF – that is replacing the mainly peer-driven evaluations of the long-established Research Assessment Exercise). However, it is clear that all institutional rankings, national and international, reflect particular biases and preferred models of what the best universities should look like. The question is rather which league tables potentially contain the fewest biases and which criteria do observers choose to emphasize as being closest to their own worldview. Moreover, as with national league tables, as global rankings become steadily more important for at least a critical echelon of leading universities in various countries, it may be their significance as an authoritative market participant that matters most, rather than evaluations of their methodological rationality. Nonetheless, some observers are particularly scathing about the THES/ QS and suggest that its flaws are sufficiently serious as to make it virtually

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invalid. Marginson (2007a), for example, falls into this camp and outlines several major criticisms. For example, the survey data used are constructed from very low response rates (around 1 per cent from 200 000 emails sent worldwide) and predominantly reflect countries where the THES (now the THE) is circulated. Nor is it clear to what questions were respondents being asked to respond. The outcome, along with the effects of other factors, is a tendency for universities in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the UK and similar ‘Anglo-American’ academic peer countries to be placed much higher and in more numbers than is the case with the SJTU. Moreover, using as a weighting factor the proportion of international to domestic students at a university may be more testimony to that university’s marketing abilities than to its worldwide scholarly reputation for international programmes or the high quality of its internationally recruited students. Effectively, a quantity indicator is being used to measure quality. As in other tables, too, teaching quality is very difficult to determine, and the use of student-to-staff ratios as a proxy remains unsatisfactory. The result, suggests Marginson, is an extreme volatility and composition bias in the results in the THES/QS, with many institutions experiencing alarming rises and falls in a time span that indicates that little that the institution has done could be held responsible.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE GLOBAL RANKINGS ON INSTITUTIONAL STRATEGY AND GOVERNMENTAL POLICY Unfortunately we possess no real build-up to date of systematic evidence on the impact of the global rankings on the behaviour and actions of the universities around the world of the kind that is now becoming available for national league tables. Hazelkorn (2007) has produced outcomes of a global survey, although the findings do appear territorially limited and the respondents were largely self-selecting. However, follow-up work by her on behalf of the OECD using case studies in a number of selected countries potentially offers more insights. The HEFCE study undertaken by Locke and his colleagues (2008), although mainly confined to analysing the impact of national rankings on universities in England, indicates that, in some of the leading institutions, the global rankings are beginning to have an increasing influence. On the other hand, there appears little interest in many US institutions in the global rankings, not least as the USNWR has such a major impact for US universities. Nonetheless, is this changing or likely to change in favour of more international ratings? Broadly, we


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require further comparative investigations, utilizing a range of research tools, to gain better evidence of the influences exerted by the global university rankings, and how these both converge and may differ in various regions and territorial jurisdictions. In Australia, even small drops in SJTU rankings for the leading two universities appear to have caused heart-searching by commentators, and ministers speculate on how Australia could get more of its universities further up the SJTU rankings. It is suggested that the two sets of global rankings have triggered a lot of marketing activity by the best-ranked institutions and, arguably, have intensified efforts to lift research-based performance throughout the system. This includes institutional efforts to concentrate their research funding allocations more tightly than previously and to move more in the direction of science-based subjects (which are favoured in the SJTU index especially). Asian universities may also be expected to be highly sensitive to the Shanghai rankings and to market rising positions in them as a means of attracting researchers and highflying students from abroad as they aim to rise to higher positions. As we noted in the case of some aspirant UK universities for world-class standing, there is also a similar willingness in Asia and Australia, by a few universities at least, to clearly demarcate research from teaching and other services, and to focus growth on more research-based faculty positions. The use of Thomson/ISI citations in the SJTU also appears to be skewing the design of research investigations to move into alignment with the indicators in this database. Science-based subjects are elevated in institutional and governmental strategies, while humanities and the social sciences, and possibly engineering too, are disadvantaged. Journals are also subject to wider evaluation, as institutions are likely to encourage their academics to publish only in those with high citation records, thus potentially excluding newer and possibly more innovative research areas reflected in new journals. As in the UK, however, such moves by institutions are not easy to disentangle in their causes from the similar influences provided by governmental research policies, notably the introduction or extension of research evaluation schemes to guide the distribution of public funds for research activity in line with perceived quality and track records. In these cases, global rankings reinforce national governmental policies – and national strategies for research reinforce the influence of the global rankings (Locke et al. 2008; Marginson 2007b). Governments in a number of countries clearly have an aim to increase the numbers of universities in the higher reaches of the global rankings that are located in their national domains. This boosts opportunities for a country to become more competitive in meeting the challenges of the globalizing economy (most high value-added sectors in economies tend

