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This paper examines the changing form and scope of higher education in the UK with a specific focus on contemporary ‘globalising’ developments within the sector and beyond. Situated within an analysis of transformations under way in the wider global and regional economy, and drawing on Jessop’s strategic relational approach (SRA), I examine the way...
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The present paper explores the need and scope of Pedagogies in the domain of higher education. Pedagogy is often a neglected sphere when it comes to higher education, where more attention is given to the mastery over the content, concepts, skills & training. But, a question often raised is, can the learning outcomes be realised effectively without...
Citations
... Additionally, commercial trends are increasingly impacting research and the allocation of research funding. The commercialisation of universities in a globally competitive education environment (Robertson 2010) has directed discourse towards seeing scientific achievements more as opportunities to create advantage in a competitive world rather than as a means to serve the public good (Münch and Schäfer 2014). Fanghanel (2012, 88), citing Lucas (2006) and Marginson (2007), claimed that within this competitive context, universities have resorted to mercilessly finding ways and strategies to 'harness the research game', applying increasing pressure on academics. ...
The critical role of universities in addressing societal issues is considered particularly important nowadays, when our futures are being threatened by various forces. Given this context, this study aimed to gain an understanding of academics’ perceptions of their role in engaging with ongoing societal challenges. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 academics, 14 female and 12 males, from three universities in Iceland. The findings revealed that academics see the university as a critical player in responding to societal challenges, yet their reflections underscore the complexities and tensions that this role entails. These include persistent tensions related to knowledge hierarchies and criticality, as well as complexities related to competition and the marketisation of research.
... Universities are under pressure to serve the knowledge-economy and are being measured on international indicators, creating a competitive businesslike environment, both in attracting students and in the funding, creation and dissemination of knowledge (e.g. Connell, 2019;Robertson, 2010). As universities are under great influence from this corporatization and commercialization of education, it is even more important that we address these questions and lead discussions around them. ...
... The corporatisation of higher education, and so of quality, has been widely discussed, 49,50 one aspect of which is seen in institutions attempting to situate themselves within a 'marketplace', by applying the standards of that marketplace or, in our case, by applying global standards or seeking global recognition or international accreditation. 51 The expansion of economic rationality into the educational sector is one the most ubiquitous dimensions of neo-liberalism and one of its most powerful ideological tools, resulting in the commodification, commercialization, and marketization of education and knowledge. ...
Context
Politics is characterised by power relations, and the deployment of power is inescapably political. In an increasingly globalised and interconnected modern world, politics is shaping the field of medical education more than ever before. Global frameworks that classify peoples and places are political tools that are fundamentally shaped by hegemonic knowledge systems. Despite this, they continue to form the basis for global thinking and practices, including in medical education. Political analysis can help to expose and challenge such thinking.
Approach
To better understand impacts of globalisation in medical education, we explore the previously under‐examined political dimensions that underpin it, focusing particularly on deconstructing power relations. We situate our analysis of global medical education in political terms, including through examination of ideology, economics, market and the enduring effects of colonialism. We interrogate the construct of the Global South (GS), considering the geopolitical and historical ideas that have enabled it to be widely propagated. We go on to examine the consequences of the GS construct in medical education and consider what this tells us about how power is enacted in the field.
Conclusions
In analysing the politics of global medical education, we shed light on how power is exerted and draw attention to forces that permit and enable trends, policies and positions. Notwithstanding the emancipatory rhetoric that has been associated with the GS construct, we highlight its reductive potential and argue that it can lead to an oversimplification of power relations and vested interests. Given the growing recognition that educational approaches do not transfer well across countries and cultures, we encourage the medical education community to consider why ideas from more dominant countries continue to be imitated so routinely. In doing so, we urge them to use political lenses to recognise the influence of multiple complex and interconnected forces of global power that shape all aspects of medical education.
... Within the dominant socio-economic dimension of internationalization, there was considerable variation in the manifestation of these rationales depending on the context and priorities. In the global north, predominantly in the English-speaking countries-UK, Australia, and New Zealand, internationalization has a strong market and commercialized orientation focused on attracting fee-paying international students (Robertson 2010;Shukr 2017). This model of internationalization is gradually spreading to Canada and continental Europe-countries which prioritized the social and academic aspects of internationalization in the past (De Wit and Altbach 2021). ...
