While serving as a benchmark of 'world-class' universities, the global university rankings do not include the vast majority of universities. However, "Times Higher Education" developed a Japanese national university ranking table in 2017, which includes approximately 40% of all Japanese universities. This increased coverage of…

Amid debates about global university rankings (GURs), very few have closely examined how GURs' media outlets construct meanings of higher education (HE) in their visual representations. We critically examine 135 publicly available visual media (photographs) in the Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) websites to uncover the…

Global university rankings seek to illustrate the performance of institutions on an international level and are used by many institutions to help them to reach strategic goals, as such, they have become synonymous to some as an indicator of quality and desirability. As global university rankings become further embedded as a basis on which…

The concept of the world-class university has proliferated throughout the world, yet there is no universal consensus on how to define these elite institutions. Without a unified definition, rankings have become a direct proxy for sense-making in the sector and a commensurate indicator that decision-makers have used to understand the world-class…

Universities around the world are increasingly orienting themselves towards global engagement in the form of internationalisation. This article examines how the importance of internationalisation and international research collaborations varies across institutions. Using data from the Fourth Global Survey of Internationalisation, it finds that…

This paper explores the impacts of research excellence evaluation entailed in global ranking exercises, a control strategy characteristic of new managerialism, on Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) academics. The enquiry combines the Critical Incidents Technique (CIT) and internet-based discourse analysis, drawing on mass media texts and…

Consequences of competition for global university rankings, such as changes in funding modes, have been extensively discussed in the field of higher education. However, few studies have reviewed its implications on knowledge production. This study provides a contextualised method for theorising the implications of this competition on the…

Employing a glonacal (global, national and local) heuristic as a theoretical lens, and a qualitative analysis with interview data, this study highlights how Chinese faculty members interpret the definitions and implications of pursuing world class universities (WCUs) and struggle with the multiple dimensions of their academic lives across global,…

In this paper, we examine 15 academics who crossed national borders in response to the strong pull of recruiting efforts from a Korean university. These foreign professors at the case university are on tenure-stream and teach regular academic courses in various academic departments and colleges. By discussing their motivations for global mobility,…