What if being world-class is bad for universities? By playing the status game, UK higher education has forfeited public trust and our right to growth. What other sector would stall in an era of surging demand, as our addressable market expands from young people to all adults? We need new forms of higher education to maintain our share of the…

Social media technologies (SMTs), online brand communities, and social customer relationship management (SCRM) Capabilities play an indispensable role in the engagement and loyalty-building of university students to achieve a sustainable university reputation. This study provides pioneering input for higher education institutions (HEIs) by…

The multi-billion-dollar university rankings industry purports to offer insights into the quality of institutions, but the extent to which it does so has consistently been refuted. Critics argue that problematic proxies, composite indexing, homogenising effects, and several other issues make them both unscientific and neo-colonial. This article…

This research seeks to analyze the logic of Brazilian academic capitalism that conditions a process of commodification of the production of knowledge, as well as the prioritization of the supply of training courses for professionals. This process is characterized as raw material knowledge contributing to the creation of a kind of World Class…

Global competition results in an overall demand for higher skills. In the competitive world, China has no choice but to adjust themselves to become more efficient, productive, and flexible. Higher education in China has played a key role in achieving socialist economy and modernization. Since the open-door policy in the 1980s, there has been a…

Reports of massive open online courses (MOOCs) appeared in mainstream news in the early 2010s with messages of potential disruption to existing higher education systems. Several years on, the role of MOOCs is still evolving. The media has the power to influence acceptance of new ideas, therefore this research investigates New Zealand news media…

Pervasive digitality reveals us as analogue creatures that are unprepared for a world and a logic generated increasingly through automation. Promulgated by capitalism, digitality has created a new form of alienation, one far more powerful and comprehensive than that envisaged by either Marx or Lukács in the analogue-industrial age. Digital…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Norway have been subjected to several reforms in recent decades. There are transformed relationships between institutions and their environment, and higher educations' third mission is emphasized. To improve our understanding of HEIs' third mission, this paper employs boundary object theory, enabling us to…

This paper examines the potential negative consequences of the internationalisation of American higher education from the perspective of positional competition theory. This analysis suggests that internationalisation efforts undertaken by colleges and universities contribute to positional competition between students vying for admission, between…

The past three decades have witnessed the growing influence of market forces on higher education, resulting in what is defined by Fairclough (1993) as the marketization of academic discourse. The present study attempts to examine the effect of such trend on university website homepages in China, which is an under-researched genre of higher…

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…

This study extends our knowledge of internal branding in the context of employees in the higher education sector. Employing a quantitative methodology in UK universities, a conceptual model is presented and tested on 235 employees. Internal market orientation (IMO) is examined as a management tool to drive employees' university brand commitment…

The expansion of opportunity in higher education and the recognition of the influence of academic research on economic development have motivated policy reforms in many national systems of higher education including Japan. Many of these national reforms involve facilitating market forces in higher education, which is a new context for many…

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector's emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the…

Recent policy emphasis on market mechanisms to drive up the performance of education systems has resulted in rising fees and increased competition in higher education in England, and in the creation of different types of self-governing state-funded schools run independently of municipal authority in compulsory schooling. University sponsorship of…