Competition today has become a central policy imperative in higher education. Connected to resource efficiency and scarcity, it remains closely attached to the idea of the market but reaches beyond when related to positional or status orders. In the higher education literature such varieties of competition -- as distinct social processes -- are…

The global diffusion of the graduate school organizational model has shifted the way future academic excellence is identified from a paternalistic master-disciple relationship to a collective organizational decision. 'Eminent men' used to recruit PhD students on the firm belief that they could identify excellence and integrate it in their own…

We analyse recruitment of recent tertiary education graduates drawing on a rich set of interviews with human resource managers of 46 large- and medium-sized firms in different regions across Germany. Specifically, we address the question of which higher education institutions' managers choose for campus recruiting and which criteria managers use…

The German and Swiss economies value skilled work highly and initial vocational education and training (IVET) has been the predominant traditional pathway into such work. However, concerns about a more "knowledge-based society" and the "academic shift in the labour market" are starting to undermine the status associated with…

In the era of globalisation, competition has also become global. In higher education, countries worldwide are attaching increasing importance to international ranking exercises and subscribing to the "world-class universities" paradigm, complemented by various strategies to benchmark with leading universities in order to enhance the…