Abstract
This study exposes governance reforms in higher education in countries, in which the reforms tried to reduce the direct state control and to promote mechanisms that steer the system giving more autonomy to the universities. For this reason we selected Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Portugal, as countries in which significant reforms have been introduced since the 1990s.
This introductory chapter resumes first the discussion about higher education reforms, identifying major trends in the reforms undertaken in EU countries. It also presents the conceptual framework to analyse the reform processes as an ‘implementation game’ played by several actors with diverse interests. The advocacy coalition framework suggests that policy reforms depend on factors that are external to the respective policy systems but also on factors that characterise other political subsystems. Studies of policy entrepreneurs addressed the questions pertaining to how coalitions develop their specific policies and the role of policy entrepreneurs as promoters of change.
This conceptual framework is placed among medium-range theories, distant from generalisations as well as from specific accounts. Without ignoring the complexities of each institution, the path to such conceptual framework emerges as an inductive conceptualisation of the common elements in the national experiences, enriched by the variations that amplify the range of options for policy development. In so doing, statements may take the form of generalisations conditioned to each situation.
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Notes
- 1.
This was the idea developed by the 2008 Eurydice Report, ‘Higher Education Governance in Europe’. The report advocated a clear shift from direct state regulation and control towards steering or guidance mechanisms, including the creation of new intermediate actors (such as quality assurance agencies). This coincided with a shift in the internal governance models towards ‘new models of managerial self-governance’.
- 2.
As early as 1984, Cerych (1984: 235) recognised that ‘the boundaries between implementation and evaluation analysis are often blurred’.
- 3.
The first wave of university reforms – starting in the 1970s – aiming at the democratisation of the institution, was framed as a general call for the democratisation of society as a whole. Claus Offe, a German philosopher belonging to the ‘Frankfurter Schule’, in summarising the reform goals of that decade, claimed that universities should be active in strengthening the democracy of a country and that democracy should be introduced into the university (‘Hochschule in der Demokratie – Demokratie in der Hochschule’; see Nitsch et al. 1965). Similar processes of democratisation were experienced in Portugal, Spain and Greece in the 1980s but framed within the transition from dictatorial to democratic systems.
- 4.
In some countries, most notably Austria and Finland, this diversification of HEIs occurred at a later date.
- 5.
These publications have also contributed to promoting policies that strengthen cooperation between university and industry, as well as to the internationalisation of research and education and a new form of governance in higher education.
- 6.
Sabatier distinguishes between minor and major policy changes: ‘Major change is change in the policy core aspects of the governmental program, whereas minor change is change in the secondary aspects’ (Sabatier 1998: 118).
- 7.
For a good, recent example, see Shattock (2014).
- 8.
This approach, pursuing ‘inductive conceptualizations of the common elements, enriched by variations that amplify the range of options’, owes a debt to Clark (2004), whose contribution to the analysis of entrepreneurial universities is of compelling importance in the literature. In this book, we apply a similar approach to the interaction between national policies and institutional performance.
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Krüger, K., Parellada, M., Samoilovich, D., Sursock, A. (2018). Introduction. In: Krüger, K., Parellada, M., Samoilovich, D., Sursock, A. (eds) Governance Reforms in European University Systems. Educational Governance Research, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72212-2_1
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