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to possess relatively large numbers of graduate employees, and in some particular cases undertake extensive volumes of research, innovation and development that require highly trained labour from home and abroad). But it also reinforces the status of national governments themselves if they are able to point to high-performing higher education institutions and sectors within their national jurisdictions. We have noted how a number of countries are investing heavily in domestic universities, selected as offering the greatest likelihood that they will become world-class universities, as indicated in tables such as the SJTU and the THES. Often selections of the favoured institutions follow official evaluations against performance indicators that are based on those found in the global rankings. Other countries, however, appear at this stage of their development of their higher education systems to focus more on attracting existing world-class universities from elsewhere – predominantly but not solely from the USA – to set up operations locally, or to establish alliances and joint ventures with their domestic counterparts. Such policies are also supplemented by schemes to attract top-rated research expatriates to return with the enticement of salaries commensurate with those earned in the USA. The aim is to import the world’s best practice as a means of eventually transferring this to the ‘DNA’ of the local universities. But it is not clear that such importation is necessarily a short-term device. In countries such as Singapore, for example, it is not difficult to envisage that a mix of globally fleet-footed and highly regarded foreign universities located alongside rapidly emerging domestic universities (such as the National University of Singapore) may provide high-value ‘hubs’ in ways not dissimilar to major, geographically defined, financial sectors. The City of London, for example, is noted less for the role of domestic UK-based financial companies than as offering a regulatory-sympathetic, geographically convenient and market-friendly location for the best performers from around the globe, and Singapore and some other countries possibly could provide something similar in higher education. As with the impact of national league tables that was observed in England, and also the consequences of marketization that have been analysed for the USA (Kirp 2003), the influence of global rankings as part of rising worldwide university competition runs the danger of downgrading widening participation and social access goals in institutions, as these variables simply do not feature in either the SJTU or the THES/QS. Nor is it clear that the financial investments required for universities to rise in the world league tables – estimated at US$1–1.5 billion – are sustainable over the period of time necessary to become established within a virtuous spiral, where the costs of achieving higher standing are more than outweighed by increased income. The danger in competitive ‘arms races’ of this kind,


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where inevitably for every winner there have to be several losers, is that financial prudence and stability may disappear and threaten institutional solvency. As we noted in the previous chapter, evidence on the attitudes of university councils and governors is that there are conflicting pressures for members, arising from the desire to achieve higher rankings on the one hand, with the need for the prudential discharge of statutory fiduciary responsibilities on the other. However, in fast-developing Asian economic powerhouses, such as China, Korea and Singapore, as well as Japan, which is longer established as a major economy, there appears strong governmental willingness to fund basic research at quite high levels. Wider regional and multilateral initiatives may also be traced to the influence of the global rankings in quickening worldwide research rivalry, not least in competition with the USA. For example, the establishment of the League of European Research Universities by Leiden University in the Netherlands and the creation of a European Institute of Technology by the European Union may be regarded in part at least as responses to the relatively poor performance of Continental universities in the global tables (Marginson 2007a). But, while many responses to global rankings may be perceived as based on accepting the inevitability of institutional hierarchies and evaluations and seeking to raise performance, others aim at establishing more holistic and less sharply divisive benchmarks and comparators, with greater weight, for example, given to student learning outcomes. There is evidence that the correlation between high research reputation and the quality of learning and teaching in an institution is quite small (Dill and Soo 2005), and that therefore intensified efforts to reflect the latter in global rankings are required. Such efforts are also linked to advancing institutional diversity as a strategic objective for higher education systems by governments and some researchers, not least through constructing typologies of institutions along the multifaceted lines of the well-known Carnegie classifications in the USA. These are a means of countering the potential standardizing consequences of rankings that are focused primarily on a limited range of indicators, and especially on research reputation. Nonetheless, the danger of mission diversity policy positions linked to funding is that they lock out aspirant and innovative research institutions from the leading positions in world-class rankings and create a form of self-perpetuating ‘closed shop’. League tables that rely for a major part of their data on data collected through surveys of institutional reputation, such as the THES/QS for example, reinforce these exclusionary processes. Respondents in such surveys are not especially knowledgeable about the merit of departments and universities outside their own institution and may rely on orthodox reputational stories or institutional ‘halo’ perceptions

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that do little to modify conventional hierarchies. Consequently, the importance of global rankings is reinforced as being highly significant, but for only a limited number of universities, and the ostensible meritocracy and fair competition suggested by the rankings are an imaginative figment in the eyes of many institutions. However, the THES/QS methodology provides some form of opportunity for institutions that are prepared to heavily recruit international students and to use the financial proceeds to recruit more international staff and to lower student-to-staff ratios. Yet international student income is liable to fluctuations in market, regulatory and currency conditions that set bars as to how far universities are able to rely on it. This route adds potential volatility to those financial risks already associated with becoming a participant in the rankings wars. As the global rankings quicken in importance for more institutions in many countries as they seek ‘world-class’ signification, undoubtedly there will be a growing sense of a single global market for the best talent and for achieving the best rankings. Although research performance will provide the major evaluator for global university positioning for some time to come, there is some expectation that a successful extension of the OECD PISA programme from secondary to higher education (as discussed earlier) will allow a more robust measure of student learning outcomes across universities and territorial borders to be introduced, and thus begin to provide a genuinely more holistic appraisal of university performance and reputation than are currently found in the two main current global rankings.

THE EMERGING GLOBAL MODEL (EGM) In earlier chapters we refer to a range of global ‘blueprints’ and models of the modern university associated particularly with world society theorists. In recent writings a number of scholars influenced by such approaches have described an ‘emerging global model’ of the research university as increasingly influential in higher education systems and for policymakers, not least because of its high relevancy for contemporary knowledge-based economies dependent upon innovation and top-class research for competitive advantage, and for broader economic and social development. The global rankings, and particularly those associated with the SJTU listings, may be regarded as highlighting the leading positions in global reputation and performance among the research universities. Effectively the global institutional league tables describe ‘the top stratum of research universities worldwide’ (Mohrman, Ma and Baker 2008). Moreover, although forming only a fraction of higher education institutions, research universities exercise considerable influence on university systems well in excess of their


