Abstract
There has been a steady and rapid growth of academic literature and policy debate on the broad ranging changes of the universities in the Western world. These are mostly founded on two problematic assumptions. One of these is the assumption of ‘unity of object’ whereby ‘the university’ has undergone an institutional dislocation and ‘fragmented’ into a plethora of quite different organizations. Interestingly, these organizations vary not only across national landscapes but also within the same funding landscape. The second problematic assumption is the one about the universality of the pressures for change. This reflects a failure to distinguish between ‘policies’ and ‘policy instruments’, on the one hand, and ‘pressures for change’ on the other. Policies can be possibly be construed as ‘universal’; ‘pressures for change’ are always specific for a social actor, or group of actors, since these are shaped by the policy as well as by the way in which it is interpreted depending on specific positioning and circumstances.. In this chapter these assumptions are challenged using information from a study of university change in the United Kingdom in two universities (a research intensive university and a teaching intensive university). Findings show that the pressures for change, as well as the manifestations of this change, are quite different. As a result these universities have positioned themselves entirely differently, thus leading for specific change in the nature of research and research practices.
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Notes
- 1.
The Russell Group is a grouping of 20 research-intensive universities in the UK which jointly undertake strategy setting and lobbying.
- 2.
In principle, change and attribution can be interrogated using two framework approaches. One of these would build on multiple data collection whereby change is measured as a difference over time and attributed causally by describing the social mechanisms that could generate this change. Another approach would be to access both change and its attribution to specific policy developments through the opinions of the respondents. Whilst the former approach is probably superior in terms of both measurement and attribution it also needs to be carried out over a long time period and is rather expensive.
- 3.
For practical reasons, since the science faculty was not available for interview within the time period of the study.
- 4.
HESA Statistics – Higher Education numbers 2007/2008.
- 5.
Renamed the Research Excellence Framework or REF after the 2008 cycle, to denote some major changes in the formulation of the exercise.
- 6.
The REF requires reporting on the impact of research partly to offset the RAE’s effect of focusing on publications in the most prestigious academic journals.
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Nedeva, M., Barker, K., Osman, S.A. (2014). Policy Pressures and the Changing Organization of University Research. In: Musselin, C., Teixeira, P. (eds) Reforming Higher Education. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7028-7_9
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