With the transition to knowledge-based economies, higher education (HE) has become a driving factor for economic and social development. Alongside high-quality education and excellent research, social responsibility (SR) has become an important aspect of universities' accountability and legitimacy. Considering the growing importance of SR for…

The South African government announcement on revisiting the Policy for the Recognition of Higher Education Institutional Types has caused anxiety and ambivalence among Universities of Technology (UoTs), institutions that lack a solid foundation for conducting leading research. Most underperforming UoTs feared a possible downgrade or…

This paper explores the regulators' perspective and demonstrates how legitimacy deficits of private universities outweigh performance results in decisions regarding university inspections. We examined the period when the regulator had an urgent claim on Russian universities, particularly during the campaign to 'clean the system of higher…

Sustainability has increasingly become key in universities, as the objectives of sustainable development are essential to establish policies, guidelines and indicators that guide institutions to be more sustainable. This recognition has led many authors to develop methods to assess universities based on their performance in terms of sustainable…

The mass participation in higher education has led to greater spending by governments and students which has increased the focus on graduate outcomes. In England, the Office for Students (OfS) is planning to take regulatory action, using the Proceed metric, against universities and their courses which do not have 60% of students with positive…

The purpose of this article is to describe the effects of university governance on campus management based on the examples of the Netherlands and Poland. The study connected theory on campus management with a concept of five dimensions of university governance (autonomy, management, participation, accountability and transparency) into an…

Benchmarking is used in higher education as a means to improve and compare performance. Comparative metric benchmarks may take two forms, based on direct standardization (DS) or indirect standardization (IS). DS can be used to measure variation in performance between institutions, controlling for intrinsic differences at each institution (e.g.…

This paper proposed a valid and reliable perceived quality assessment framework of administrative services in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in the Brazilian context. The method was in two main stages: (i) map a set of quality attributes and dimensions for administrative services in HEI, (ii) build and test the perceived quality assessment…

This paper focuses on the effect of merger on university efficiency. In a first stage analysis, efficiency scores of English universities are derived for a 17-year period using the frontier estimation method data envelopment analysis. A second stage analysis explores the effect of merger and other factors on efficiency. We find that mean…

The paper contributes to the growing and often controversial study of higher education productivity measurement. The paper clarifies core productivity ideas, and considers alternative models for productivity assessment. Results from these models are explored using data from Australian higher education. Findings reveal implications for the…

The objective of this article is to study some of the intended and unintended effects on academe of the evolving global ranking game. I will start with some broader points on the global ranking game, the formal terms and economic interests it promotes, then continue with a presentation of the Shanghai ranking and its main rival the Times Higher…

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…

Researchers have identified the emergence of a global field of academic science. In order to understand the dynamics of this field, this study used latent profile and regression techniques to analyze data gathered for a sample of 114 research universities from around the world. Sociological theory informed the framing and conceptualization of the…

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…

Higher education institutions in Portugal, as in many developed countries, have undergone deep transformations affecting their organisational structures and professionals. These reforms framed by new public management are said to induce changes in the traditional jurisdictional field of the academic profession with the administrative power being…