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In the sociology of education, opponents of deficit thinking would be seen as important change agents, potentially inspiring radical policy change aimed at reducing systemic discrimination of specific sociodemographic groups. That is, contestation of deficit thinking can in theory lead to its destruction. In this paper, we argue that contestation can be overruled or downplayed via public discourses. From a discourse-historical approach, we illustrate how contestation was attenuated in the context of ethnicity in Flemish higher education in the period 1985–2020. We show how a variety of discursive processes eventually marginalize anti-deficit narratives in mass media texts, even though these stances were dominant at certain moments. The major contribution of our study is that it highlights important discursive mechanisms underlying the reproduction of deficit thinking in times of contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of marketing for higher education have widely explored the branding activities of specific entities in higher education such as universities and programmes, but they consistently focus on proactive brand management. Proactive strategies are centred around gaining and maintaining a stronger brand. This also implies that reactive strategies are underexplored. Reactive strategies are rather centred around repairing stakeholder trust in contexts where stakeholders criticise the brand. For instance, in the Netherlands, stakeholders have strongly criticised teacher training programmes, by raising fundamental issues concerning their quality and societal relevance. Based on a case study of a specific teacher training programme in the Netherlands, we investigate processes underlying reactive brand management. We identify several micro-level strategies of brand managers such as acknowledgement, normalisation and denial of responsibility. Our assumption is that these kind of strategies can contribute to the continuity of problematic or even highly controversial entities in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on academic inbreeding have mostly focused on institutional inbreeding and its negative effects, whereas little research has explored its causes. We identify current explanations of the macro‐, meso‐ and micro‐level factors that sustain academic inbreeding as well as research gaps. We address a main research gap regarding what macro‐level factors contribute to academic inbreeding, by analysing systems' norms and rules regulating access to senior academic positions and teaching language requirements in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the largest public university systems of the European Union. The analysis reveals that career rules designed to guarantee quality may have unintended effects in terms of academic inbreeding. Most importantly, the habilitation procedures pose greater challenges to international candidates and often increase barriers between disciplines as well. In some disciplines and regions, language requirements contribute substantially to academic inbreeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 higher education research, theoretical approaches stressing isomorphism dominate the discourse on how higher education institutions ‘behave’ in their higher education and research systems. We argue that research should address both instances of similarity and differences. Using theoretical notions from institutionalism and the branding/marketing literature, and focusing on how UK universities are different and similar in their welcome addresses—as expressions of the institutions’ images—we are able to offer a balanced view of patterns of similarities and differences as well as share findings of patterns over time (2005-2015). Using quantitative and qualitative content analysis, our findings show overall high levels of homogeneity of images across the universities. But younger and less prestigious institutions were (both in 2005 and 2015) more inclined to show distinctive images. [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 paper investigates the role of ethnic majority staff in the perpetuation of monocultural education that excludes non-western, ethnic minority cultures and reproduces institutional racism in schools. Based on qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews in four ethnically diverse schools in the Flemish educational system, we specifically investigate the role of ethnic majority staff in the reproduction of monocultural school practices through a discursive theoretical lens. The study advances the current literature on institutional racism by showing how situated meanings of monocultural school practices at the micro level of individuals are discursively inter-linked with the macro-level monocultural model of education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the last decade, the public healthcare sector has had to deal with increased competition, a growing influence of patient associations, and a necessity to deliver health services more efficiently and effectively. Despite recognising the patient participant's role as a critical stakeholder in value creation, there is a limited body of research on the influence and power of patient participants. This article focuses on regional health improvement collaboratives that aim to develop coordinated, multi-stakeholder solutions to their healthcare cost and quality problems. They meet regularly and include health professionals, health insurance providers, and patient participants. In this article, we explore the relationships between these stakeholders and patient participants' interpersonal dimensions regarding empowerment and valuable collaboration. Data were collected through stakeholder observations during meetings of three regional health improvement collaboratives, as well as through semi-structured interviews with the patient participants involved in these cases. Results show that patient participants can be empowered on a personal level. However, this does not imply that patient participants are empowered within the group dynamics. Interpersonal relationships constitute a crucial hidden aspect of building trust. More dialogue and inquiry are needed to examine how patient engagement is enacted and positioned within healthcare collaboratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how ethnically diverse, inclusive schools manage their legitimacy in an educational quasi-market. These schools are often threatened with a loss of legitimacy as ethnic majority parents perceive an ethnically diverse student population and radical pedagogical practices as signs of lower quality education. However, precisely legitimacy in the eyes of ethnic majority parents is crucial to acquire resources, motivate staff members and maintain their ability to offer quality education, necessary to minimize the majority-minority educational attainment gap in the long run. Drawing on a theoretical approach combining neo-institutional and impression management theories, we empirically investigate how four ethnically diverse, inclusive secondary schools embedded in the highly exclusive Flemish educational quasi-market manage their legitimacy. Comparing their legitimacy management strategies, we find that maintaining legitimacy is related to (1) formally conforming to dominant norms, decoupling their radical practices by relegating them to the informal sphere; and (2) proactively manipulating perceptions of the school's ethnic diversity and radical pedagogical practices. However, our findings suggest that an ambiguous version of these strategies might be sufficient to achieve this aim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to identify how ethnically diverse schools can discursively maintain a good reputation. Reputation allows attracting the mixed student population necessary to achieve inclusion or closing the gap between the attainment of ethnic majority and minority students. In semi-market educational systems where students are free to attend the school of their choice yet education has no market price, the share of ethnic minority students functions as one of the main indicators of a school's educational quality. Ethnically diverse schools are thus perceived as offering lower quality education. Based on the case of a highly ethnically diverse, inclusive secondary school in the exclusive Flemish secondary educational semi-market, we found that a positive reputation could be achieved through three related discursive practices: affirming the high-quality education of the school, redefining the relation between students' ethnic diversity and educational quality and reconstructing ethnic diversity as an educational resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on branding is an established sub-discipline in the higher education literature. However, studies in this field have somehow produced contradictory results: some studies point at isomorphism, others find differentiation. Our study wants to offer a possible explanation for this paradox, by proposing a more nuanced view on brand communication. Based on a multiple case study of three Flemish universities, our results mainly point at isomorphism in communication channels with a general focus that are addressed towards a broad audience. In specific communication channels, targeted towards specific stakeholders, we identify high levels of differentiation. We discuss these findings against the background of the strategic ambiguity perspective on communication in complex stakeholder environments. [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]