Globalization Higher Education

International postdoctoral researchers are growing in number and importance in academic research around the world. This is contextualised by a shift to international and enterprise modes of academic production. Through a multiple case study, this paper analyses the role of international postdoctoral employment in life sciences and engineering fields at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. In doing so particular attention is given to understanding why there are increasing numbers of postdocs from abroad working in these fields and countries, and the ways in which international postdoctorates are incorporated into research laboratories and projects. International postdoctoral employment appears driven by the same factors in the US and UK but is related to different modes of academic production. The findings of this study have implications for research on academic labour, and the organisation of academic production.

In recent years, EU policy-makers have acknowledged the role of universities in supporting the knowledge economy and a common approach on higher education has been evolving. The problem faced is one single market with widely varying higher education syste

I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of 'metacritique' - where the essential quality to be encouraged in students is a flexibility of thought and the ability to negotiate a range of different critical modes.

This stimulating and accessible book examines how speed emerged as a cultural issue during industrial modernity. The rise of capitalist society and the shift to urban settings was rapid and tumultuous and was defined by the belief in 'progress'. The first obstacle faced by societies that were starting to 'speed up' was how to regulate and control the process. The attempt to regulate the acceleration of life created a new set of problems, namely the way in which speed escapes regulation and rebels against controls. This pattern of acceleration and control subsequently defined debates about the cultural effects of acceleration. However, in the 21st century 'immediacy', the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values.

"Change is a fundamental ingredient of interaction patterns in biology, technology, the economy, and science itself: Interactions within and between organisms change; transportation patterns by air, land, and sea all change; the global financial flow changes; and the frontiers of scientific research change. Networks and clustering methods have become important tools to comprehend instances of these large-scale structures, but without methods to distinguish between real trends and noisy data, these approaches are not useful for studying how networks change. Only if we can assign significance to the partitioning of single networks can we distinguish meaningful structural changes from random fluctuations. Here we show that bootstrap resampling accompanied by significance clustering provides a solution to this problem. To connect changing structures with the changing function of networks, we highlight and summarize the significant structural changes with alluvial diagrams and realize de Solla Price's vision of mapping change in science: studying the citation pattern between about 7000 scientific journals over the past decade, we find that neuroscience has transformed from an interdisciplinary specialty to a mature and stand-alone discipline."

In this article, we wrestle with the core issue of how early career researchers translate central tenets and core concepts of critical theory and critical methodology into their research practice. By way of creative representation, we draw from bell hooks and Cornel West's (1991) written rendition of their verbal dialogue in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Their hope was to offer the book in a dialogic format in such a way that mirrored the synergy in their verbal discussions as friends and intellectual colleagues. In a similar vein, we hope to share with readers the synergy and depth of the narratives that have transpired during our ongoing discussions on the important topic of critical praxis as part of a collaborative research group called the Disruptive Dialogue Project (Gildersleeve, Kuntz, Pasque & Carducci, 2010; Kuntz, Pasque, Carducci, & Gildersleeve, 2009).

The race to establish regional education hubs is a recent development in cross-border higher education. This article briefly examines the rationales and strategies used by three countries in the Middle East and three in South East Asia which are working towards positioning themselves as regional education hubs. The different approaches and purposes among the six countries highlight the need for a typology of education hubs. Three types are proposed: the student hub, the training and skilled workforce hub, and the knowledge/innovation hub. The final section of the paper takes a closer look at Malaysia's cross-border education initiatives and its actions to establish itself as a competitive education hub in a region where Singapore and Hong Kong have similar intentions. Whether Malaysia has the ability to make a quantum leap from being a student hub to becoming a knowledge/innovation hub remains to be seen and appears to be an optimistic outlook.

To varying degrees, education policy reforms around the world are driven by educational discourses relating to globalisation. At the same time, national and local histories, cultures and politics mediate the effects of globalisation discourses. This paper employs methods of analysis that draw on the concepts of 'vernacular globalization' and 'policy archaeology' in order to examine the ways in which the effects of globalisation on National Curriculum policy reform are mediated by conditions and priorities that are specific to national contexts. The enquiry focuses on three curriculum policy problems that are associated with the English school curriculum and have recently been identified as requiring reform: inappropriate curriculum knowledge, the skills deficit and the one-size-fits-all curriculum. The paper concludes by summarising the results of the analysis, identifying some curriculum issues arising from it and offering reflections on the methodological approach it has employed.

The purpose of this study was to critically review the reform movement of Higher Education by the Ministry of Education and how its reform policy toward global competition has created a discrepancy between the knowledge produced and the needs of local society. The study found, first of all, that the state‐driven reform policy has decreased the autonomy of South Korean universities, although the state, including the Ministry of Education, did not increase financial support. South Korean universities have enjoyed little autonomy in terms of financial expenditure, offering courses, recruitment of professors, the number of students, etc. Bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education are able to filter most of the policies and measures. Secondly, the study looked into the consequences of the policy emphasis of global competition. The governance and management of South Korean universities have again turned towards the 'business university,' rather than toward the research university and as such, tends to produce knowledge and human resources for immediate societal needs. To support these assertions, the study examined how the reform policies for global competition surrounding the emphasis of SSCI journals might produce globally competitive but also perhaps locally unsuitable knowledge. The study found that there is indeed a disjoint between the knowledge produced in the research sphere and the needs of the local society. Local researchers are compelled to adopt mainstream theoretical frameworks of North America and Europe in order to get their work published in the indexed journals. Local issues and problematics are subsequently neglected and/or relegated to the margins of pertinent academic research interests.

