Organisational actorhood denotes the agency and capacity of organisations to act for and out of themselves. Sociological neoinstitutionalism has shown how notions of empowered actorhood have spread globally and across modern society. It has however neglected how organisations act upon this notion. Drawing on Foucault's writings on governmentality,…

Purpose: To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative, risk-takers and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms. This study aims to investigate, from a schoolteacher's perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial…

Since the implementation of the Excellence Initiative and the Excellence Strategy, German higher education institutions have been restructuring university governance, especially those selected as Universities of Excellence. This study uses a holistic and mission-related integrated governance approach to conduct a qualitative analysis of the…

The global establishing of school choice has often and convincingly been criticised in terms of social inequality because parents have very different access to resources to enforce their expectations and demands as 'costumers'. What is less discussed in the literature is the perspective of the 'providers': Do schools have to give up their position…

Recent shifts in university governance have relied on increased autonomy. Within this context, the enhanced role attributed to governance boards at the expense of academic bodies and the role of external stakeholders has gained momentum. With the aim of understanding the extent of the influence of external stakeholders at the institutional level,…

As previous research has not addressed the relationship between university autonomy and university rankings within countries where the state control model is used, this study explores universities' strategies to achieve top university rankings in accordance with their autonomous rights and financial as well as political support. Specifically, this…

Purpose: School improvement and effectiveness depend substantially on teachers developing their professional competencies on an ongoing basis. Germany's new approach to school governance combines instruments borrowed from different theoretical concepts: teacher collaboration (in a sense of professional self-regulation with high autonomy) and…

The characteristics of the modern school system, which integrates children into a "nation state," have been radicalized throughout history, especially in Japan and Germany. This research aims to clarify German and Japanese paradigms in public education through a focus on the roles of school teachers. The research asks: what is the…

European quality assurance has a complicated history that must be viewed as taking place on two levels: first, in a national effort to deregulate the public sector and to make universities accountable for their teaching performance; and second, a supranational endeavor to accomplish European integration in the field of higher education. Similarly,…

Purpose: Increased school autonomy and accountability have been a common denominator of national reforms in otherwise heterogeneous governance systems in Europe and the USA. The paper argues that because schools serving disadvantaged communities (SSDCs) often have lower average performance, they are more often sanctioned or under closer scrutiny,…

The purpose of this paper is to comparatively investigate the professional autonomy of upper secondary school teachers in three European countries in interpreting and implementing curricula. The paper focuses on teachers' experiences, and their perceptions of their autonomy and the control exercised over them in the global era of neoliberal…

Purpose: In Germany up until now, there has been very little research on staff development in schools. The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively assess school-based staff development and to describe the interplay between different instruments of staff development (e.g. classroom observations, development discussions) at the school level.…

External support by a local coordinating agency facilitates the work of school-to-school networks. This study provides an innovative theoretical framework to analyse how support provided by local education offices for school-to-school networks is perceived by the participating teachers. Based on a quantitative survey and qualitative interview data…

After the revolution in 1918, many reformist teachers were convinced that they could put into practice their dreams of a free and independent school in a democratic republic. Four state schools in Hamburg became anti-authoritarian school communities, in which teachers, parents and students experimented with revolutionary concepts of education. For…

The concepts of differentiation and profiling are cornerstones in discussions about the organisation of contemporary higher education systems, following the trends of massification and global competition. This contribution provides a system-level description and comparison of the German and Dutch higher education systems regarding these topics,…