This study explores the production, dissemination, and reception of the discourse of educational excellence and internationalisation in Japan's Designated National University Corporation System. The study frames the policy initiative within the longstanding goals of the Japanese government and demonstrates how the work of Michel Foucault helps…

Purpose: The concept of distributed leadership (DL) has been widely advocated within higher education (HE). Yet, there have been few empirical investigations and little theory development outside Western contexts to date. This study presents a unique conceptualisation of DL and tests it empirically in India. Design/methodology/approach: This study…

This paper examines the ways in which administrators, academics and students living under conditions of authoritarianism come to imagine the university's political possibilities and horizons. To this aim, we first consider how alternative imaginaries are constructed and contained at Bogaziçi University, where the parameters of political…

Numerous studies have discussed the "ethics of care" and "safe learning environments" in relation to educational experiences. Yet, there is a dearth of literature on such aspects in vocational, non-western higher education contexts. This paper examines how students and teachers view entanglements of the ethics of care and safe…

In China, higher education institutions (HEIs) have a governance arrangement in which the university president and the party secretary occupy key roles. However, their legal roles as institutional leaders are vaguely specified in existing legal frameworks. Based on a four-dimensional theoretical model, this paper (i) clarifies the leadership roles…

While reference societies as an "externalization" process are often used to justify borrowing policies from abroad, a concerted attempt to understand how "power" influences this process, particularly regarding "semiperipheral" references to the periphery, remains absent. This article explores the externalization…

This article performs a discourse analysis on the recent interest of the Israeli Ministry of Education in vocational education by examining governmental and organisational texts. This article addresses two key questions. What is the government's justification for its renewed interest in vocational education? What are its discursive practices to…

Rules and rationalities are the bases of analysis in rules determined governance model. Power as the ability to influence decision-making and the influence of power centres are not sufficiently examined in the literature on the governance of higher education. The article locates various centres of power in the functioning of universities and how…

This article addresses the problem of the quantification of higher education by introducing a theoretical framework for power relations and agency within this process. Instead of treating evaluation regimes as external and imposed on the sector, it argues for a relational approach to the problem of exercising power over the higher education sector…

This conceptual paper presents a decolonial critique of Eurocentric epistemic hegemony in South Africa and its impact on the curriculum. We argue that the propagation of knowledge from the Global North as 'universal' through conceptually vague framings of curriculum internationalization is contributing to the maintenance of Eurocentric hegemony.…

A case study is used to understand how Western international branch campuses (IBCs) in China represent themselves through web-based branding materials. Drawing on colonial discourse analysis and the theoretical framework of Whiteness as futurity, this study examined the case of Wenzhou-Kean University, a Sino-US cooperative institution to…

The purpose of this study is to explore education fever and credentialism in South Korea from the perspective of higher education. To discuss the study logically, three research questions are stated. First, what is the concept of Korean education fever from cultural perspective? Second, what and how has been developed educational credentialism in…

Despite the diversity and inclusion efforts of higher education institutions, immigrant and minority students frequently experience marginalisation that adversely affects their academic progress. In this article, we examine the under-researched population of immigrant women in Icelandic universities. Drawing on the intersectionality perspective,…

The war in Ukraine has opened a Pandora's Box of internationalization concerns that, heretofore, took a backseat to concerns with the effectiveness and sustainability of the field. In analyzing the impact of the war on international higher education, scholars offered various assessments of the conflict's effects, especially in the combatant…

The neo-institutional theory indicates the impact of the institutional environment on organizations. This leads to the creation of homogeneous institutional structures, due to the existence of dominant institutional logic. University reforms, embedded in ideas of New Public Management, mean that evolution of the institutional logic associated with…