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numbers. In part, this is displayed in the aspirational strategies of those institutions currently marginal to such a category and that seek increased association with the emerging global model by raised recognition and funding through activities aimed at enhancing their research profile. Mohrman, Ma and Baker (2008) describe the EGM of the research university as prioritizing the search for new knowledge, particularly in science and technology, and the production of advanced research workers (through the provision of PhD opportunities in a large number of subjects). Medical schools and biomedical research especially provide scope for global collaboration, amplified funding, and the publications and citations that help to maintain dominance in the loftier part of the global university rankings. But, more generally, the international characteristics of such institutions are especially marked, found both in collaborative alliances crossing territorial borders and in the competitive worldwide scramble for the best students and faculty researchers. The key peer influences are undoubtedly global, and academics are as likely to set up joint research projects with colleagues in other countries as they are with domestic faculty. Indeed, at EGM universities faculty members are likely to have been recruited increasingly from abroad. At the institutional level, consortia membership with like-minded and reputationally equivalent universities from around the world and similar partnerships provide both cost-effective intellectual property development and status enhancement. Inevitably the internal reward systems in such institutions benefit those with published research, especially in prestigious journals. Effectively, for Mohrman and colleagues, ‘the EGM is an intensification and globalization of the development of research universities in general’ (p. 5), and the leading EGM institutions are to be found in the top echelons of all the global university rankings. This is hardly surprising as, essentially, the global rankings, and particularly the SJTU, reflect the model of the EGM research university in key assumptions, measures and weightings. Although not every EGM institution possesses all the following set of eight attributes, Mohrman and colleagues believe that these characteristics broadly distinguish the type from other models of the contemporary university (p. 7): 1.

2. 3.

EGM universities see their mission as transcending the boundaries of the nation-state, educating for global perspective and advancing the frontiers of knowledge worldwide. EGM universities are increasingly more research-intensive, with the use of scientific methods in disciplines outside the sciences. Faculty members, as producers of new knowledge, are assuming new roles, shifting from traditional independent patterns of inquiry to

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.


becoming members of team-oriented, cross-disciplinary and international partnerships, with research directed more often than before toward real-world problems. The research enterprise is extremely costly. Universities are going beyond government support and student contributions to diversify their financial base with funding from corporations and private donors, competitive grants for technology innovation, and creation of for-profit businesses as spin-offs of research enterprises. New relationships are being created among universities, governments and corporations to advance economic development and to produce knowledge for the social good. These universities are adopting worldwide recruitment strategies for students, faculty, and administrators. EGM institutions require greater internal complexity directed toward research, such as interdisciplinary centres, integration of research elements in student training programmes, and greater technological infrastructure for discovery. Universities participate with international non-governmental organizations and multi-governmental organizations in support of collaborative research, student and faculty mobility, and validation of international stature.

In governance terms, as we noted in Chapter 1, increased influence within EGM universities attaches to entrepreneurial leading-edge research departments/units, whose members are both less interested in (or too busy or perhaps temperamentally disinclined for) involvement in traditional collegial democracy and less easily controlled by administrative procedures and notions of corporate authority. Outside the university, national and local governments increasingly puzzle over the appropriate balance of intervention and autonomy in the funding, policy and regulatory accountabilities required of the research universities. The principles of transparency, value for public money and accountability are triumphant in the world of regulatory governance and cannot be ignored by policymakers. Yet there is anxiety too that the creativity, outcomes and status of the universities, upon which such policymakers are increasingly dependent, must not be damaged either. Moreover, the global range and activities of the EGM research universities are not easily comprehended by external stakeholders (although league tables are believed to be broadly accurate) and thus are not readily subject to governmental coordination. Altbach and Balan (2007) argue, too, that high levels of academic freedom and institutional autonomy are necessary for EGM universities to develop and for a globally respected research culture to become established. Inevitably


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such features accentuate the detachment of such institutions from national governmental coordination and reinforce the regulatory policy dilemmas that confront elected politicians. Nonetheless, as we shall see, in countries where a strong state imprint persists and where academic freedom remains constrained (as in China, for example), the EGM model is rapidly emerging as a consequence of state support and encouragement (Mohrman 2008). Although predominantly located in the USA, the EGM increasingly influences higher education systems around the world, although most research universities are still found within the world’s developed economies (Altbach and Balan 2007). Yet even in well-established systems, the EGM is strengthening. For example, researchers in the UK were involved in 50 per cent more international collaborations in 2005 than ten years previously, while in 2007 40 per cent of research council grants had an international component, and half of PhD students and 40 per cent of research staff were non-UK nationals (THE, 8 May 2008). Elsewhere in more developing countries the EGM model is also becoming more pronounced. In India, for example, the country’s prime minister has called for a revival of the tradition of good research, revealing a five-year plan for the period from 2007 during which 15 new universities ‘conceived as world-class institutions’ would be built, alongside the foundation of new national institutes of science, technology and information technology (THE, 8 May 2008). The prime minister’s aim is to see more Indian universities appearing in the global league tables, as currently no Indian university or institute is featuring in the top 100 of the SJTU. This omission is unsurprisingly perhaps, as only in 2003 did Indian government policy on science make explicit reference to the role of universities (Jayaram 2007). We noted in the previous chapter, however, that the EGM does not roll out seamlessly, and in Germany, for example, a range of cultural and institutional impediments to the implementation of the EGM model are discernible (Baker and Lenhardt 2008). As we shall see, as in Germany, in China, too, a full-blown EGM is restricted by continuing national practices, in this case limitations provided by state controls. Nonetheless, in China, the policy aim to have internationally competitive research universities in support of an increasingly sophisticated economy has led to public policies also that strongly reflect the models found in the USA and other major leading higher education systems. The policy and institutional frames of reference and standards are increasingly global. International ranking systems reinforce such processes by emphasizing the prime features of the top universities globally, and predominantly these are those of the EGM (Mohrman 2008). As a result, and

