The focus of this paper is to promote the awareness of higher-education administration and faculty of the opportunities presented by developing and implementing lean operational models in their institutions. The paper provides a brief account of the author's observations of small liberal arts colleges that are operating in non-efficient models. It…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are traditionally seen as society's robust institutions but are currently experiencing new difficulties as a result of shifts in both government and society's expectations of their roles as education providers. There is a global call for new models and practices which need HEIs in the private sector to develop…

Inefficiency has been a major issue battling the service delivery of non-academic staff in most public universities in Nigeria and this has greatly affected the academic and research outlook of Nigerian universities. Interest in the study was to determine the extent to which induction, demonstration, on-the-job and formal training which are all…

Many colleges and universities today are reorganizing student affairs operations in ways that eliminate or reassign many of their functions to other university departments. In some drastic cases, student affairs departments and senior leadership positions have been eliminated. On some campuses, the chief student affairs officer does not report…

To this date, research on the interplay between organisational structure/managerial and organisational value/psychological elements which impact on educational quality is scarce and fragmented. As a consequence of a lack of knowledge in this area, institutions often address these elements in isolation, moving past integral approaches, which…

This article examines changes in the formal organization of two universities and two schools within these universities, the University of Oslo and Stanford University. We focus on role differentiation, rule formation, and resource seeking structures and describe organizational developments along these dimensions. We find that both these…

Instructional leadership remains a complicated and debated issue for education. In fact, traditional theories of leadership from within both education and the organizational sciences increasingly face criticism. Drawing from ideas applicable to differentiated contexts of learning, this article develops an alternative model of instructional…

This monograph examines the emergence of strategic human resource (HR) practices in higher education at a time when the budgetary crisis in public higher education has never been more acute. The wave of financial pressures on public research universities today heralds the advent of an era of unprecedented change. Financial upheaval resulting from…

Universities are engines of the knowledge-based economy, both as sites of knowledge production and exploitation. Over the past two decades a "Third Mission" for universities has been articulated, alongside teaching and research; and this third mission is understood as commercial engagement. While growing literatures on the entrepreneurial…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of second tier UK universities in relation to the effectiveness of their knowledge management systems and involvement in open innovation. Data were acquired using a mail survey of academic staff in social science and business faculties in second tier institutions. The results indicate that…

Purpose: This paper aims to report on how an Administrative Division at a research-intensive Australian university utilised feedback data from the Learning and Growth Survey, to initiate changes. Design/methodology/approach: This paper refers to the actions taken by the Administrative Division to the results obtained from the Learning and Growth…

Historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs) have long struggled to compete with traditionally White institutions (TWIs) when it comes to breakthrough research. Of the 908 U.S. institutions that received National Science Foundation research funding in fiscal year 2005, only 72 were historically Black, and they took in $294.2 million in…

This article develops a methodology, based on the concepts of a results-referenced needs assessment, to determine and prioritize perceived areas of existing or potential concern in an academic institution. The results were used to develop a baseline against which progress in addressing those concerns can be measured over time for the purpose of…

Universities should be developing female middle-managers for reasons of gender balance (Aitkin in "The Last Boilerhouse Address," Canberra University 2001), the skills shortage, pending mass retirements (Chesterman in "Not doable jobs? Exploring senior women's attitudes to leadership roles in universities." Women's Higher…

An extensive literature on leadership theories and models concerns large organizations in industry and has been developed mostly by outside researchers with expertise in conducting large surveys on and interviews with "subjects" in leadership positions. Recently, such theories have been adopted or adapted to higher education in South…