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Private supplementary tutoring is expanding fast around the world. Recognising that examination boards are major shapers of curricular load, the purpose of this paper is to identify the roles of examination boards at Grades 8, 9 and 10 in Bengaluru, India. Two boards were chosen, with one having a heavier perceived curricular load than the other.

The study used mixed methods with a questionnaire survey of 687 students in Grades 8, 9 and 10, and 51 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews.

Perhaps surprisingly, the findings did not reveal significant differences in tutoring demand by students. Both groups viewed the board examinations as having high stakes, and accordingly invested in extensive private tutoring. Competition emanating from credentialism was the main driver of the decision to receive tutoring among both cohorts.

Although previous studies have explored various components of demand for tutoring, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first to explore the impact of examination boards on demand for tutoring. Since the system of schools being affiliated to examination boards is common not only in India but also in many other countries, the study has broad international relevance.

The purpose of this article is to examine matching in the graduate labour market (GLM) in order to understand how expansion of higher education is perceived and translated in practice.

The article uses meritocracy and credentialism as frames of reference to explain the role of educational certification in systems of social structuring. Correspondingly, qualifications may function as signals, screens or proxies. Qualitative evidence, drawing on 40 interviews with graduates, employers and educators gives insights on access requirements, recruitment and selection and transfer of knowledge and skills, in three graduate occupations: chartered accountants; active schools co‐ordinators; and risk managers.

Findings suggest that expanding graduate numbers has produced altered patterns of closure. Employers use the availability of relevant degrees to limit applications, define jurisdictional boundaries and exclude the less, or inappropriately qualified. Yet correspondence between degree and occupation cannot necessarily be read off by a connected degree.

Closer connections between degree and occupation imply labour market segmentation although this requires further evidence in other occupations.

Supply‐side policy interventions are countered by strategic use of graduates. The paper explores issues of relevance to policymakers, employers, educators and graduates and will be of interest to those in the field.

Purpose – I analyze how laypersons and professionals navigate challenges to the legitimacy of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). The disorder is modeled as a cultural object manifested in the discursive practices of multiple actors forming a knowledge coalition of professionals, laypersons, governmental, and corporate actors. Coalition members faced challenges to the disorder derived from popular skepticism and from professional's contradictory knowledge claims and diagnostic practices.

Methods – I observed these processes in a two-year, ethnographic case study supplemented with a two-stage, open-ended interview with core members of an AD/HD informational and support group.

Findings – Parents and coalitional professionals managed these challenges differently depending on the status of the source (professional vs. nonprofessional) and the alignment (within the coalition vs. nonaligned) of the challenge. Nonprofessional skeptics were easily countered as ignorant moralists who lacked objective knowledge of the disorder – a tactic termed credentialism. The contradictory diagnoses and treatments of professionals were managed as instances of mal-diagnosis – a construct employed by both professionals aligned with the diagnosis and laypersons associated with the disorder. Finally, while parents actively sought a diagnosis as an objective valorization of their status, they remained skeptical of AD/HD; however, in achieving diagnosis they also worried that the methods used to establish a diagnosis were possibly unreliable.

Originality/value – This study contributes to the emergent sociology of diagnosis by describing the techniques used by laypersons and some professionals in maintaining a contentious diagnosis.

The purpose of this paper is to address the lack of knowledge of the accounting occupational group in England prior to the formation of professional accounting bodies. It aims to do so by focusing on attempts made by writing masters and accountants to establish a recognisable persona in the public domain, in England, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to enhance that identity by behaving in a manner designed to persuade the public of the professionalism associated with themselves and their work.

The study is based principally on the contents of early accounting treatises and secondary sources drawn from beyond the accounting literature. Notions of identity, credentialism and jurisdiction are employed to help understand and evaluate the occupational history of the writing master and accountant occupational group.

Writing masters and accountants emerged as specialist pedagogues providing the expert business knowledge required in the counting houses of entities that flourished as the result of rapid commercial expansion during the early modern period. Their demise as an occupational group may be attributed to a range of factors, amongst which an emphasis on personal identity, the neglect of group identity and derogation of the writing craft were most important.

The paper highlights Early English Books Online (available at: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (available at: www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm) and the seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney Collection Newspapers as first class electronic resources now available for studying accounting history from the sixteenth century through to the eighteenth century.

The paper advances knowledge of accounting history by: profiling commercial educators active in England in the early modern period; studying the devices they employed to achieve upward social and economic trajectory; explaining the failure of an embryonic professionalisation initiative; and demonstrating the contingent nature of the professionalisation process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine hiring managers’ perceptions of massive open online courses (MOOCs) as compared to traditional degree-conferred forms of higher education in relation to hiring and employment decisions.

A literature review is presented along with a triangulated theoretical framework. Using online survey data, quantitative methods reveal findings related to the main research question: what are hiring managers’ attitudes toward MOOCs as a form of post-secondary education?

Analysis of the data reveals that hiring managers have a clear preference for traditionally educated job applicants but employer demographics, apart from organizational procedures, do not significantly impact their overall perceptions of MOOCs’ value.

Most of the research is based on anecdotal research. Very little has been written on how to fix this problem.

This paper illustrates implications of MOOCs’ future development and implementation both in higher education and in the labor-force. The main implication is that MOOCs represent neither a panacea to the issues facing higher education and the American labor-force nor an alarming threat to stakeholders appreciative of the status quo.