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as we noted in the previous chapter, leading Chinese research universities have been favoured by additional and selective governmental funding, and exemptions from the rapid drive to mass participation, on the grounds that quality and research performance may become compromised by rapid and large student recruitment. In China, as elsewhere, the development of the EGM research universities is undertaken within a context of mass participation in higher education – to help pay for the EGM and to meet wider human capital needs in a nation – but China is seeking to achieve both goals virtually simultaneously and this requires highly selective policy approaches. A number of emerging EGM universities in China have been granted the independence by the state to determine the students and faculty members for study abroad, and to develop additional earnings capacities including through research alliances with business and through tuition charges. State control in some areas is moving also towards evaluation ‘at a distance’ and outcomes and performances post facto, along the lines of the meta-regulatory university governance models found in the leading tertiary nations, rather than on extensive micro-management. Faculty are encouraged to become more research active, to attract more research funds, and to publish more in leading academic journals (preferably in international English-language prints), while younger scholars are encouraged to study abroad, notably in the USA. Overseas scholars and Chinese ‘returnees’ are increasingly sought for university positions, not least to garner the expertise of world-class universities abroad. Research support to universities through new funding bodies has increased but has also become more competitive. Yet the influence of both the state and the Communist Party remains strong in China’s higher education system, not least in appointments to senior administrative positions, while publications and research activities are often closely inspected by the state (Mohrman 2008). As such, the EGM is adapted to conditions and state policies in China rather than being taken over and implemented wholesale. It will be interesting to see whether continuing state direction and restrictions on conventional Western notions of freedom of inquiry and expression impede the pace of ascent up the global rankings by the leading research universities in China. A similar interest applies to some other Asian societies, too, such as Korea, where the government’s ‘Brain Korea’ programme, aiming to build ‘world-class universities’ through major investment in graduate programmes, sits alongside continuing strict governmental controls for universities on matters such as admissions policies and who may be admitted to study (Ki-Seok Kim and Sunghee Nam 2007).


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WORLD-CLASS SYSTEMS Inevitably encouragement and selective support for the EGM at an institutional level may produce unhappiness in institutions that fall outside the categories receiving special treatment. As with league tables, such policies are regarded as elitist and unfair and as undermining other policy objectives associated with increasing institutional diversity and widening social participation (which also require special funding). Consequently, it is not uncommon, especially among Left-leaning governments and new (not especially research-based) universities to refer instead to the need to build a ‘world-class university system’. The deputy prime minister in Australia (with responsibility also for higher education) in 2008, for example, raised such a policy objective as a means of emphasizing the Australian government’s support for the diverse range of institutional missions found within that country’s university sector. But what does the ‘world-class system’ objective signify and does it differ overmuch from the EGM? In some views the selective EGM approach benefits the whole of a nation’s higher education system – it confers standing and prestige, raises general aspirations and standards, and, particularly if encouraged through formal policy incentives for alliances between EGM and non-EGM institutions, trickles down the benefits, resources and experiences from the former to the latter in mutually advantageous and collaborative alliances and joint ventures. However, we lack real evidence in the highly competitive and reputation-conscious world of higher education that such ‘knock-on’ advantages are occurring. More likely, perhaps, the notion of ‘world-class system’ signals that funding policies are to be brought into line with policies of institutional diversity, and that EGM universities may expect less favourable treatment than if the goal of ‘world-class universities’ predominates as the financial driver for public investment. Nonetheless, it is unlikely also that ‘world-class system’ policies herald a move away from competitiveness, selectivity, performance and accountability. The aim is rather to explicate world-class standards for diverse missions and to fund achievement accordingly. Yet, as we have remarked previously, it is very difficult to specify and to measure outcomes globally in other than research terms. At least in research there are established transnational criteria and ‘markets’ – such as publications and citations – that are not available, for example, for student outcomes reflecting learning and teaching excellence (although, as we have noted, the prospective development by the OECD of a ‘PISA for higher education’ offers some hope that this situation may eventually be remedied – see Chapter 4). Moreover, theories of competitive realism and institutional isomorphism suggest that universities do not find it easy to turn away from activities and

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aspirations, predominantly research, that most clearly confer institutional reputation whatever the levels of government exhortation to the contrary (King 2004). The growth of national and global league tables will hardly change this either, given the research and established reputational focus that rankings generally reflect. Moreover, while the notion of ‘world-class’ is hazy enough when applied to institutions or departments (often signifying high reputation rather than achieving detailed high performance standards), it is even more difficult to specify the contours of a world-class higher education system. It may be based, for example, on high selectivity and elitism and with a superb handful of top universities outweighing the dross elsewhere in the system. In Scotland, for example, a governmental task force was reported in 2008 as considering reforms aimed at creating one Scottish university to rank among the world’s top 20 institutions with mergers among the rest (THE, 27 March 2008). Or it may be based on a more egalitarian approach with universities of all types and missions broadly being funded similarly and by a strict formula, rather than by selectivity, competitiveness and the demands of the economy (that is, along the lines of the world we have lost since the 1980s with the subsequent growth of the new public management and neo-liberalism). In such circumstances, perhaps the best that could be achieved would be a wide collection of second-class rather than outright world-class performers, but with a genuine claim that the overall system effects are, comparatively, more ‘world-class’ than those of policies based upon the selectivity of EGM approaches. Clearly, the world-class system approach is faced with a number of unresolved issues, although emulation of the excellence and diversity of the US model may provide an indication of fruitful ways forward. But most countries, however, lack the resources of the USA (and the public and private institutional investments built up over many years) to implement effectively such a model.

