Universities engage in international collaboration for a number of reasons. In the global North, which is characterised by wealth and power, universities increasingly use international collaboration for competitiveness and marketisation. In contrast, the global South engages in collaboration to strengthen research and build knowledge capacity.…

This study aimed to investigate common features and ways of understanding quality culture (QC) within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nordic countries. While the concept of QC is commonly accepted and often used, its meaning is not always clear. This paper focuses on how Nordic universities frame QC in their internal documentation. The…

The field of transformative learning has garnered significant attention from researchers and practitioners in adult education due to its potential to address the complex and unpredictable challenges of societal change. This study employs a bibliometric approach, analyzing data from the Scopus database covering the years 1992 to 2023, identifying a…

Collaboration between universities and schools has been emphasised by both governments and within educational development research in the Nordic countries. However, educational research has tended to focus on the practitioners' perspectives and experiences, i.e., researchers and teachers. Our intention is to contribute to the field with research…

In 2010, the Swedish Education Act introduced new provisions stating that education at all levels should 'rest on scientific grounds and proven experience'. These requirements led to greater policy activities at the state level and enhanced the cooperation emerging between the municipality and higher education as well as between teachers and…

This article studies issues of coloniality in so-called capacity-building projects between universities in Africa and Scandinavia. Even fifty years after independence, the African higher education landscape is a product of the colonial powers and subsequent uneven power relations, as argued by a number of researchers. The uneven geography and…

In the face of reduced public funding of science and increased demands for 'value for money', academic researchers find themselves hard pressed to produce relevant research and demonstrate their utility to society. These pressures are particularly prominent in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) where practical value is frequently questioned.…

In this article, we will discuss how circumstances and requirements on a micro-level may be of relevance for the conditions for international student mobility within higher education. This will be done through examining similarities and differences in the organization of degree project courses at universities in Russia and Sweden, and how…

This paper explores the introduction of centrally coordinated initiatives aimed at formalising universities' relationships to external organisations. Such initiatives are referred to as "structured relations". Based on a review of nine Swedish Universities, we identify three types of structured relation initiatives (network events,…

Universities play an important role in the development of society. However, it is not always clear what the objectives of collaboration between a Higher Education Institution (HEI) and external stakeholders from the surrounding society are. In this study, value-focused thinking was applied to construct structures of strategic, fundamental and…

The competition of civilizations forced the European universities to adapt to the competition with the Chinese and American universities. European integration cannot advance without the collaboration between European universities. An answer to these challenges is the CIVICA project, the European University of Social Sciences, a consortium of the…

It has been argued that universities are changing into becoming more professional as organizations, and this paper investigates this claim by exploring the emergence and tasks of communication departments in modern universities. Examination of universities in six Baltic and Nordic countries shows that communication departments are working closely…

This article discusses how Centres of Excellence (CoE) and the existence of several logics in these centres can contribute to the differentiation of the strategic profiles of universities. The study sees research centres as a way to organize research activities in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in order to target both excellence but also…

Educational collaboration activities are generally under-researched part of the interactive learning between universities and industry. The study based on 529 Master of Science (MSc) theses from a major Swedish engineering school, the faculty of engineering LTH at Lund University, shows that MSc theses are a frequently used collaboration mechanism…

University-industry collaboration (UIC) provides not only effective training for students but also knowledge production in universities for industry to contribute to the economy (Bektas & Tayauova, 2013). The paper proposes to analyse reasons for deficiencies in UIC with a comparative analysis of the curriculum of the industrial design (ID)…