This paper provides a comparative analysis of national rationales to higher education internationalization in the global north and south countries using content analysis. The results reveal that the socio-economic rationales are dominant across most of the 27 sampled countries. However, they manifest differently across the global north and global south as countries interpret the benefits and effects of internationalization in line with their national priorities. These variations are being shaped by an increasingly complex, competitive, and multipolar higher education internationalization landscape with new global south actors acquiring agency despite the deepening global inequalities. As a result, political rationales are becoming an important driver to internationalization. The current geopolitical environment associated with global conflicts, health pandemics, and increased nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-globalization sentiments is also adding more uncertainty and complexity. Due to increased concerns about this multipolar and self-centred internationalization, a few countries are starting to promote inclusive approaches to internationalization.
... Universities worldwide face the challenge of adapting to the growing number of "business-like" Higher Education institutions. This necessitates a shift towards a more entrepreneurial approach, focusing on achieving greater efficiency and improving overall quality (Robertson, 2010). In addition, the rise of managerialism/new Public Management (NPM) in the higher education sector is motivated by the need to showcase academic standards (quality assurance/QA) and research output to secure government and industry funding, predominantly contingent on performance. ...
Background
This paper discusses the lack of references that comprehensively describe the changes in universities owing to the ideology of neoliberalism. This research also discusses how a university maintains its function and identity when the great wave of neoliberalism massively erodes collegiality as the original philosophy of the university through a case study of the neoliberalism ideology on higher education. This study also provides a comprehensive framework for higher education management and governance changes.
Methods
We selected all retrieved sources based on the keywords and analyzed all the documents we obtained. This study obtained data from Scopus retrieved on October 27, 2023, using the following keywords: (TITLE-ABS-KEY ("collegiality") OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ("change management") OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ("neolibelism")) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("higher education"). This study utilized bibliometric analysis to ensure a structured review of the literature on collegiality, change management, and neoliberalism in higher education.
Results
The findings show that organizational management, leadership, education, technology, curriculum, innovation, organizational change, decision-making, and human beings are significant trajectories of neoliberalism in higher education.
Conclusions
This study offers other constructs for accelerating leadership success in higher education. This relates to how change leadership can navigate changes resulting from neoliberal ideology.
... At that time, the state was widely perceived by the public as a 'benevolent dictator' because of its responsibility to safeguard all citizens' economic and social wellbeing (Desai 2003). However, in the past three decades, heavily influenced by the restructuring of the welfare state in the 1980s, the UK higher education system has been increasingly associated with political and economic ideologies related to neoliberalism (Robertson 2010). The marketization of higher education and the rise of the practices of the student consumer have been joined with successive governments' attempts to shift the funding of higher education away from the state and on to students as customer beneficiaries (Naidoo and Williams 2015). ...
In this monograph, Lili Yang compares core ideas about the state, society, and higher education in two major world traditions. She explores the broad cultural and philosophical ideas underlying the public good of higher education in the two traditions, reveals their different social imaginaries, and works through five areas where higher education intersects with the individual, society, the state, and the world, intersections understood in contrasting ways in each tradition. The five key themes are: individual student development in higher education, equity in higher education, academic freedom and university autonomy, the resources and outcomes of higher education, and cross-border higher education activities and higher education’s global outcomes. In exploring the similarities, Yang highlights important meeting points between the two world views, with the potential to contribute to the mutual understanding and cooperation across cultures.
... The form and nature of unbundling in higher education has received attention in both practice and scholarship in recent years (Bacevic 2019;Newfield 2019;Czerniewicz 2018;Komljenovic and Robertson 2016;McCowan 2017;Robertson 2010). On the whole, unbundling is associated with the development of new business models which include, or rely on, working with private providers companies (Komljenovic and Robertson 2016), although there are rare exceptions of commons-based governance models (Lee 2013) and alternative perspectives where unbundling might lead to opportunities for HE to better serve students through personalisation and employability (McCowan, 2017). ...
This paper explores how academics navigate the Higher Education (HE) landscape being reshaped by the convergence of unbundling, marketisation and digitisation processes. Social Realism distinguishes three layers of social reality (in this case higher education): the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical layer is presented by the academics and their teaching; the actual are the institutional processes of teaching, learning, assessment, mode of provision (online, blended); the real are the power and regulatory mechanisms that shape the first two and affect academics’ agency. Two dimensions of academics’ experiences and perceptions are presented. The structural dimension reflects academics’ perceptions of the emergent organisation of the education environment including the changing narratives around digitisation, marketisation and unbundling in the context of digital inequalities. The professional dimension aspects play out at the actor level with respect to work-related issues, particularly their own. This dimension is portrayed in academics’ concerns about ownership and control.
