In the 21st century, knowledge has become the driving force behind societal progress, emphasising the need for higher education to produce contextually relevant knowledge that addresses the multifaceted challenges faced by local communities. It is in this respect that knowledge needs to be generated through one's position of epistemic location in…

Increasingly, competing discourses shape tensions between the role of the contemporary university and the global markets in which universities must exist. This paper draws on the examination of interviews with nine education academics in Australia to illuminate the construction of 'global' in the production of the global graduate (GG). Discourse…

This article aims to investigate whether national differences in the institutionalization of the binary divide between universities and Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) lead to different outcomes in performing Academics' Societal Engagement (ASE). Two institutional theory-based core differences of European binary higher education (HE)…

A growing body of literature is encouraging academics to slow down their academic work as a way of managing the acceleration of university life. Little attention, however, has been paid to the important differences in temporalities among different sorts of higher education institutions, and the effect this is likely to have upon the sense of…

A government report criticised Australian universities for low proficiency in commercialising epistemic production (research and knowledge). A critical omission was a comparable measure of academic productivity to substantiate whether underperformance correlated with the commercialisation value of research output or whether academic productivity…

In this article, we argue that sick leave and its management within the university involves exchanges of moral capital. The circulation of moral capital supports a moral economy, in turn underpinning the political economy of the corporate university. The forms of moral capital are diverse, sometimes easily recognized as such, more often hidden in…

Although, as a result of the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework, the principle of teaching excellence is receiving renewed attention in English higher education, the idea has been left largely undefined. The cynic might argue, in agreement with Bill Readings, that this lack of a precise definition is deliberate, since teaching…

Before the 2000s and the buzz surrounding global rankings, many countries witnessed the emergence and development, starting in the 1970s, of academic media rankings produced primarily by press organisations. This domestic, media-based production, despite the relative lack of attention paid by the social sciences, has been progressively integrated…

Certain global leadership forces -- competitiveness, tolerance and creativity -- are so pervasive that they can be illustrated on the part of any country. However, nations also have unique dynamics to consider within our interconnected world. This is the overarching issue being expressed in this essay wherein the Carol Mullen deconstructs Canada's…

New Public Management reforms have fostered universities to focus on performance and competition which has resulted in different pressures to perform and disruption of strong teaching-research balance at universities. The imbalanced division of teaching research workloads may be gendered and can strengthen the differences in research productivity…

In Australia and elsewhere, universities face increasing pressure to improve research output and quality, particularly through partnerships with industry. This raises interesting challenges for academic staff with considerable industry experience who are "new" to academe. Some of these challenges were faced by the authors who have been…

Among the major policies that have been implemented to ensure its continued success, "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" (TSLN) has been described as the "big bang of educational reforms" in Singapore. However, while the policy aims to develop critical thinkers in school leavers, the corporatisation of education in the shape of…

Previous scholarly attention to the experiences of faculty members has emphasized the contexts of US institutions, with minimal attention to the experiences of faculty members at Canadian universities. This paper presents the findings of the Canadian component of an international survey that was administered in 19 different jurisdictions to…

This article focuses on "impact" as a new condition of research assessment for UK academics. It explores a history of resistance to an "impact agenda" and how impact as a component of the Research Excellence Framework (REF)--a system of performance based funding--is viewed by academics as an infringement to a scholarly way of…

In Baldino and Cabral (2013) we introduced the concept of qualified labour-power as the commodity produced by the school system. In the present article we outline a quantitative model to evaluate the profit rate of educational programmes. We compare a medical school programme with a teacher education programme at a public university in Brazil,…