"The authors explore the challenges inherent in traversing the multiple boundaries between sociology and social work, and the academy and the community, by examining a service learning course on hunger and homelessness taught by two sociology professors and two social workers on the staff of a community service organization. The authors draw on instructional team meetings and correspondence, observation of class sessions, and formal and informal course evaluations to analyze three "moments": the planning process, a pivotal class session, and students' final presentations. They found that both their teaching and students' learning were enriched by disciplinary differences in knowledge claims, the design and utility of qualitative research, and the process of drawing conclusions from, and making arguments using, qualitative data. The authors conclude that experiential learning has value beyond providing students hands-on experiences. It can also provide a laboratory in which students and instructors can explore the similarities and differences between sociology, social work, and other disciplines."

"As economic conditions around the country (and world) impose increasing limitations on funding for higher education, it is worthwhile to review some of the major reasons that higher education costs are so high and rise so rapidly. An understanding of these reasons is critical to making rational responses that preserve (and perhaps even strengthen) important components of institutional mission. This is, of course, a subject that has been extensively written about over the past several decades by many authors, but since responses to the current economic situation seem to generally ignore what is known about the problem, perhaps another brief review is justified. Interested readers will find my many earlier takes on this issue collected here"

"This article examines the intensification, since the creation of the so-called Shanghai list of world universities in June 2003, of a political struggle in which a variety of actors, universities, national governments, and, more recently, supranational institutions have sought to define global higher education. This competition over global higher education has highlighted issues such as the internationalization and denationalization of higher education, the international mobility of students, the role of English language as the language of science, and the privatization of higher education. In contrast to IPE or Marxist analyses, we analyze the symbolic logic of ranking lists in higher education, their uses, and the European Commission's initiative to create an alternative world university classification (see World Social Science Report, UNESCO Publishing; Europa zwischen Fiktion und Realpolitik/L'Europe-Fictions et réalités politiques, Transcript for analysis). This initiative represents a political move in a process of rapid restructuration of higher education at the global level."

"This essay addresses the question of how to best teach interdisciplinarity through a detailed discussion of a common upper-division gateway course for multiple majors housed in an interdisciplinary studies unit. It argues for a shift in the problematic within which discussions of interdisciplinary pedagogy generally take place by emphasizing the practice of interdisciplinarity itself."

"The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, 'academic development' has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge."

"Public-private partnerships in education (ePPP) are acquiring increasing centrality in the agendas of international organizations and development agencies dealing with educational affairs. They are designed as an opportunity to correct inefficiencies in the public delivery of education and to mobilize new resources to increase the access to and cost-effectiveness of education in low-income contexts. This article explores the emergence of ePPP as a 'programmatic idea' and, in particular, the semiotic strategies by means of which this idea has been located in the global education agenda and promoted internationally among practice communities by a network of policy entrepreneurs. The analysis is supported by extensive fieldwork and by a new approach to the analysis of the framing and mobilization of new policy ideas, which incorporates literature on agenda setting, policy entrepreneurs, and policy frame analysis. The approach reveals the complex way in which policy ideas, political actors, institutions, and material factors interact to strategically put forward new policy alternatives in developing contexts."

This contribution explores the transformation of higher education policy from the mere co-ordination of educational curricula by national governments to the embodiment of the Lisbon Agenda's 'governance architecture', together with its impact on national policies, institutions and actors. It does so by charting change in both policy outputs and policy outcomes in four different European countries - England, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy - and by relating these changes to the ideational and organizational aspects of the Lisbon Strategy. We suggest that Lisbon acted as a 'script' to be followed by national governments and other policy actors, enabling them to gradually adapt to Lisbon-induced ideational and organizational pressures, and to shape national organizational and communicative discourses that can overcome entrenched interests and transform the prevailing perception of higher education so deeply rooted in national cultural and policy traditions.

"In this article I seek to reconsider the social and economic purposes of higher education. It begins with the premise that there appears to be a general trend towards governments positioning higher education primarily in terms of the economic role that it can fulfil. Such a trend, however, has attracted considerable criticism. In this article I argue that the problem for higher education is not it having an economic role, but the narrowness of the way in which that role is often conceptualised. Drawing on critical theory I explore the interrelation of economic and social factors within higher education and the wider society in which it is situated. This article argues for a redefinition of the purposes of higher education to ensure that both universities and workplaces are sites of human creativity and that the profound and exciting work within institutions of higher education benefits all members of society."

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

It is estimated that approximately 3 million students are enrolled as international students, and it is possible to project that this number may reach more than 7 million by 2025. As global demand exceeds the supply, competition is building for the best of these students. Some countries (or regions) clearly envisage the opportunity this represents and have been strongly stimulating student mobility. There is a race for "brains", be it for professors at the end of their careers looking for new professional opportunities and/or the opportunity to return to their native countries, or for researchers at the beginning of their careers, looking for a place that might offer them a better future, or even for students, who seek more appealing alternatives. How will Brazil fare in this competition for talent?

This article reviews and compares the developments in six countries which claim to be an education hub. It explores the meaning of education hub, introduces a working definition, and proposes a typology of three kinds of education hubs as follows: student hub, skilled work force hub, and knowledge/innovation hub. Furthermore, it identifies issues requiring further research and reflection on whether hubs are a fad, a brand or an innovation worthy of serious attention and investment.