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This paper aims to assess the “external dimension” goals of the Pan European Bologna reform, almost 19 years after its launch. The influences of the reform on higher education in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific are investigated. The paper analyses the appeal of the 1999 Bologna Process (BP), which, arguably, symbolizes an effort to strengthen the hegemony of Western European education and influence, has for the first time gone beyond ex-colonial lines, including areas where Europe’s socio-political influence is not impactful.

This paper opted for an analytical review of the literature on the European higher education internationalization goals as stated in external dimension objectives of the Bologna Process reform. The literature search was complicated by the limited number of peer review articles focusing on the spread of the Bologna model beyond Europe. As a result, the inclusion criteria were flexible, and consideration was given to educational website reports/articles, dissertations, books, pamphlets, and internal EU/European Commission reports.

The findings of this review indicate that, in spite of significant challenges, the internationalization objectives of Bologna Process are gradually being met in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Most notable is that some countries that historically did not have a European colonial presence are embracing aspects of the Bologna reform. Almost 19 years after, the BP reform now has a significant external influence not only in the former Portuguese, Spanish, British and French colonies but also beyond. In spite of the overwhelming embrace of the BP model in Europe and outside of Europe, its implementation, everywhere, has faced some administrative, political, and economic challenges.

The study examined the spread of the Bologna Process models beyond Europe and not its acceptability by stakeholders such as faculty and students outside Europe. Future research could examine the satisfaction rates among higher education stakeholders in regions and countries embracing the BP models.

The findings of this review indicate that the steady spread of the BP means that more countries and tertiary education institutions can explore opportunities aimed at developing more educational and socioeconomic partnership, including the exchange of knowledge, technology and resources.

While emphasizing the benefits and opportunities for cooperation, the paper identifies that the increasing internationalization trends influenced by the BP are leading to regional higher education cooperation in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Other higher education models around the world can learn from the marketing strategies of the BP aided by EU.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate key implications of globalisation for business schools, and to put structural alignment of academic structures with the Bologna Declaration in a broader strategic alignment with the needs of a knowledge‐driven society and a socially sustainable development.

The analysis uses systems theory for analysing dynamic change in society and a synthesis of its influences on business education, as we see the Bologna Process is neither conceived nor implemented with sufficient care for holism in the European effort to become an innovative society.

Business schools should extend their transformation effort beyond the Bologna Process and align their strategic model of operation with societal needs by integrating social requirements into their strategic framework.

Research focuses on key external developments in business education at a transnational level. Future research should focus on the exploration of the business school response to social change in a local context.

A requisitely holistic picture of contextual change offers business school leaders deeper understanding of external implications for aligning schools with societal needs.

Emerging social challenges in Europe are taken as the starting point for realigning a strategic model of business school operation with societal needs and the business world with the aim to improve schools' accountability and their evolvement into socially engaged actors with innovative approaches.

The paper presents a systemic and requisitely holistic view of social change for aligning the business school model of operation with the broader needs of a knowledge‐driven society that stretches beyond the formal academic structures unification in the Bologna Process.

Turkey has been an active member of the Bologna Process (BP) since 2001. This chapter focuses on the impact of the BP on higher education (HE) in Turkey by outlining the reforms that were carried out and the narratives surrounding the changes. The focus of the chapter will be on how the BP has been accommodated, negotiated debated or rejected in Turkey and the societal and political tensions surrounding the process. The chapter is based on the findings of semi-structured interviews conducted with the Bologna experts and the officials of universities in Turkey, who were responsible for the reforms between 2009 and 2016, as well as a review of updated data and the analysis of secondary literature and official texts, such as the National Reports of the BP and the relevant policy documents in Turkey. After a very intense reform process, the policy transfer in Turkey slowed down, and Turkey's discussions, specifically about the BP both at the policy and the university level, became close to non-existent. The chapter aims to analyse the reasons behind the loss of interest in the BP in Turkey by focusing on the critical voices and discussions surrounding the neoliberalisation of HE. The chapter will also refer to how Euroscepticism in Turkey impacted the reform process in HE.

This paper aims to analyze the problematic relationship between the Left, the commercial revolution and the progressive growth of mass consumption during the Italian economic miracle.

Taking for example the city of Bologna, the most important city run by the Italian communist party, the paper problematizes the socio-economic and political – institutional processes connected with the emergence of “American-like” commercial and distribution strategies, and of consumerist identities.

Bologna’s administrators governed the commerce through a rationalization supported by urban planning, including the establishment of a chain of “associated supermarkets”, built on municipal areas and financed by a mixed-capital company set up for that purpose. At the same time, they sought to protect small retailers to gain their political consensus and to contain crisis-related anxieties among the consumers, a category which has still an uncertain identity in Italy.

