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Transnational education has increased over the past decade for multiple reasons. Higher education institutions driven by a need to increase non-governmental funding and the concept of higher education as a commodity, have combined to cause many institutions to extend their activities into the field of transnational education partnerships. To ensure the survival of these strategic alliances, teaching faculty are required to service the commodity being exported from the UK. This unique study uses this context to evaluate the application of Heideggerian phenomenology and IPA as a means of analyzing the lived experiences of academic practitioners and the effects on their being. The study concludes that Heideggerian philosophical thought provides an insightful lens when combined with IPA, by providing access to an individual's personal perception of events as opposed to other methodologies that simply attempt to produce an objective account of the event itself. Two vignettes from the data exemplify how the approach can help us understand participant lived experiences in a given context, as well as documenting the wider benefits of applying this approach in other studies that concern the lived experiences of individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bonds that unite partner institutions in the delivery of shared transnational collaborative programmes are critical in the effective management of these education partnerships. A crucial component in this unification is social capital, where partners connect and develop networks, lubricated by trust, which facilitates cooperation and commitment to the venture, producing purposive and beneficial outputs. This paper explores this phenomenon by investigating the way social capital manifests between operational colleagues tasked in the delivery of collaborative joint-degree programme partnerships. Initially, the paper explores the relationship between 'partnership' and 'social capital'. It then analyses three sociological perspectives of social capital, the rational, critical and democratic strains, before examining them in relation to empirical data collected from three collaborative programme partnerships. The paper concludes there is evidence of all three strains, but advocates partner institutions observe four recommendations, so to encourage the manifestation of the beneficial critical and democratic strains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]