Managing Good Governance In Higher Education

"Michael Shattock, former registrar of Warwick, can lay claim to having invented the serious study of university governance in Britain." Public How has university governance changed and developed over the last quarter of a century? How can people actively engaged in university governance manage the increasingly complex issues that confront them? This book addresses university governance as extending throughout an institution from the governing body to senates/academic boards and the organs of governance at faculty and departmental levels. It considers the legal structure of higher education institutions; the impact of developments in corporate governance in the private sector; the reforms in modern university governance, including in academic governance; the practicalities of managing governance, drawing on selected case studies; and the role of governance in relation to institutional performance. Whilst the primary market for the book is the United Kingdom, many of the themes addressed are of international applicability. The book provides both a practical guide for those actively involved in governing universities – lay governors, senior managers and academics – and a key scholarly text for students of higher education, managers in universities and colleges, and policy makers.

"Michael Shattock, former registrar of Warwick, can lay claim to having invented the serious study of university governance in Britain." Public How has university governance changed and developed over the last quarter of a century? How can people actively engaged in university governance manage the increasingly complex issues that confront them? This book addresses university governance as extending throughout an institution from the governing body to senates/academic boards and the organs of governance at faculty and departmental levels. It considers the legal structure of higher education institutions; the impact of developments in corporate governance in the private sector; the reforms in modern university governance, including in academic governance; the practicalities of managing governance, drawing on selected case studies; and the role of governance in relation to institutional performance. Whilst the primary market for the book is the United Kingdom, many of the themes addressed are of international applicability. The book provides both a practical guide for those actively involved in governing universities – lay governors, senior managers and academics – and a key scholarly text for students of higher education, managers in universities and colleges, and policy makers.

This ground-breaking Handbook examines the evolution of university autonomy and governance by tracking the changing relationship between higher education institutions and the state. Through unique historical analyses, contributors provide important insights into the position of students, academics, and universities in today’s society and map potential future directions of travel for the sector.

External drivers are pressing for a more privatized approach to higher education and research, a greater reliance on technology and the more efficient use of resources. This book analyzes recent changes in institutional governance and management in higher education and their impact on the academy and academic work. It draws on findings from an international study based on a survey of academics in eighteen countries. It opens with a chapter outlining the key issues, drivers and challenges that inform contemporary discourse around academic work and the profession in general. It then focuses on national case studies, comparing changes in the top tier with the lower tiers of national systems, public and private institutions, and other differentiating factors appropriate in each country, which include mature and emerging higher education systems. It concludes by proposing a series of generalizations about the contemporary status of governance and management of institutions of higher education.

Governance of Higher Education explores the work of traditional and contemporary higher education scholarship worldwide, providing readers with an understanding of the assumptions, historical traditions, and paradigms that have shaped the scholarship on governance. Bringing together the vast and disparate writings that form the higher education governance literature—including frameworks drawn from a range of disciplines and global scholarship—this book synthesizes the significant theoretical, conceptual, and empirical scholarship to advance the research and practice of governance. Coverage includes the structures of governance, cultures and practices, the collegial tradition, the new managed environment of the academy, and the politics and processes of governance. As universities across the globe face a myriad of challenges and multiple stakeholder demands, Governance of Higher Education offers scholars, practitioners, and higher education graduate students an essential resource for advancing research and the practice of governance.

This edited volume contributes to the ongoing research and practice on applying performance management to university governance. A comparative approach and international perspective of the issue is provided through extensive use of case studies and empirical findings. A specific focus is also placed on using performance governance applied to higher education institutions' Third Mission, and on enhancing decision makers’ ability to frame dynamic complexity. In this regard, specific attention is devoted to analyzing the cause-and-effect relationships in affecting public outcomes. This also includes managing trade-offs in both time and space, and detecting and counteracting unintended behavioral effects from the use of formal systems focused on quantitative measures for performance assessment.

Governing universities is a multi-level as well as a highly paradoxical endeavor. The featured studies in this book examine critically the multifaceted repercussions of changing governance logics and show how contradictory demands for scholarly peer control, market responsiveness, public policy control, and democratization create governance paradoxes. While a large body of academic literature has been focusing on the external governance of universities, this book shifts the focus on organizations’ internal characteristics, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of the changing governance in universities. The book follows exigent calls for getting back to the heart of organization theory when studying organizational change and turns attention to strategies, structures, and control mechanisms as distinctive but interrelated elements of organizational designs. We take a multi-level approach to explore how universities develop strategies in order to cope with changes in their institutional environment (macro level), how universities implement these strategies in their structures and processes (meso level), and how universities design mechanisms to control the behavior of their members (micro level). As universities are highly complex knowledge-based organizations, their modus operandi, i.e. governing strategies, structures, and controls, needs to be responsive to the multiplicity of demands coming from both inside and outside the organization.

Governance is becoming increasingly important in universities just as it is in the wider world of commerce and banking. Historically, universities were run by their academic communities but as mass higher education has taken root, as university research has become a critical element in national economies and as the demand for more accountability both financial and in academic performance has grown, pressure has mounted for a ‘modernisation’ of governance structures. One aspect of ‘modernisation’, particularly important in many European systems, and in Japan, has been the decision by governments to give institutions greater autonomy, more control over their budgets and legal responsibility for the employment of their staff. International trends to introduce greater competition between institutions, to encourage greater institutional differentiation and give greater play to market forces has led to an emphasis on leadership, a more systematic involvement of external stakeholders and a more ‘corporate style of governance. At the same time this has often led to a sense of loss of collegiality, a redistribution of authority and a growing gap between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ within universities. This book analyses governance change in nine major higher education systems, Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, the UK and the USA, each account being the result of independent research by a leading authority in the field and describes how a convergence of governance structures has been mediated by the historical, cultural, political and social characteristics of the different systems. Michael Shattock is a leading authority on university governance; this study offers the most up to date account of governance reform in a range of higher education systems, an analysis of the common trends and an assessment of their impact on the idea of a university. It will be essential reading for academics, postgraduates and practitioners in higher education.