CONCLUSION As with national league tables, the global institutional rankings are significant less for the rationality, objectivity and comprehensiveness of their methods (as we have noted, no institutional ranking system is able to meet such requirements and all are inevitably ‘biased’), than as providing some sense of global orderliness and providing additional support for the operation of global markets and global reputation sifting in higher education. That is, league table compilers are regarded as significant market participants almost irrespective of the scientific validity of their approach. We suggest that league tables are a form of bounded rationality that offer


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a variety of stakeholders a set of simple heuristics with which to comprehend an increasingly complex but less directly knowable world. Similarly, Marginson (2008a) suggests that the global rankings connect to powerful needs for rank ordering – as ends in their own right almost – rather than enabling logical decisionmaking that takes into account all available data. Indeed, as we have seen, often differences in ranking positions are based on small and statistically insignificant differences in institutional ‘scores’. Undoubtedly, whether through governmental policy adoption of ‘worldclass university’ strategies or through institutional adaptation of mission and purpose, global rankings appear to be having a major influence on behaviour and activity in the field of higher education. More particularly, the EGM – the model of the US research university – is sustained by the implied template of the modern successful global university actor found in the global rankings and is diffusing around the world. Governments increasingly apply increased investment in research, especially in the science and biomedical areas, and on a competitive and selective basis. But not only the world-class university but all universities are regarded as responsible for their futures and their positions – as autonomous agents – and, as a consequence, alleged deficiencies in performance are entirely ‘their fault’ and cannot be blamed on government or any other entity. As a result, rankings generate major dilemmas for both universities and governments in determining whether isomorphism or diversity offers the best prospects for their future prosperity, and perhaps their survival.

8.

Conclusion: global regulatory futures

In the previous chapters we have explored the idea of the university as an organizational actor that is self-regarding and responsible. Increasingly its autonomy but also its importance to governments is leading to heightened and more formal processes of accountability. Although universities predominantly are rooted in national systems of funding, regulation and innovation, increasingly these processes, and the organization itself, are influenced and shaped by global standards and models. These models are the outcome of the actions of both state and non-state actors – sometimes they are located more in organizational fields – and frequently they operate for effectiveness through comparative peer pressures and horizontal monitoring by organizations. In some cases, private regulation, as found with university league tables, provides orderliness to a sector and helps to constitute markets, yet also debilitating aspects of national public policy. However, processes of dissemination of global standards, particularly those issuing from inter-governmental or supranational bodies and which require explicit national incorporation for their implementation, include a number of levels of diffusion that potentially constitute threats of an attenuation of commitment. Chains of implementation, and their critical levels and nodes, require careful analysis to distinguish between surface acceptance and onthe-ground ritualism and to consider where such divergences are found (as in the case of the Bologna Process, for example). Regulatory governance is increasingly a sophisticated and subtle matter for practitioners and is increasing its interest for academics and other analysts. Not only do the developing transnational networks of regulators – governmental and non-governmental – recognize that effective policy implementation depends upon considering and then deploying complex instruments to best suit overall objectives and particular circumstances, but many actors are both regulators and regulated. As private authority increases in private–public networks of coordination and rule-making, non-governmental, corporate self-regulatory and meta-regulatory processes become recognized as cost-effective, expert and legitimating sources of governance. Consequently, private bodies undertake regulatory functions and establish new forms of non-state law. Sassen (2007) estimates 214


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that there around 125 international institutions worldwide in which independent authorities reach final legal decisions, and there is a general recognition of multiple and specialized private processes increasingly manifesting high signs of juridification. Private bodies also take on characteristics of public agencies in contractual acceptance of the public interest, and in commitment to principles of accountability and transparency, in supplying public services. In recent decades, including in higher education, we have witnessed in the provision of key public services not simply the privatization of the public but also the publicization of the private. These processes are particularly characteristic of the transnational realm. There is no overall sovereign of the kind that we find in national jurisdictions but rather a patchwork of coordination and orderliness clustered around sectors. The world is quilt-like in its patchwork of sector governance rather than totalizing in the ways associated with sovereign territorial rule. Self-regarding and self-responsible organization is the world’s major coordinating principle for associations, and universities have firmly entered this world. Communities of knowledgeable experts generating blueprints, models and standards provide the sealants, the scientific analyses and the legitimacy for such processes of global governance. Rather than politicians, and the conflicts and contests of power and democracy, we appear more to have technocrats, consensual coordination and voluntarism. The focus is on a kind of governing legitimacy that is based upon being effective in an acceptable manner to those on the receiving end. The hazy contours at the borders of governmental and private authority especially characterize transnational processes. However, we need to take care not to assume that all that matters for governance in the world is that of rationally solving collective coordination problems. We still need to know who gains and who loses in emerging global governance – and not ignore issues of power and conflict. The higher education domain captures many of these developments and is at the heart of a significant number. The previous chapters describe the role of inter-governmental arrangements, public–private networks, private authority and world culture as forces that are bringing about the convergence of global governance arrangements for universities across territories. Increasingly we find in the world of higher education less scope for orderliness and coordination founded on direct-line traditional regulation, but more the careful playing upon corporate reputations and organizational peer processes through rankings and similar informational disclosures on standards. How best we might take forward our research agendas in this field and with what assumptions are important issues, and the following provides a number of propositions. First, we must recognize that regulatory governance, national and

