The role and influence of department heads on women in academia is understudied and weakly conceptualized. This article expounds on prior work, which identified limitations of department head literature, to put forth three problematic discourses that run through much of the department head research: the "discourse of fairness," the…

Little is known about how researchers in higher education institutions (HEIs) experience and respond to support received from their departments. The present study investigated how support for researchers' autonomy (choice and self-expression), relatedness (through connections with colleagues) and competence (feeling effective in one's work)…

This study elaborates on the epistemological foundations of Turkish higher education research drawing on data from 854 doctoral dissertations with an analytical framework based on the institutional organization of researchers and knowledge, the object of study, and the object of knowledge. The results imply that the long-established state higher…

This paper is a response to Cotton, Miller and Kneale's 2017 paper on the current state of higher education research within UK universities. It seeks to contribute to the debate surrounding the inclusion of pedagogic research (PedR) via SoTL in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the context of researchers who reside within a…

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) encompasses research on postsecondary teaching and learning across all disciplines. Why do scholars engage in the study of teaching and learning? What supports and challenges do they encounter? What is the impact of SoTL? Using a micro-meso-macro-mega (4M) framework, I explore these questions in…

Institutional researchers are often tasked with assessing why college-wide initiatives succeed or fail. This can be a difficult task: researchers need to discriminate between multiple feasible explanations, work with limited data, and produce compelling narratives. Process tracing is a qualitative methodology that enables researchers to make valid…

This paper relates how leaders of a higher education program, the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network, sparked and managed innovation across communities of scholarship, research, and practice. This paper uses a "design narrative" method to describe how leaders orchestrated organizational change by bringing diverse…

Scholarly journals are not passive receptors of scientific information. On the contrary, they, within the process of filtrating the kind of research that will finally been published, contextualize a scientific field. In the present review I examine the Environmental Education related articles published in science education journals between the…

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…

Contemporary changes in higher education in Sweden are characterised by two educational discourses: marketisation and academisation. Demands to meet market requirements, as well as to make education more scientific, have created tensions between and within institutional cultures. Using interviews with 16 heads of departments, the authors…

The articles published in 15 specialist academic journals--based in Australasia, Europe and North America--focusing on higher education in the years 2010 (n = 567) and 2000 (n = 388) are analysed. The analysis focuses on: the themes and issues addressed in the articles published, the methods and methodologies used, theoretical engagement, the…

In this article Sutherland surveys over the period of the last 40 years (the length of an average full academic career) the changes which have occurred to the departmental structures and procedures in the teaching of and research into English Literature in British universities. He perceives a marginalization of the English department in the…

The role and responsibilities of the chair of an academic department in higher education is considered from the perspective of both actor and agent, within the context of the institution being served and the department being represented. The intent of this article is to further research on the role of department chair by analyzing it in the…

Examines the qualifications and administrative responsibilities of department heads as listed in "Spectra," the Speech Communication Association's monthly newsletter. Finds that over 75% of the listings indicated the doctorate or other terminal degree as a requirement; over half wanted previous administrative experience; nearly 70%…

The importance of the role of partnerships in research is evidenced by the federal government's, private sector's, and nonprofit organizations' continued interest in and approach to funding research through these vehicles. In education research involving interorganizational partnerships, partnerships are needed to create coordination and alignment…