Recently, a number of inbreeding cases have surfaced that have fuelled public criticism of recruitment practices and the lack of mobility in the Swedish higher education sector. This study focuses on recruitment practices at Swedish universities, particularly the divergence between what seems to be a practice of hiring internal candidates and a…

As excellence in teaching and learning, in combination with a focus on student performance rates, are guiding the demands placed on higher education institutions, modern universities are attributing strategic importance to leadership of teaching and learning. Previous studies on educational leadership have, nevertheless, identified significant…

This study explores the culture of physics departments in Sweden in relation to physics teacher education. The commitment of physics departments to teacher education is crucial for the quality of physics teacher education and the way in which physics lecturers talk about teacher education is significant, since it can affect trainees' physics…

Focusing on Tanzanian and Mozambican PhD students funded by Swedish development aid, this article investigates how everyday academic work life is gendered in Sweden and in the students' home academic departments. In particular, it focuses on the role of 'important others', such as international donors, universities, colleagues and family, in…

Universities are currently in the process of change and adaptation to shifting expectations that for example include closer engagement with businesses and increased facilitation of entrepreneurship among faculty and graduates. By supporting academic entrepreneurship, universities can address these expectations whilst also becoming more…

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…

Research on the role of language in multilingual workplaces, where English is often adopted as a lingua franca (ELF), shows that language practices influence socialization and interpersonal communication, frequently creating issues such as asymmetrical sharing of information, language clusters, or thin communication. Similarly to other…

This article presents a case study of the internationalisation of an Engineering School at a leading Swedish University. The case study is an attempt to sketch out a more qualitative analytical approach to the study of internationalisation, focusing on the interplay between agency and structure and policy and practice as constructed by actors on…

This article explores the perceptions of active senior researchers from different scientific and scholarly areas about scientific and scholarly writing, specifically that associated with research. The study comprises interviews with 12 researchers in four different faculties at a Swedish university: Arts, Social Sciences, Science and Technology,…

To study the factors that cause some university departments to produce excellent research and provide excellent research training, this book considered the factors underlying research efforts in four innovative and three stagnant Swedish university departments in the social sciences. Data were gathered through interviews with 152 doctoral…