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global, is a critical matter for the wellbeing or otherwise of universities. We noted that private higher education now constitutes around a third of all provision and that regulation is a key instrument that determines its size, legitimacy, opportunities and public interest role. Consequently regulation is important for the public universities too, and governments face dilemmas in governing their universities in ways that satisfy the needs for both transparency and accountability, on the one hand, and the facilitation of self-organizing creativity and innovation, on the other. Our account shows that we live less in a world of neo-liberalism than in one of worldwide regulatory capitalism, as David Levi-Faur, Jacint Jordana and John Braithwaite argue. Rather than simply equating all forms of regulation with administrative oppression, as those in higher education tend to do, we need also to understand how regulation can best serve the public and the private interest, and how it may do so by incorporating, and gaining the acceptance of, those being regulated. To what extent is current global governance suited to the best purposes of policymakers and others and what particular processes appear to work well? These are important policy issues to place on research agendas. Second, who is gaining and who is losing from these processes and how much does that matter? This involves analysing power in its productive as well as behavioural characteristics, as forming subjects and biases without much overt activity. It also requires an understanding that regulatory arrangements are never fixed immutably but are always contestable and reflect particular views of the world that are often strongly opposed by others. How do we get to the heart of these conflicts and contradictions? Third, we probably require more micro-analyses of these processes in order to develop our macro-concepts and -theories in a better-informed way. How exactly do these transnational networks operate on the ground, in international organizations and in other similar networks, and how might we understand better notions of modelling, ranking, peer pressure, power, politics and science as key elements? That is, globalization incorporates and also materializes local national dynamics. Not all processes found within national territories are necessarily national but may be what Sassen (2007) describes as ‘a localization of the global’, exemplified by global capital markets being partially embedded in sub-national sites such as financial centres with their distinctive systems and patterns of trust, or by national courts increasingly using international instruments, such as human rights, international standards and WTO regulations in their adjudications. There is a necessary involvement of national states in forming global governance, not least in helping to shift regulatory functions into transnational networks and organizations, and in the direction of standards, voluntarism and peer pressure. Moreover, within the state some


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elements become more globalized and pivotal than others, and higher education departments may lose out to governmental trade or security departments in transnational negotiations over higher education matters. Globalization research involves analysing national and sub-national practices and as such takes in many traditional concerns of public policy analyses, albeit with a rather different lens. Research into global university and other sector governance requires as much attention to micro-practices and national institutions (as sites of globalization) as it does to matters of worldwide interconnectivity and global institutions. Fourth, our research agenda for globalization and higher education governance needs more accounts of the role of ideas, culture and narratives as explanatory variables. Rather than assume that economic factors are always dominant we require interpretations that more richly capture the mix of factors and processes governing universities and policymakers. In this way we are likely to find not only that globalization (and global governance) is about producing convergent uniformity in regulatory applications, but that it actually depends for its continuance on the vitality, variety and differences between countries and groups and the very competition and innovation that themselves provide the motor for globalization. The workings of markets and higher education systems remain considerably shaped by the specific actions of states, such as towards private higher education and supply from outside their borders. Matters of legality, legitimacy, quality assurance and broader regulation reflect varying national cultures and histories, although our story is that many of these may be lessening in moves towards greater global convergence. Fifth, future research is likely to benefit from closer analyses of open source knowledge flows as a further process of privatized global governance. Moreover, in higher education, such processes tend to be structured by university league tables that help to secure a tight (if not totally closed) reproduction of institutional status in both national and global domains (Marginson 2008b). Consequently, university rankings have both commercial and non-commercial effects that require much greater attention, not least the relationships and proportionalities between status and market consequences for institutions. A regulatory approach of the kind that we have advanced throughout this book would also explore linkages to other regulatory influences, such as the increased integration of quality assurance and qualifications framework and recognition systems. Finally, in governing universities and other institutions globally, it is important to recognize that, in addition to markets and hierarchies, we find standardization as an increasingly important form of coordination and governance. Standards take the form of often compelling advice on good practice for organizations, and standardizers loom particularly large

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on the world stage where other rule-makers provide less competition. Moreover, independent and worldwide actors, such as universities, appear to respond better to the voluntarism and peer influences associated with standardization than to external legal directives. Yet many standards are highly procedural, exercised at a distance, and focus on processes believed to produce desired and quality outcomes, leaving space for organizational ritualism and conformity rather than inducing real improvements. Standards may also be constructed and adapted to meet the protectionist interests of the well-established players and act as a form of protectionism (such as in accrediting criteria in higher education that make it difficult for for-profit bodies to become certificated). Standards can thus undermine as well as facilitate markets. But broadly standards help to make universities subject to audit and other accountabilities, although also undermining forms of professionalism based on established and often tacit knowledge and practices. How standards operate as a form of global governance in university systems is still largely unexplored, and research examining the application of worldwide standards to higher education actors and processes is especially needed. As such it would form an important component of the increasing salience of global regulatory governance for universities virtually everywhere.

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Index Brint 50, 53 Brisbane Communique 117 British Standards Institute 100 Brunsson 88, 99, 159–60 Brunsson and Jacobsson 99, 150

Academic collegiality 62–3, 78, 136 Academic fields 58–61 Accountability 79, 98, 123, 135–6, 138, 158 Accreditation 135 Accreditation bodies 13, 36, 50–51 Adelman 116 Ahrne and Brunsson 88, 91, 93 Alesi et al. 114 Altbach 20, 24, 196, 199 Altbach and Balan 23, 208–9 Ambiguous regulation 78 American Council on Education 51 Anderson 74 Apollo Group 28–9 Armingeon 126 Asia 3, 25, 33, 52, 83, 92, 117–18, 121, 181, 199, 205 Australia 116–18, 199, 203, 211 Australian National Protocols 43 Audit society 75 Ayres and Braithwaite 78, 83–4 Baker and Lenhardt 56, 209 Balzer and Rusconi 106, 108, 128 Barnett and Duvall 130 Barnett and Finnemore 130 Beerkens 115, 168 Berger and Luckmann 54 Berlin Principles 155, 160, 163, 188 Bevir and Rhodes 77 Black 83, 98 Blackmur 120 Blyth 83 Boli and Thomas 53 Bologna Process 4, 14, 35–6, 44, 66, 71, 94, 100–118, 129, 152, 157, 160, 188, 214 Braithwaite 75, 81, 86, 90, 97, 120, 216 Braithwaite and Drahos 70, 76, 86