... Implementing this JR could train and prepare Indonesian researchers to be able to produce their knowledge by publishing it to the world and turn their HEs to be known by international students (Salmi, 2009). Besides, the publication of the research and numbers of citation will be able to increase the reputation of Indonesian HEs to gain better ranking in global table league as argued by (Robertson, 2010). ...
This report exhibits how Indonesian policymakers internationalise their Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to answer the “global openness” in education. Joint Research (JR) has been implemented by Indonesian policymakers to do so. This research scrutinise such implemented JR by proposing an adopted European framework system in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This framework is the transversal dimensions of successful European countries in practising OpenEdu (dos Santos, Punie & Munoz, 2016), namely, strategy, technology, quality and leadership. As the intention of Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education (MoRTHE) towards JR is to increase the number of international journal publication, this research favourably recommend the implementation of JR by reforming and upgrading four categories adopted from EU OpenEdu: strategy, technology, quality and leadership. Those categories need to be adopted officially into the JR implementation to produce more international journal and be ready to compete with other institutions globally.
... One element of such strategies of extra-revenue-generating activities may be the export of education through the development of international branch campuses. Figure 1 shows how international branch campus development from the UK started in the 1990s and grew strongly post-1997, following the introduction of tuition fees and the simultaneous cutting of state funding for higher education (Robertson 2010). In 2016, transnational education, or the export of entire programs through franchises, articulation agreements, joint ventures, and branch campuses abroad, contributed £610 million to the UK's gross domestic product, an increase of 72 percent since 8 For a comparison to income-contingent loans in the US and Australia, see Bryant and Spies-Butcher (2020). ...
The role of higher education institutions as active agents of globalization and marketization remains relatively little explored. Economic geographic perspectives are particularly well placed to investigate globalizing higher education as an important economic sector, in addition to its supportive role in the knowledge economy. Drawing on political economic and cultural economic perspectives on marketization and geographic fixes, the study analyzes the motivations and spatial strategies for geographic expansion of universities through the establishment of branch campuses. Based on qualitative interviews with key decision-makers of English universities, I argue that (international) branch campuses enable a range of geographic fixes for higher education institutions: a territorial fix through the geographic expansion and construction of segmented markets and a symbolic fix through the relocation of campuses to places that promise reputational gains. The rapid growth of British branch campuses abroad and domestically (in the global city of London) involve substantial financial and reputational risks and as fixes constitute only temporary stabilizations. The conceptualization of symbolic fixes, in addition to territorial fixes, may enable a more nuanced understanding of the role of space in the construction of segmented, yet relational markets that combines intersecting political economic and cultural economic logics.
... The purpose, made explicit by the Ministry of Education, was intended to achieve levels of mastery or proficiency of English in Colombia for 2019. However, it could also have represented the adherence of the country to globalization as a mass phenomenon, synonymous with the "commercialization" of higher education, as seen by some critics of this process (Brandenburg & de Wit, 2011;Pennycook, 2012;Robertson, 2010). Conversely, Piekkari and Tietze (2011) have reminded us of the difficulty, if not the impossibility, to dictate general policies for language use and rather recommended a sensibilization process before setting any policy implementation. ...
This article analyzes the results of the Saber Pro, the state exam for students completing higher education, during 2007-2017 concerning the English language section. This analysis uses the reports and databases from the Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación (ICFES) repository and explains the policy in its historical context. The results warn of a quite worrying picture between the goals established by the Ministry of Education and the final achievements. The level of English of future Colombian professionals is not only very low but also without improvement from its beginnings in 2007 to 2017. As a conclusion, it would be necessary to review, from the universities' perspective, the language education policy and propose bottom-up structural alternatives that allow a sustained impulse in teacher training, methodology, and curricular and pedagogical organization.
En este artículo se analizan los resultados de la prueba Saber Pro, el examen de estado para estudiantes que terminan la educación superior, en el módulo de inglés del periodo 2007-2017. Este análisis utiliza los informes y bases de datos del Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación (ICFES) y proporciona un breve contexto histórico de la política educativa. Los resultados advierten un panorama preocupante entre las metas establecidas por el Ministerio de Educación Nacional desde el inicio de la prueba de inglés y los logros obtenidos. El nivel de inglés de los futuros profesionales en Colombia no solo sigue siendo muy bajo, sino que además no se observa mejoramiento importante. Como conclusión, se propone revisar desde las universidades la política educativa con alternativas estructurales que permitan un impulso a la capacitación docente, la metodología y la organización curricular y pedagógica.