Major changes in the governance of higher education and the public sciences have taken place over the past 40 or so years in many OECD countries. These have affected the nature of authority relationships governing research priorities and the evaluation of results. In particular, the increasing exogeneity, formalisation and substantive nature of…

Schools' use of digital technology has so far proved to be a peripheral feature of the Conservative-Liberal education agenda. Through a series of reductions to previously extensive bureaucratic and funding structures, the Coalition administration has presided over a swift but sustained withdrawal of state support for digital technology use in…

Internal evaluators encounter risks but also significant opportunities to strengthen organizational and professional ethics. Potential contributions depend, in part, on the conjunction of ethics and evaluation in the role of the internal evaluator as the person specially commissioned to investigate value and render judgment based on evidence…

The relationship between the state and higher education institutions has always been a complex one. The "state" itself in this context is a heterogeneous mix of elite people--bureaucrats, politicians, committees of co-opted academics and business leader--and it increasingly faces pressures from diverse stakeholders, including students…

Today's higher education environment is marked by heightened accountability and decreased budgets. In such an environment, no higher education institution can afford to ignore alternative approaches that could result in more effective and less costly solutions. Open-source software (OSS) can serve as a viable alternative to traditional proprietary…

In their search for magic bullets to fix failing schools, policymakers seldom directly address powerful ecological factors impacting schooling. This article identifies several major demographic, societal, economic, and educational changes and trends in U.S. society over the past several years; analyzes their impact on schoolchildren; and offers a…

The limited effectiveness and fiscal unsustainability of professional-led public sector extension systems in developing countries have aroused considerable interest in Farmer-led Extension (FLE) approaches in the recent decades. A key challenge facing these initiatives is a lack of sustainability of the farmer groups developed through project or…

Beginning by analyzing the major qualitative and quantitative changes in higher education around the world, this article examines international trends in their financial implications. It then demonstrates the state's inability to bear the entire rising financial burden, and explores the role of self-financing, and of the non-profit and for-profit…

The diversity of US institutions of higher education is manifested in many ways. This study looks at that diversity from the economic perspective by studying the subsidy structure through the distribution of institutional price-cost ratio (PCR), defined as the sum of net tuition price divided by total supplier cost and equals to one minus…

During the past two decades, performance-based accountability systems (PBASs), which link financial or other incentives to measured performance as a means of improving services, have gained popularity among policymakers. Although PBASs can vary widely across sectors, they share three main components: goals (i.e., one or more long-term outcomes to…

In this paper we seek to investigate the role of different factors in accounting for the differences in earnings among recent graduates working in the private sector in Ireland. Three years after graduation there is a pay gap of 8 per cent in hourly wages between male and female graduates in the private sector and a 4 per cent non-significant gap…

This dissertation examined the performance outcomes of public management networks (PMNs) in the disaster management context. The effectiveness of three disaster response sub-networks in the area of evacuation were examined and compared using the case of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Louisiana in August 2005: Citizen Protection:…

Purpose: The article aims to report the findings of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the benefits, drawbacks and future prospects of formal mentoring in medium-sized and large organisations. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical data for the study were collected via an online survey, and consist of responses from 152 human resource…

The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research "in complex organisations". Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an…

The demand for accountability through measurement continues to increase. Although much progress has been made, it remains an issue that challenges even the most sophisticated and progressive performance improvement function. This article provides an overview of best practices in the return-on-investment process and describes how applying these…