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This paper aims to provide a historical case study of strategic changes in accounting at an Australian university’s business school department during 1972-1992 when it was repositioning itself in the early stages of major changes in the Australian and international tertiary accounting education environment. The study is conducted within the context of the university history within which the department operated as well as major government policy and global education shifts shaping university structures and focus.

This study offers a historical analysis of early stage changes in university focus at the business school’s accounting department, developed through departmental and university reports and oral history interviews. A narrative analytical methodology is adopted to portray a history of an academic accounting department in transition.

This case study illuminates the impacts of and responses to the beginning of marketisation and globalisation of higher education, and the commercialisation of universities and explains the strategic implementation processes in one university’s business school departmental during a period of significant formative change in the Australian accounting education landscape.

This study deepens our understanding of environmental, structural, educational and research changes at the operational departmental level of academic institutions, paying particular attention to the organisational culture and human capital dimensions.

This paper aims to reflect on the development of Australian doctoral education after the program commenced, initially at the University of Melbourne, following the end of the Second World War.

While utilizing the rich literature on doctoral education in Australia, the paper adopts a chronological approach to key issues that have had particular impact on the Australian doctorate since the mid-1980s.

Three major reports have had particular impact on the Australian PhD which was based on the Oxbridge model of supervisor/candidate with little or no coursework.

This reflection brings together a number of threads in Australia’s PhD program based on a wide range of historical and contemporary literature.

To invoke Julian Le Grand's conceptual model of the interaction between human motivation and policy formulation in order to explain how motivational endogeneity in the university environment has distorted policy outcomes in the Australian higher education reform program.

Le Grand contends that changes in the perception of policy makers of both motivation and agency in the public sector have transformed public sector reform programs in the past two decades. However, because producers and consumers of public services react vigorously to different policy presumptions of their behaviour, a problem of endogeneity arises that may distort the intended outcomes of reform processes. This conceptual framework is applied to higher education reform in Australia from the so‐called Dawkins reform program in the late 1980s onwards.

Argues that the Le Grand model can shed light on the changes in Australian higher education that have occurred as a consequence of the ongoing reform process and account for at least some of the unintended negative consequences of the reforms.

The paper represents the first application of the Le Grand model to higher education reform.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the structures of collegial governance in Australian universities between 1945 and the “Dawkins reforms” of the late 1980s. It describes the historical contours of collegial governance in practice, the changes it underwent, and the structural limits within which it was able to operate.

The analysis is based upon the writings of academics and university administrators from the period, with more fine-grained exemplification provided by archival and other evidence from Faculties of Arts and their equivalents in newer universities.

Elements of hierarchy and lateral organisation coexisted in the pre-Dawkins university in ways not generally made explicit in the existing literature. This mixture was sustained by ideals about academic freedom.

By historicising “collegiality” the research problematises polemical uses of the term, either for or against. It also seeks to clarify the distinctiveness of contemporary structures—especially for those with no first-hand experience of the pre-Dawkins university—by demonstrating historical difference without resort to nostalgia.

“Collegiality” is a common concept in education and organisation studies, as well as in critiques of the contemporary corporate university. However, the concept has received little sustained historical investigation. A clearer history of collegial governance is valuable both in its own right and as a conceptually clarifying resource for contemporary analyses of collegiality and managerialism.

The purpose of this paper is to trace debates between state and federal governments, and community stakeholders, leading to the establishment and abolition of the first attempt at a university for Western Sydney, established as Chifley University Interim Council.

The historical analysis draws from published papers, oral history accounts, and original documents in archives of the University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney.

Higher education reform in the 1980s in Australia was fought out as an extension of broader issues such as “States rights”, the rising political power of peri‐urban regions, long‐standing tensions between state and Commonwealth bureaucracies, and the vested interests of existing tertiary education and community groups.

This is the only existing study of attempts to found Chifley University, and one of the few available studies which take a social and contextual approach to understanding the critical reforms of the 1980s leading up to the Dawkins Reforms of 1988‐1990.

In Australia, the Dawkins green paper of 1987 supposedly set a clear framework for merging institutions in the new unified national system. However, neither the Commonwealth nor the various state governments took a strong leadership role in deciding which institutions should merge, leaving the actors to determine their own futures. In South Australia, three universities now exist, which was the least preferred option of the state’s educational planners. Two of those universities offer MBA programmes on contiguous campuses, a situation, supposedly, which would not be tolerated by the Dawkins guidelines. The third university, in a suburban location, also offers post‐graduate management education. In South Australia the Dawkins reforms of 1987 have had minimal impact on the delivery of post‐graduate management programmes, while a new university has emerged from the reform process.

This chapter explores the development and the role of accounting for research quality in Australia’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assessment exercise. It tracks the progress of performance measurement systems from quantitative to qualitative measurement within the Australian higher education sector since 1970, leading up to the implementation of a formal ERA in 2010, and its subsequent iterations in 2012, 2015, and 2018. Although only a part of the ERA submissions, now certain published research outputs provide the primary evidence for research quality to most ERA panels and are a significant driver of the final rating awarded. Before the authors assess the 2018 exercise, they will examine the ever-changing role of journal publications as a vehicle for academic research output.

The central place that education has in the strength and well-being of any profession is widely accepted. Australia presents an interesting case study of a country where Library and Information Studies (LIS) education moved from being conducted by practitioners under the guidance of the professional association to being provided in institutions of higher education in 1959. The 50 years (1959–2008) saw substantial changes in Australian LIS education with a rapid proliferation of schools which was later followed by closures, mergers and changes of focus. This chapter charts LIS education during this period focusing on organizational and structural aspects of the placement of LIS education in tertiary institutions, on the academization of LIS educators who had in the early days mainly been drawn from practice, and on the development of LIS educators as academic researchers and authors as represented by their productivity and visibility in national and international databases. In addition to giving an account of these areas of LIS education over the 50 years, the chapter seeks to offer explanations for what has occurred and some views of strategies which may assist the development of LIS education in Australia and in other countries which possess similar characteristics.

This study aims to examine how government policies have influenced the governance paradigm of Australian public universities from a historical perspective. In doing so, it addresses current uncertainty on government-governance connectivity.

The study draws on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and governance and uses a developed framework of three constituents of governance to explore government–governance connectivity through a critical discourse analysis.

The findings reveal that government policies have influenced the three constituents of governance differently since 1823, resulting in three distinct governance discourses. In the third governance discourse, the findings reveal a deviation from policy directions towards corporate managerialism, resulting in a hybrid governance control environment. This scenario has arisen due to internal stakeholders continuing to be oriented towards the previous management cultures. Other factors include structural and legalistic obstacles to the implementation of corporate managerialism, validity of the underlying theory informing the policy directions towards corporate managerialism and doubts on the achievability of the market based reforms associated with corporate managerialism. The totality of these factors suggests a theory practice gap to be confirmed through further empirical research. There are also policy implications for policymakers to recognize the hybrid control environment and ascertain the risk the hybrid control environment poses towards the expected outcomes of corporate managerialism.

The findings are limited to a critical discourse analysis of data from specific policies and journal publications on higher education and a developed framework of constituents of governance.

The study is the first to examine government–governance connectivity in Australian public universities and also the first to introduce a three-constituent governance framework as a conduit to explore such studies. The findings contribute to the literature in identifying a theory-practice gap and offer opportunities for further research to confirm them.