Editorial

Citation

Roberts, B. (2009), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 23 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2009.06023gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 23, Issue 7

I am very pleased to welcome you all to this the final issue for 2009 and I must say it has been a very successful year from the point of view of the receipt of an increasing number of papers. However, the downside is that higher numbers means higher rejections and stiffer competition for publication as the journal has not increased its issues per year, or the number of papers per issue which still stands as before at seven issues in a year and six papers in each. So, in this issue, we have work approved from the USA, UK, Taiwan, Ireland, Austria and Canada – indeed it is not so often that every paper is from a different country.

In our first paper, Prof. Michael K. McCuddy and James G. Nondorf write on ethics in university and college admissions. It is only in the last few years that authors have made any comment on the ethical side of education and yet it now crops up reasonably frequently which frankly is an encouraging sign if it leads to a better value-based management. So, the purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges and dilemmas that exist within the university system of the USA. The views of students and parents are also considered in this study and the admissions issues are explored through conceptual analysis of a trilogy of ethical concerns and arguments. Part one of the trilogy looks at access and trust, part two at espoused values and enacted values, and finally in the third part looks at the trio of categories that make up the ethical dilemmas that confront admissions officers on a daily basis.

Then Felix Maringe of Southampton gives a paper on the internationalisation of higher education. He argues that little work has been done assess the impact of internationalisation on its integration within the higher education system. Six UK universities were selected with the view of determining three aims how internationalisation was conceptualised in the institutions, the evidence for its structural integration and understanding the challenges faced. The findings showed that there exists a barrier working against full integration of the concept into the institutional cultures.

In the next work, Jane Lu Hsu and Hsin- Yi Chiu study perceived differences in teaching performance following a survey administered in a large Taiwan university. Five dimensions were found including content of materials, learning condition, interaction, attitudes, and responsiveness. Results indicated that surveyed students in the clusters of superior and inferior quality courses had statistical differences in the seriousness of the evaluations of teaching performance and how they would be taken into consideration in the modifications of teaching style. However, lecturers of superior and inferior quality courses were not statistically different in their viewpoints in how they value the evaluations of teaching performance. Students were able to distinguish courses of different quality in various dimensions but lecturers seemed to believe they had done well in teaching and would not know the differences in teaching performance perceived by students in the various classes.

At Dublin City University, Aamir Ali Chughtai and Finian Buckley have worked together on an article which looks at trust in relation to outcomes. The main purpose of the study was to examine the effect of a faculty's trust in the school principal on three school outcomes, namely self-reported in-role job performance, organisational citizenship behaviour and learning goal orientation. The research aimed to highlight the role of organisational identification and work engagement in explaining the linkage between trust in the principal and three outcome variables.

Prof. Mary Ann Danowitz, Prof. Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger and Asst Prof. Roswitha Hofmann of Vienna University followed up a European Social fund project on diversity management. The paper aims to provide concepts and strategies to introduce successfully and implement curricular change, especially in relation to incorporating diversity management into the academic programmes. After utilizing documentation and accounts from agents involved in the change process as well as an outside observer, a 12 month change process at a major university and the effect on curriculum was described. The authors feel that the process offers concepts strategies and lessons to assist colleges and universities to assess the internal and external organisational environment and the availability of resources, and to plan approaches to introduce successfully and to develop, curricular change around sensitive topics such as diversity equality and gender.

In the final paper, Avninder Gill submits work on knowledge management initiatives at a small university in which the paper addresses the knowledge management challenges faced by the administration of a small university lacking a mature research culture. The paper therefore investigates the main issues faced by a small university to enhance its research reputation and identifies key components of a knowledge management system that can be established to achieve these objectives. Asst Prof. Avninder Gill finds that most of the reported applications of knowledge management in the education sector are limited to localised applications of IT. This paper attempts to provide a more comprehensive approach for institute wide knowledge management by looking at the issue from both an ecological as well as an IT perspective thereby providing a more sustainable culture.

Brian Roberts