This paper fills a current research gap as evidenced in the literature; employers’ perceptions of MOOC-educated job applicants when compared to traditionally educated/degree-conferred job applicants. By determining the value of MOOCs as employers pragmatically view them, stakeholder groups can better determine their future positioning of MOOC-related resources in addition to time and money allocated in MOOCs’ direction.

Global participation in higher education has expanded greatly since the late twentieth century. The implications for the cultural, social, and economic fabric of societies have been substantial. To explain transitions from elite to mass higher education systems, theoretical insights from Technical-functionalism, Neo-institutionalism, World Academic System, and Credentialism perspectives have been put forward. It is the contention of this paper that there are emerging and complementary factors driving steadily growing participation in “high-income” universal higher education systems. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

With reference to Ulrich Beck’s concept of the “risk society”, it is discussed how higher education participation is increasingly a response by young people (and their families) seeking to mitigate heightened instability in work and employment under a “risk regime”. Publicly available data from national and supra-national organisations are used to evidence trends and support the arguments put forward by this paper.

Participation is perceived as quasi-compulsory to “survive” amid concern that those without higher education attainment are being “left behind” in modern labour markets. This environment has contributed to more students from more diverse backgrounds viewing higher education as the only viable option to secure a livelihood regardless of rising private costs of participation and rising uncertainty over graduate employment outcomes. The expansion of higher education has therefore potentially developed a self-perpetuating dynamic as the perceived cost of non-participation escalates.

It is shown that to better understand higher education participation in “high-income” countries with universal higher education systems, one needs to consider the conceptual idea of “survivalism”, that underlines risk and the vulnerabilities of modern societies.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of the sociological model of professionalisation known as the “professional project” put forward by Magali Larson, which has become the prevailing paradigm for accounting historians.

The paper challenges the use of the concepts of monopoly, social closure, collective social mobility and the quest for status as applied to the history of accountancy. The arguments are made on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

The use of the concept of monopoly is not justified in the case of accounting societies or firms. The only monopoly the accountants required was the exclusive right to the titles, for example, CA in Britain and CPA in the USA. They were right to argue that the credentials were merely to distinguish themselves in the market place from untrained accountants. The validity of the concept of social closure via artificial barriers to entry is questioned and new evidence is provided that the elite accountants have always recruited heavily from classes lower in the social hierarchy than themselves. The concept of the collective social mobility project is found wanting on a priori and empirical grounds; accountants behaved no differently to other business classes and have probably not enhanced their social status since the formation of their societies.

The paper offers, in the case of accountancy, one of the few critiques of the accepted model of professionalisation. It demonstrates the weak explanatory power of the sociological paradigms used by accounting historians.

Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada.

We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences.

We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty.

We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how principals in Taiwan lead student and teacher learning at a time of leadership and learning paradigm shifts and the imminent implementation of the curriculum guideline for 12-year basic education.

This study interviewed 32 elementary and junior high school principals purposively sampled based on reputation and recommendation from senior principals and government officials.

As a society which values credentialism, principals in Taiwan face challenges in executing the vision of educating student as a whole person. The authors discuss how principals are solidifying whole person education as the espoused value, how they are enforcing school-based curriculum and effective instruction, and encouraging teacher professional learning. Principals are sharing power by recruiting stakeholders’ participation in guiding school development and enacting distributed leadership, while also building relationship as social capital and soliciting support from the community to establish the conditions to improve teaching and learning.

This paper highlights how principal practices are evolving in a time of changing conception of learning from academic achievement to multiple competencies and the shifting paradigm of power from participatory decision making to distributed leadership. This paper ends with a discussion on how leadership for learning (LfL) as a community engagement has emerged.

With the shifting of the concept and paradigm of learning, principals in a high power distance society like Taiwan are now facing opportunities as well as challenges to lead teachers to engaging students in inquiry and collaboration.

This paper highlights the indigenous practices of principal LfL in a high-performing East Asian education system in a time of changing notions of learning and leadership.

Bureaucracy in libraries is typically presented in terms of six banal characteristics originally identified by the historian Max Weber at the turn of the twentieth century. In some cases, bureaucracy in libraries is seen as a system that might be undone. These characterizations underestimate the power of bureaucracy as a force external and intrinsic to libraries. The purpose of this paper is to reintroduce the topic of libraries as bureaucracies such that library practitioners can identify, question and reform aspects of bureaucracy in libraries.

A review of literature from the library field and from the social sciences is presented in the framework of a SWOT analysis, such that readers can see bureaucracy in libraries for its strengths and weaknesses, as well as in regards to its external opportunities and threats.

Bureaucracy is a largely misunderstood and overlooked topic, in all disciplines, including library science. Generally, bureaucracy is presented as a negative and ineffective system operating in the public sector only, though bureaucracies serve many positive purposes and functions in all aspects of society. Bureaucracy cannot be dismantled, though opportunities exist to eliminate its less desirable aspects and effects. In some ways, libraries exemplify bureaucratic thinking, yet in webs, libraries are poised to offset or challenge the harmful effects of bureaucracy in all other aspects of society.

Bureaucracy is seldom considered in library research or in other fields. As such, it is a grossly misunderstood subject. This extensively research paper synthesizes the literature that does exist on the topic, and expands upon it using theory from the social sciences. As such, this paper stands to begin a discussion about how libraries can restructure and respond to change.