Search

Drawing upon earlier studies of reforms and institutional changes in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to trace how the understanding of accountability has changed over the past twenty years and how it is understood to have impacted on higher education institutions. We do so by reviewing more than 350 papers and by asking three questions: Who answers to whom? For what are they answering? And how to assess those accountability arrangements? With these three questions as guides, our results indicate that higher education institutions have been undergoing processes of what we term accountabilization. These results contribute to the scholarship on higher education governance by conceptualizing the processes of accountabilization.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated -- or mainstreamed -- in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization. Design/methodology/approach: Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired processes, whose aims included ensuring that sustainability was integrated into the educational process. Findings: By following two audit-inspired processes, the authors show how teachers were asked to respond to open-ended survey questions and by doing so emerged as responsibilized subjects. Although the teachers were given lots of space to interpret the concept of sustainability and show how it was translated into the programs and courses offered, the teachers were made accountable as established organizational hierarchies were reproduced when responsibilization was formalized through techniques of accountabilization. Research limitations/implications: The analysis moves beyond the instrumental epistemologies characterizing much of the positivist-oriented research in higher education. As with all studies, the authors study also has methodological limitations, such as involving a single higher education institution. There is a general need for more empirical research in this area in order to build theory and to understand whether the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization can also be applied in other higher education contexts. Practical implications: The study shows that higher education administrators engage in processes of responsibilization and accountabilization through formalized processes of interpellation, as documents and self-assessment exercises tie teachers to organizational contexts. Originality/value: To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study that introduces the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization as social relationships in higher education governance.

This study examines how university teachers in two Swedish higher education institutions grapple with the challenge of connecting research and teaching. With the increasing pressure in higher education to improve graduate employability, teaching is expected to include skills-oriented, vocational training which may (or may not) conflict with the more traditional Humboldtian ideal, in which teaching is built on research. Drawing on the rich bodies of literatures on employability and the teaching-research relationship, the authors find that university teachers practice the relationship in four ways: by using scientific articles in the curriculum; by teaching students a critical research attitude; by lecturing about their own research results; and by relying on the formal skills of fellow teachers. These practices of establishing a close connection between teaching and research are, this study suggests, met with resistance from colleagues, who are perceived to favor vocational training and emphasize employability; from students, who are also perceived to worry about employability; and finally from other policies that target partially conflicting objectives, including those for employability.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how university teachers' professionalism shapes the coordination processes in higher education institutions (HEIs). By developing an innovative framework, which combines governance theories and theories about professionalization, we found that university teachers' roles in coordination with governance actors in HEIs follow two different logics: to comply with decisions, policies and rules; to follow their own professional attributes, interests and desires. We add to the current literature by conceptualizing these as two different processes; one of professionalism and one of governance. The professionalization process mainly concerns substantive questions about teaching and its connection to research, and it primarily takes place in collegial conversations, while the governance process concerns questions about form and procedures and emerges when rules and regulations are implemented. The two processes meet when trade unions, professional associations and accreditation institutes act as platforms or arenas for discussions.

Inspired by Austin's work on the performativity of speech acts, Goffman's notion of speaker positionings and Swales' notion of genre moves, this paper explores how annual general meetings as a corporate genre are governed and propelled by the Swedish Companies Act, the Swedish Code of Corporate Conduct as well as explicit and tacit genre expectations. While observing more than thirty corporate annual general meetings for listed companies at Nasdaq Stockholm in Sweden over three years, we identified that the corporate elites populating the stages at these meetings act as meeting-professionals. Being meeting-professionals, the corporate elites have acquired knowledge of how to conduct a formal meeting by learning the genre, identifying which positions are available during a meeting and, based on these two pieces of knowledge, utter speech acts. Our concluding discussion points to the need for future studies of how corporate elites learn and use genres of corporate communication to utter speech acts that ultimately form these kinds of formal meetings and perpetuate capitalist relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what ways are meetings a social form? How are meetings organized and how do organizations structure meetings to produce consensus around visions of the future? In this article, planning meetings, which gather representatives from the regional Public Transport Authority and the municipalities involved in public transport planning in Stockholm, Sweden, is probed as a social form. By structuring the meetings as collaborative planning processes, the Public Transport Authority's ambition is to draw on the municipalities' multiplicity of experiences and views but then arrive at a consensus, on which a strategic document is produced. However, these meetings are perplexing as a social form. While expectations of their outcomes vary, dialogues in the meetings are boxed-in as they follow standardized protocols for agendas, discussions, and decision points. Planned meetings, as this article shows, are an undertheorized aspect of attempts at future-making among formally independent bureaucracies. The article concludes by proposing that deliberative ideals in bureaucratic settings allude to deliberative bureaucracy through the social form of planned meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this article is the relation between teaching quality and expectations by different governance actors in higher education. Managing a department in a public university is, to a large extent, about the coordination of governance actors, involving government authorities as well as the university and the faculty. Internally, the departmental management has to act strategically to achieve this coordination, especially in relation to teachers who expect resource allocation to ensure teaching quality, expressed in terms of academic requirements. To explore this, the concept of proximity is introduced. The study points out the importance of organizing teaching activities to create proximity, as well as that the context and conditions for creating proximity are important for teaching quality, thus achieving coordination with governance actors.

Recent developments in higher education have shown that policies that promote employability tend to be at odds with policies that aim to ensure a close relationship between teaching and research. In this article, we explore how university teachers enact a policy demanding a close relationship between research and teaching. Based on a conceptualization of educational labor practices as policy enactment, we show that teachers enact the policy by using scientific papers in class; by teaching students how to attain a 'scientific attitude'; by drawing upon one's own research experiences; and finally, by emphasizing formal competence. As the policy is enacted through educational labor practices, and those practices give higher education its meaning, the policy enactment is enabled by what we term the policy unconscious. This term denotes not only the educational labor practices by which the policy is enacted, but also the dialectics between the particular labor practices and the general meaning ascribed to higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical–historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact of COVID-19 on the marketized public transport system in Stockholm, Sweden. During COVID-19, ridership dropped as did ticket revenues, which put the market under operational and financial distress. Drawing on a discussion of the norms and techniques of marketization, we probe how the contracted bus operators responded to the pandemic, how they tried to save the market from collapsing, and whether the measures taken suggest an organized move away from neoliberal policies. Adding to recent debates of COVID-19 and neoliberalism's longevity, we conclude that although the norms underpinning marketization remained unquestioned, the techniques were partly re-evaluated in the midst of the global crisis as a way to protect the established neoliberal policies from falling apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]