Initiatives to build research universities to have world-class universities, the creator and the disseminator of scientific knowledge in knowledge-based economies, are among the most important policy reactions in higher education systems. With an increase in demands on greater accountability, transparency, and efficiency, studies investigating the…

For two centuries, academics and their universities have competed for prominence and vied to demonstrate that their institutions are at the center of the scholarly world. Scientific advances in particular fields, reciprocal academic visits and conferences, impressive physical architecture, and publishing in shared venues and a "lingua…

University rankings envision a level playing field between competing universities, particularly in higher education (HE) systems regulated along market lines. Drawing on social stratification theory, we argue that rankings exacerbate, rather than alleviate, resource inequalities between universities with historically consolidated reputations…

Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) often function in an environment where various institutional pressures force them to position themselves on a national-international orientation scale in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of different constituents with different expectations. Empirical insights, however, on how HEIs respond to these forces…

This study investigates the systematic, structural, procedural and reputational differences associated with the use of budgeting for strategic planning across public sector institutions in Canada. Data obtained from a survey of 38 universities across Canada along with publicly available hand-collected data supports a heterogenous mix of budgeting…

Third Stream Activity (TSA) is increasingly important to UK universities and the wider economy, through innovation and entrepreneurship. Using data from the 2009/2010 UK Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey, this study investigates UK universities' TSA. Through considering the data in original and logged forms, two…

This paper explores the effect of methodological choice on global Higher Education Institutions' (HEI) rankings, and the effect of choices regarding League Table and Ranking Systems (LTRSs) upon decision-making and policy. LTRSs are identified as heuristics to aid decision-making about HEIs. The paper examines the methodological choices commonly…

Coauthorship has intensified as a mode of production across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first in a large number of fields. Yet sole authorship remains a publishing mode in some fields. Publishing is not only an individual behavior but is also nestled in organizations. To that end, incentives to sole -- or co-author work may vary…

This paper examines how universities reconcile the need to project themselves as successful global competitors with the need to respond to national policy expectations, particularly around equality. It does so through a comparative analysis of the language used in the publicly available documents of universities in England and New Zealand. While a…

When investigating students' motivations to enrol in university, a wide range of elements related to the overall student experience should be taken into account. The current study moves from this point to analyse students' choice factors from a survey completed by 27,504 students across 23 Italian institutions by means of a logistic principal…

Faculty recruitment has become a new challenge for public higher education institutions (HEIs) in China since the 1990s. Based on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework, this study analyzed the faculty recruitment preferences and the effects of selected organizational factors on these preferences at top national HEIs from 2002…

University rankings have proliferated in recent years and have been diverse, with a variety of profiles. This paper deals with the task of obtaining one single summarized ranking based on a selection of the most widely known rankings, in short, a meta-ranking. Five of the best-known rankings were selected and a database compiled with the major…

This article explores the factors affecting the content of universities' mission statements. We conceptualize missions as identity narratives, a type of symbolic representation of an organization. Based on the literature on organizational identity we argue that universities need to address two major challenges when crafting their mission…

Using the China Family Panel Studies, we identify the subjects studied by vocational college and university graduates, with the latter group further divided into ordinary and key universities. While the returns are around 8-10% to attending colleges and ordinary universities, there are higher returns of 12-16% per annum to attending the more…