This paper explores teacher educators' endeavours to enhance their students' cultural competence in the context of Danish teacher education. It analyses how these endeavours resonate with the theoretical principles of critical multiculturalism and multicultural education. The study employed dyadic interviews as its primary method for data…

This study applies resource dependence theory to address the question of how the critical resource dependence relationship emerges in the context of a university's performance agreement. This study focuses on two Nordic universities that have adopted performance agreements while simultaneously using strong performance-based state funding. Resource…

Universities, and business schools specifically, are experiencing a transformation of their societal mission. Similar to the STEM fields, business schools are nested in global competitive environments facing multiple competing pressures, one being the need to demonstrate their social impact (SI). While business schools signal their commitment to…

The current demands on higher education institutions (HEIs) to become more efficient and effective have led to increasing performance pressures on researchers, and consequently on the practices and outcomes of researcher collaborations. In this paper, based on a qualitative study of collaborative experiences of management and organisation studies…

This paper investigates the accountability mechanisms introduced in the universities in the Nordic countries by building on a typology of accountability types. By utilising survey data, it analyses how academics experience the changes in accountability mechanisms and how they perceive the impact of these changes on their performance. The analysis…

Many of the same ideas seem to crop up repeatedly in the higher education governance reform wave in recent decades, with accountability, flexibility, and strategic capacity being a few of the common concepts. Several studies have shown, however, that national higher education systems receive these inputs very differently, leading to dissimilar…

The social pedagogic tradition has been integral to the culture of early childhood education including School Age Childcare (SAC) in Denmark for decades. Drawing upon interviews with multiple stakeholders: lecturers, representatives of an Education Research Institute, union activists an SAC provider and a policy maker, in Copenhagen, Denmark, this…

Europe's knowledge economies need high-level skills, the capacity to innovate and to support democratic societies. In this perspective, the main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of higher education and how this is promoted in various countries in Europe and beyond. The evidence, conclusions and…

Europe's knowledge economies need high-level skills, the capacity to innovate and to support democratic societies. In this perspective, the main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of higher education and how this is promoted in various countries in Europe and beyond. The evidence, conclusions and…

Academic values and norms have as a consequence of the wave of European higher education reforms been put under pressure by the increasing expectations and demands of flexibility, entrepreneurialism and accountability. This article examines how these changes affect identity construction processes at department head level in the case of Danish…

The paper reports from a comparative study on systems of quality assurance in 19 countries around the globe, and how these systems function as accountability mechanisms. Based on a theoretical framework for assessing how accountability mechanisms can contribute to build trust in the higher education sector, the analysis of the quality assurance…

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency…

In recent decades, the concept of accountability has attracted more and more attention in public governance and management. The management of education is no exception. This article presents and discusses the evolution and current status of educational accountability in two different national contexts, China and Denmark. Two main sectors of…

In this globalized world, individuals and countries that invest heavily in education increasingly benefit socially and economically from that choice. Among the 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries with the largest expansion of college education over the last decades, most still see rising earnings differentials…

The role and function of external quality assurance is of great importance for the development of an internal quality culture in higher education. Research has shown that external quality assurance can stimulate but also create obstacles for institutional improvement. To strike a balance between improvement and accountability is, therefore, a key…