International policy trends point to an increased focus on student achievement, teaching quality, and school outcomes. Attention to Swedish students' poor academic achievement over the past two decades has resulted in an increased emphasis on the responsibility of municipalities and schools to create a better educational atmosphere through…

Globalizing forces have both transformed the higher education sector and made it increasingly homogenous. Growing similarities among universities have been attributed to isomorphic pressures to ensure and/or enhance legitimacy by imitating higher education institutions that are perceived as successful internationally, particularly universities…

The emphasis on competitiveness and the knowledge-based economy in European policymaking has resulted in a heightened focus on monitoring and steering the science system, particularly through metric-based instruments. Policymakers' general aims of fostering excellent research and breakthroughs are shared by researchers as well; however, below the…

Twentieth-century "massification" of higher education and academic research led to mission diversification and structural diversification of national higher education systems (HESs), but also a tendency of non-university colleges to seek to develop into full-scale universities by the emulation of practices of established academic…

The purpose of this study is to compare how Swedish school principals understand basic values that are important in fulfilling the Swedish national curriculum, Curriculum 1994 (a new curriculum, Curriculum 2011, which came into operation in autumn 2011, has only minor differences compared to the common text in Curriculum 1994), considering…

The present study explores a local initiative to develop parent support services through the school system. In focus are the discourse on home-school relations and parent support and the interplay between discourse and practical occurrences. Official documents, interviews and notes from municipal meetings and informal conversations were obtained…

In times of increasing skills shortage, regions and particularly non-core regions, need to attract highly-skilled workers. It is better for these regions to (re)attract highly-skilled workers that gained knowledge and contacts elsewhere and because they once lived in the region for study have already ties to the university region than trying to…

The authors investigate how Third Mission activities at universities, such as the outreach and technology transfer functions, are anchored in organizational structures and practices, and discuss the implications of this relationship for the success of the activities. They draw on case studies of two Swedish university colleges to illustrate the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the key aspects of transformation of universities towards sustainability, such as the ideal characteristics of the "sustainable university", and the drivers and barriers in the transformation, by comparing the strategies of seven universities world-wide. Design/methodology/approach: A…

Originally written to accompany a request for funds to set up a research project concerning the relationship between educational theory and organization theory, this brief report is based on the assumption that organization theory has a valuable contribution to make to the development of education as a science. First outlined are trends in…

Examines development of general organization theory, proposes an overall organization model for analysing the school, distinguishes between the school as an institution and the school as an organization, and outlines a set of conceptual tools believed to describe and analyse the school as an organization. Provides practical applications for…

Management and leadership as a consequence of organizational tasks and structure are discussed in this paper, with a focus on the application of leadership theories from market-oriented organizations to more regulated organizations such as the Swedish school system. The Swedish educational system, according to Berg's (1988) "cross…

The fundamentally psychological orientation of educational research over the years is now changing. The educational phenomenon is part of the institutional setting and, therefore, organizational restrictions and influences are being studied. In addition, the organizational approach to educational research carries the implication of a more holistic…

Discusses the effect of computerization of the work environment on psychosocial communication. The RAM program, developed at Stockholm University to explore the effect of computers on the structure of organizations and the psychosocial work environment, is described; theoretical models are explained; and the future use of knowledge-based systems…

Educational organizations, this paper asserts, are best described using a neorationalist model, which analyzes organizations as social instruments, acknowledges structural conflict, and views individuals as active participants. The paper examines traditional and modern rationalist organization theories and contrasts these with systems theory; it…