Much remains to be seen in the characteristics of the Italian miracle, and in the manner it was ruled. The case of Bologna illuminates an important piece of the Italian Left’s attempt to interpret and to lead the modernization of the country.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the school‐to‐work transition of graduates in different fields of study, as well as to study programmes in three subsequent generations of graduates in the 2007 to 2009 period. The paper focuses on graduates from the new Bologna‐harmonised programmes and investigates their early career outcomes by comparing them to those of graduates from pre‐harmonised programmes.

The authors apply a probit regression to calculate differences in the probability of employment for different fields of study and propensity score matching to investigate the effect of different study programmes in each field of education on early career outcomes, such as being employed within the first three months of graduation and the first nine months of graduation.

The authors find that graduating from a particular field of study affects the probability of employment in all three years. In general, regardless of the field, the authors observe decreasing probabilities of employment in 2008 and 2009. Using propensity score matching, the authors estimate the effect of the new Bologna‐harmonised programmes on the probability of employment and find a statistically significant negative effect compared to counterparts who finished pre‐Bologna programmes. The findings are robust to the use of different matching criteria.

In the institutional framework of a tuition‐free system in higher education and collective bargaining in the labour market, performance indicators such as employability can provide relevant information regarding student choice and a proxy measure for the quality of higher education in each participating university. In addition, this provides a rare insight into the employability of graduates from Bologna‐harmonised programmes, as well as for a post‐transition country such as Slovenia.

By covering entire populations of full‐time graduates in 2007, 2008 and 2009 who entered the labour market for the first time after graduation, the authors calculate the probability of employment within the first three and nine months of graduation. This allows the authors to infer about the effect of the new Bologna‐harmonised programmes as well as the impact of the recent financial crisis. The paper offers rare evidence of the school‐to‐work transition in a post‐transition and tuition‐free country.

This chapter conceptualises inclusion and neoliberalism and theorises the relationship between these two phenomena in order to contextualise the debates presented in the rest of the chapters in this book. Additionally, this chapter investigates the evolution of the meaning of ‘inclusion’ in the key international Bologna Process (BP) policy documents. This chapter is informed by a thematic analysis of 26 documents, issued between 1998 and 2020. The chapter demonstrates that understanding ‘inclusion’ only with regard to lifelong learning, student-centred education and the social dimension has pitfalls – there are overlaps between these action lines and, consequently, the relationships among them are unclear. A better way of understanding inclusion in Bologna may be through considering a tight relationship between the inclusion and neoliberal discourses in the support of marginalised groups in higher education (HE). The relationship has been evolving in relevant policy documents since 1998 which is the year that marks the preparatory Sorbonne meeting that gave life to Bologna in 1999. The inclusion discourse grew in strengths, while the neoliberal rhetoric firmly stood its ground since the beginning of the BP, while undergoing some transformations. In spite of such seemingly positive dynamic in the development of inclusion in the BP, its definition remained vague in the policy documents until 2020 as it was unclear which exact underprivileged groups were meant to be supported in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The 2020 conference outcome documents made a significant step towards closing the gaps in our understanding of whom inclusion targets in Bologna and how to implement these inclusion ideas. The chapter highlights this achievement and also prepares the reader to problematise its reach in national contexts later in the book.

Higher education (HE) in Slovakia is undergoing a second massive wave of transformation that is a direct post-socialist response to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) (ESG, 2015). In Slovakia, these standards have led to the end of the previous accreditation model and the emergence of a new accreditation agency. It is through the new forms of assessment and assessment standards that one can observe the second wave of the neoliberalisation of HE in Slovakia that stems from the Bologna Process (BP). The chapter describes the nature and consequences of this second wave. The question is whether the new accreditation standards in Slovakia take into account the idea of social justice in HE and what type of effects the second wave of ‘Bologna’ neoliberalisation is having on social justice. The chapter relies on a thematic analysis of the following types of documents issued between 2002 and 2020: strategic government documents, internal regulations of the accreditation agency and course accreditation manuals. It compares the discourses on the accreditation criteria in both waves of the neoliberalisation of HE in Slovakia. The results of the analysis show that the meaning of social justice in these discourses lacks the emphasis on the social dimension particularly in the second phase of the BP in Slovakia.

This chapter presents a case of the adoption of the Bologna Process (BP) outside the boundaries of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) – in Cameroon. The adoption of the BP lines of action has triggered higher education (HE) reforms in Cameroon including reforms to enhance graduate employability. In Cameroon, graduate employability is promoted through ‘professionalisation’ of degree programmes – which seeks to prepare students with employment-ready skills and competences capable of adapting to the fast and highly competitive global economy either as job seekers or job creators. With the use of policy documents, existing literature and interviews with policymakers and university officials, this chapter examines the framing of employability from the perspective of social justice and neoliberal discourses. The analysis highlights the idea that while the overall goal is to promote social justice by enhancing the employability skills of all graduates to gain employment through a diverse set of employability pathways, some of the pathways are dominated by neoliberal ideologists discussed in this chapter via mode of governance, commodifying training and commodifying access. The different focuses and operationalisation of social justice and neoliberalism reveal tension as social justice emphasises training for all while neoliberalism emphasises training only for those students with the purchasing power.