Carnegie Classification 47–8, 142, 205 Cass 85 Central bankers 95–6 Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) 127 Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) 139–40, 142, 187, 197 Chait 63, 65–6 China 25, 52, 139, 187, 193, 209–10 Chubb 195 Clark 19, 64 Clarke 147–8 Consortia 6, 64 Copenhagen Declaration 108 Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) 51 Credit ratings agencies 73, 79–80, 148, 154, 156–8 Dale and Robertson 123 Deem et al. 64 Deliberative democracy 91 Demortain 125 Dill 62–3 Dill and Soo 205 DiMaggio and Powell 54 Dingworth 8–9 Diversity 30–33, 42–4, 46–7, 105, 187–8 Djelic and Kleiner 85 Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 87, 90, 97 Douglass 102 Drori and Meyer 87–8

231

232


Eaton 35 Economic competitiveness 21, 44–5 Economic competitiveness theory 68–70 Economic models 13, 40–41 Elsbach and Kramer 153 Embedded knowledge regulators 15, 154–61 Emerging global model (EGM) 16, 206–10 ENQA 71, 113 Entrepreneurial universities 64 Epistemic communities 71, 82, 90, 12, 125, 156 ERASMUS 35, 104 European Area of Research and Innovation 108 European Commission (EC) 108–10, 128–9, 192 European Credit Transfer Scheme (ECTS) 103, 113, 117 European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) 107, 205 European Register for Quality Assurance 113 European Union (EU) 3, 5–6, 10, 24, 30, 33, 35–6, 70–71, 74, 82, 92–3, 95, 104–5, 107, 127, 131 Fair Trade Labelling Organization 97 Financial Times 139, 150–56 Forrest 75, 83 For-profit higher education 26–30, 50–51 Foucault 87 France 114, 122, 194 Frank and Gabler 58–61 Freeman 77 G8 24, 42, 126 Geiger 29 Germany 56, 112, 116, 139, 187, 194 Gilardi 68, 71–2, 80 Global governance 1–2 Global influences 3–5 Globalization 1, 31–2, 130, 161, 189, 217 Globalization and trade 33–8

Globalization and regulation 38–9 Global rankings 189, 190–213 Governance 90 Governing boards 65 Governors 179–81, 188 Graz and Nolke 77 Guardian newspaper 178 Hall and Soskice 82–3 Hartmann 119 Hay 40 Hay and Marsh 83 Hayek 7 Hayhoe and Lin 25 Hazelkorn 145, 147, 167–70, 189, 202 Held and McGrew 3 Henry et al. 127 Herberg 99 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 15, 167, 170, 172, 201 Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) 106, 111 Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) 172 Hood 96 House of Commons (UK) 113 Hurrell 71 Hybrids 96 Hyoung-Kyu 120 Independent regulators 80–81 India 209 Inter-governmental governance theory 70–71 Intermediary bodies 21 International Accountancy Standards Board (IASB) 92, 97 International Competition Network (ICN) 85, 93 International Management in Higher Education (IMHE) 127 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 24, 70, 73 International Organization for Standardization 100 Jacobsson 94 Japan 26, 83, 121, 187

Index Jayaram 209 Jepperson 53 Jordana and Levi-Faur 68, 71–2, 80, 216 Kahneman and Tversky 138 Kaplan 27–30 Kay 40 Kerr 48, 62 Kerwer 79, 159 King 5, 20, 29, 38, 43, 70, 77–8, 214 King, Griffiths and Williams 64, 90 Kirp 49, 148, 204 Ki-Seok Kim and Sunghee Nam 32, 210 Kitthananan 38 Knowledge economy 44, 102, 116 Korea 187, 193, 210 Law 77, 94–5, 99 Laureate 27–30 Lee 25 Legal pluralism 98 Legitimacy 98–9 Leiden University 205 Leitch 61 Leuze et al. 118, 120 Levi-Faur 75 Levy 25–7 Lisbon Agenda 36, 71, 107–8, 127 Locke et al. 15, 137–8, 140, 144–5, 147–8, 150, 158, 167, 170–89, 202–3 London School of Economics and Political Science 146 Macleans 139 Malaysia 25, 27 Marcussen 95, 126 Marginson 3, 21, 154, 191, 195, 197–9, 201–3, 205, 213, 217 Marginson ans van der Wende 41–2, 51, 104, 114–15, 197 Markets 22–3, 80, 121, 135 Martens 119, 121–2, 124 Martens and Weymann 3 Mass higher education 61–2 Melbourne University 117 Meta-organizations 88–9, 91, 93

