Insecurity and intense competition for permanent academic positions appear to be common experiences for early career researchers across the globe. With academic precarity now firmly on the international research and policy agenda, this article looks comparatively at postdoc precarity in three European countries: Ireland, Norway and Switzerland. It…

After decades of decline, African higher education is now arguably in a new era of revival. With the prevalence of knowledge economy discourse, national governments in Africa and their development partners have increasingly aligned higher education with poverty reduction plans and strategies. Research capacity has become a critical development…

While universities now lie between two philosophical poles -- idealism and utilitarianism -- the Humboldtian ideal primarily serves to give a humanist glaze to a technocratic discourse. Regardless of its autonomy on paper, the University does not control its finances. This guise of autonomy has set a double authoritarian heteronomy of the…

This conceptual article explores the idea of academic collaboration from a perspective that places knowledge in the centre of the inquiry. It considers the extent to which collaboration maintains its intrinsic salience for the academy, despite the proliferation of external incentives and injunctions. As scientific and socio-economic progress has…

The aim of the first "Global Conclave of Young Scholars of Indian Education" held in New Delhi in 2011 was to help build bridges for research collaboration primarily for young scholars of Indian education to collaborate with their partners across borders. This paper draws on an "intrinsic case study" of this "global…

Between 1990 and 2010, the New Zealand university adopted an enterprise form. The nature of academic work changed commensurate with changes in the external regulatory and funding environment, the internal performative research culture, the proliferation of trans-national researcher networks, and the growing managerial codification of acceptable…

As India's higher education sector is poised to grow at a tremendous pace, one of its main challenges would be provision of quality education. Teacher quality has been identified as one of the most critical factors affecting educational quality. As such, the immense importance of attracting high-quality entrants into the teaching profession cannot…

Open source, open content and open access are set to fundamentally alter the conditions of knowledge production and distribution. Open source, open content and open access are also the most tangible result of the shift towards e-science and digital networking. Yet, widespread misperceptions exist about the impact of this shift on knowledge…

This article emphasizes the complexity of the term flexibility and discusses its meanings and political dimensions, along with its expressions or realizations within the field of higher education. It proposes a new principle of flexibility that overcomes an understanding of flexibility within higher education as the mere ability or versatility to…

This article focuses on the author's applied anthropological work with the Ingham County Health Department between 1998 and 2001. Government administrators were reflexively aware that nobody had ever stepped back to assess the area's overall environmental health and rank the issues according to some criteria, such as by the "most urgent…