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In this paper, we explore the delegitimation of contemporary student protest against market-oriented reforms in higher education. Theoretically, we draw on an extended version of the Public Nuisance Paradigm, a theoretical paradigm that emphasizes the role of mass media discourse in the delegitimation of social protest. We illustrate our argument in a case study of the 2014 student protest against a market-oriented reform in Flemish higher education, that is, higher tuition fees. We identify four specific discursive strategies underlying the delegitimation of this student protest through mass media discourse: authorization, rationalization, moralization and predication. The major contribution of our study is that it extends the Public Nuisance Paradigm that has been introduced in the recent higher education literature focused on student movements, by zooming in on the micro level of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary higher education, stakeholder management is increasingly important given the growing number and complexity of stakeholder groups. Defensive stakeholder management (DSM), defined as verbal responses of universities to stakeholder criticism, is a largely neglected topic in the higher education literature. Drawing from a combination of theoretical perspectives in the organisation science literature, we explore how three Serbian universities engage with DSM (in relation to allegations of academic misconduct). We focus on the antecedents of inter-institutional differences in responses to stakeholder criticism and its antecedents, in particular, decision-making structures and core missions. Our findings suggest that different universities do respond differently to the same type of criticism and as such this is an important contribution to the debate on DSM in higher education and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the higher education literature, there seems to be a growing consensus that contemporary higher education institutions (HEIs) are trapped in conformity. From a new institutional perspective, higher education scholars argue that HEIs tend to comply with widely endorsed institutionalized values (e.g. academic excellence) and this widespread compliance leads to field homogeneity, at least in the missions of HEIs. In this paper, we introduce an alternative perspective drawing on recent insights in Scandinavian institutionalism. From this perspective, it has been argued that organizations tend to develop organization specific, heterogeneous definitions of institutionalized values to establish a fit with the modalities of the specific organizational context. Based on a comparative case study in Flanders, we investigate translation rules that shape heterogeneous definitions of the institutionalized value of socio-demographic diversity. The major contribution of our study is that it sheds new light on the dynamics underlying field homogeneity versus heterogeneity in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier studies on stakeholder management in European universities focused on proactive strategies, that is, substantive organizational practices to establish and maintain mutually beneficial exchanges between universities and their stakeholders. We argue that the literature on stakeholder management has to be extended by theorizing defensive strategies (i.e. verbal or symbolic accounts in response to stakeholder criticism). Drawing on the institutional logics perspective, we investigate how and why a highly reputed, research-intensive European university deploys defensive strategies in the mass media. Our single-case study demonstrates that defensive strategies vary depending on the type of stakeholder criticism. Our study indicates that the relations between universities and their critical stakeholders can be consensual, but only if stakeholders criticize organizational values belonging to the institutional logic(s) from which universities operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the factors affecting the content of universities' mission statements. We conceptualize missions as identity narratives, a type of symbolic representation of an organization. Based on the literature on organizational identity we argue that universities need to address two major challenges when crafting their mission statements, (i) to pursuit legitimacy in spite of multiple and competing expectations, and (ii) to properly balance similarity and distinctiveness from other universities. We identify factors that affect this strategic effort and develop hypotheses that we test in the empirical context of the United Kingdom's higher education system. Results show that (i) among competing expectations, universities choose claims that are plausible to external constituents and consistent with the values of internal members, and that (ii) they adopt claims similar to universities belonging to the same organizational form while differentiating from geographically closer universities in order to reduce competitive overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]