233

Meta-regulation 7, 31, 69, 75, 81, 110, 136, 162 Meyer 53 Miller and Rose 87 Modelling 76 Mohrman 209–10 Mohrman et al. 206–8 Moran 75 Morgan 94 Morgan and Yeung 77 Morth 85, 94 Morse 35 Mugge 77 Mundy 121 Multiversity 62 National state 7, 9 National Student Survey 22, 172, 175–6 Neo-institutionalism 53–6 Netherlands 112, 116 Networks 9–11, 14 New public management 7, 13, 40–42, 46, 72, 75, 152 Niland 192 OECD 3, 5–6, 11–12, 14–15, 24, 30, 34, 36, 43, 70, 73, 79–80, 82, 85–6, 92, 99–101, 118–31, 188, 195 Open Method of Coordination (OMC) 93–4, 107, 127, 131 Organizations 4, 53, 87 Parker 81 Path dependencies 84 Pattberg 132 Peck 40 Phoenix University 28–30 Powell and DiMaggio 90 Power 75, 90 Private authority 15, 86–7, 132, 159, 214 Private higher education 12, 23, 50–51 Private universities 24–7 Professionalism 88 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 123–4, 126, 129, 137, 188, 195, 198, 206, 211

234


Public choice theory 13, 40–41 Public good 21 Public interest 43 Quality assurance 6, 34, 44, 79, 114, 119–20, 136, 217 Quality Assurance Agency 90 Ramirez 53, 55, 61, 102 Rankings 4, 6, 15–16, 32, 36, 44, 80, 103, 122–3, 129, 135–65, 168–89 Regulated regulators 94 Regulatory capitalism 75 Regulatory governance 1, 6–7, 13–14, 62–67, 77–80, 214 Regulatory narratives 83 Regulatory ritualism 90 Regulatory state 73, 75 Research 21, 32–3, 52 Research Assessment Exercise 172, 201 Research councils 52 Responsive regulation 75, 83–4 Risk 90, 149, 186–7 Sadlak 193, 195 Sadlak and Liu 187, 192–3 Sanoff 142, 159 Sassen 1, 214, 216 Schepel 100 Scherrer 119 Schooten and Verschuuren 78 Science 82, 88, 96, 100, 125 Scientific rationalization 57–8, 87 Scotland 212 Scott, C. 83 Scott, J. 75 Self-regulation 63 Shanghai Jiao Tong University 140, 162, 170, 191–213 Sinclair 154, 158, 164 Singapore 204 Skills 61 Slaughter 9–10, 74 Socially-embedded universities 61 SOCRATES 104 Soft law 6, 15–16, 61, 72, 84, 101–2, 107, 135, 155, 160 South Africa 38

South America 25, 116 Standards 6, 87–9, 91, 99–100, 120–21, 125, 150, 159, 180, 218 Standardization 72, 88–9, 91, 103, 118, 144 Students 20, 182 Student loans 30 Student vouchers 30 Streeck and Thalen 83 Tacit knowledge 183 Teaching institutions 31 Teichler 3, 19 Tierney and Sirat 25 The Times newspaper 180 The Times Good University Guide 172 The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), now The Higher Education (THE)/QS 146, 162, 170, 173, 196–213 Transnational networks of professionals 71–2 Transparency 78–9, 91 Trustees 65 UNESCO 5–6, 12, 30, 34, 36, 100, 102, 104, 118–20, 126–7 United Nations 73, 92 Universitas 21 32, 168 Universities 2–3 Universities UK 32, 124 University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific (UMAP) 117 University of New South Wales 117 US News and World Report (USNWR) 138–9, 142–4, 146, 148, 159, 189, 202 USA 27–30, 33–4, 36, 42, 47–51, 65–6, 68–9, 78–9, 81, 86, 97, 102, 105, 110, 116, 121, 155, 193, 198 User-pays models 23 Usher and Savino 140, 146, 187, 189 Varieties of regulation 82–4 Vincent-Lancrin 33, 35 Vogel 75 Wade 38 Walter 83

Index Wedlin 143, 147, 150, 153 Weiss 3, 38, 83 Weymann et al. 131 Woodhouse and Stella 6, 13 World Bank 6, 24, 30, 43, 45, 74, 131 World-class systems 211–13

235

World-class universities 15–16, 23, 52, 136, 185, 187, 189–213 World order 7–11, 74 World society models 15, 38, 53–6, 71, 101–2 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 12, 24, 35, 51, 70, 74, 82, 85, 111, 119, 131

Governing Universities Globally: Organizations, Regulation and Rankings

Working Globally (Express Exec)

Governing Europe

Governing Medicine

Governing and Governance in France

Franchising Globally: Innovation, Learning and Imitation

Architectural Design and Regulation

Banks, Consumers and Regulation

Privatization, Regulation and Deregulation

Franchising Globally: Innovation, Learning and Imitation

Banking Regulation and Globalization

Pricing and price regulation

Gene expression and regulation

Media, Organizations and Identity

Social Networks and Organizations

Media, Organizations and Identity

Organizations and Environments

Power and Organizations

Complexity, Learning and Organizations

Media, Organizations and Identity

Personality And ORganizations

Understanding Gender and Organizations

Governing Sustainable Cities

Governing Universities Globally: Organizations, Regulation and Rankings

Working Globally (Express Exec)

Governing Europe

Governing Medicine

Governing and Governance in France

Franchising Globally: Innovation, Learning and Imitation

Architectural Design and Regulation

Banks, Consumers and Regulation

Privatization, Regulation and Deregulation

Franchising Globally: Innovation, Learning and Imitation

Banking Regulation and Globalization

Pricing and price regulation

Gene expression and regulation

Media, Organizations and Identity

Social Networks and Organizations

Media, Organizations and Identity

Organizations and Environments

Power and Organizations

Complexity, Learning and Organizations

Media, Organizations and Identity

Personality And ORganizations

Understanding Gender and Organizations

Governing Sustainable Cities

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