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The article seeks to provide an overview of 55 recent books (2009‐2011) on higher education, with special emphasis on the authoritative overview edited Altbach et al., American Higher Education in the Twenty‐First Century (Johns Hopkins, 3rd Edition, June 2011, 511 pp.).

Books are grouped in nine categories: Global trends, Losing autonomy, Faculty, Students, Finance, Digitization, Curriculum, Diversity, and Moving forward. A concluding Coda discusses an important new paradigm of four types of scholarship, proposed in the seminal 1990 report on Scholarship Reconsidered, and the two types of scholarship that continue to be badly lacking in the academy, to the detriment of the world, the nation, and higher education itself.

American higher education is undergoing many changes and stresses, and all of the books considered here point to a “bleak horizon” in various ways, in part caused by the outdated structure of higher education. Altbach issues a timely call for a new “sense of academic mission,” which is discussed in the Coda.

This uniquely broad and up‐to‐date “frontier frame” overview, enabled by the GlobalForesightBooks.org web site on current affairs books, emphases the many perspectives on higher education, provides a broad frame to appreciate current thinking, and encourages more synthesis that seriously addresses the “Knowledge for What?” question.

This paper aims to provide exploratory evidence on corporate governance (CG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) interfaces. Although there remains a voluminous literature on CG and CSR, very little effort has been put forward to explore the nature of this relationship.

Using interviews with Senior Executives of New Zealand Stock Exchange listed firms, this research assesses CG and CSR practices, identifies barriers for CG and CSR adoption and investigates the nature of the relationship between CG and CSR.

The results indicate a moderate level of CG and CSR practices, with a lack of resources and cost-time balance as common barriers for CG and CSR adoption. However, despite these barriers, we note that the majority of executives appreciate the increasing convergence between CG and CSR, and believe that a more robust CG framework will lead to more sustainable CSR practices.

These findings have important implications for managers and policymakers interested in understanding the CG-CSR nexus and promoting responsible business practices.

The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of institutions as compliant environments, using data to monitor and enforce compliance with a range of external policies and initiatives, using the particular example of UK higher education (HE) institutions. The paper differs from previous studies by bringing together a range of policies and uses of data covering different areas of HE and demonstrating how they contribute to the common goal of compliance.

The compliant environment is defined in this context and the author has applied the preliminary model to a range of policies and cases that use and reuse data from staff and students in HE.

The findings show that the focus on compliance with these policies and initiatives has resulted in a high level of surveillance of staff and students and a lack of resistance towards policies that work against the goals of education and academia.

This is the first study to bring together the range of areas in which policy compliance and data processing are entwined in HE. The study contributes to the academic literature on data and surveillance and on academic institutions as organisations.

The paper offers suggestions for resistance to compliance and data processing initiatives in HE.

This is the first study to bring together the range of areas in which policy compliance and data processing are entwined in HE. The study contributes to the academic literature on data and surveillance and on academic institutions as organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how sustainability assurance providers’ (SAPs) promotion of sustainability assurance influences the scope of engagements, its implications for professional and managerial capture and the ability of sustainability assurance to promote credible reporting.

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with sustainability reporting managers (SRMs) and SAPs in Australia and New Zealand, using an institutional work lens to focus the analysis.

At the start of a new assurance engagement, SAPs offer pre-assurance and flexible assurance scopes, allowing them to recruit clients on narrow-scoped engagements. These narrow-scoped engagements focus on disclosed content and limit SAPs’ ability to add value and enhance credibility. During assurance engagements, SAPs educate managers and encourage changing the norms underlying sustainability reporting. At the end of the assurance engagement, SAPs provide a management report demonstrating added-value of assurance and encouraging clients broader-scoped engagements. However, with each assurance engagement, the recommendations offer diminishing returns, often leading managers to question the value of broad-scoped engagements and to consider narrowing the scope to realize savings. Under these conditions, client pressure (potentially managerial capture) along with practitioners’ desires to grow assurance income (potentially professional capture) can affect SAPs’ independence and the quality of their assurance work.

The study implies that regulation mandating the scope of engagements may be called for.

The authors contribute to the research literature in several ways. First, the findings show how professional and managerial capture occurs before, during and at the end of the assurance process. The authors highlight how perceived value addition from sustainability assurance diminishes over time and how this impacts the scope of engagements (with implications for SAPs independence and the quality of assurance work). The authors show these findings in a table, clarifying the complicated interrelationships. Second, the authors contribute to theory by identifying a new form of institutional work. Third, unlike previous studies focused on SAPs, the authors provide insights from the perspectives of both SAPs and SRMs.

This paper seeks to consider the collaborative efforts of developing a grid computing infrastructure within problem‐focused, distributed and multi‐disciplinary projects – which the authors term interventionist grid development projects – involving commercial, academic and public collaborators. Such projects present distinctive challenges which have been neglected by existing escience research and information systems (IS) literature. The paper aims to define a research framework for understanding and evaluating the social, political and collaborative challenges of such projects.

The paper develops a research framework which extends Orlikowski and Gash's concept of technological frames to consider two additional frames specific to such grid projects; bureaucratic frames and collaborator frames. These are used to analyse a case study of a grid development project within Healthcare which aimed to deploy a European data‐grid of medical images to facilitate collaboration and communication between clinicians across the European Union.

That grids are shaped to a significant degree by the collaborative practices involved in their construction, and that for projects involving commercial and public partners such collaboration is inhibited by the differing interpretive frames adopted by the different relevant groups.

The paper is limited by the nature of the grid development project studied, and the subsequent availability of research subjects.

The paper provides those involved in such projects, or in policy around such grid developments, with a practical framework by which to evaluate collaborations and their impact on the emergent grid. Further, the paper presents lessons for future such Interventionist grid projects.

This is a new area for research but one which is becoming increasingly important as data‐intensive computing begins to emerge as foundational to many collaborative sciences and enterprises. The work builds on significant literature in escience and IS drawing into this new domain. The research framework developed here, drawn from the IS literature, begins a new stream of systems development research with a distinct focus on bureaucracy, collaboration and technology within such interventionist grid development projects.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how fairness evaluations are constructed in a B2B context.

This paper conducts a field study of Air Greenland and its internal and external customers based on strong structuration theory (Stones, 2005). The authors employ context and conduct analysis to analyze how fairness evaluations emerge across four levels of structuration.

The paper finds that fairness evaluations emerge as a result of the interaction between external institutional pressures, agents' internal structures, and situated reflection and outcomes. The construction of fairness evaluations was embedded in contradictory institutional structures, where groups of actors constructed different evaluations of fair profits, procedures and prices. Actors furthermore worked on changing position-practice relations which shifted relations, external structures and affected outcomes and fairness evaluations.

This paper offers a conceptualization of embedded agency as emerging across the four levels of structuration. This contributes to debates in strong structuration theory through conceptualizing and analyzing how actors may be both be constrained and oriented by structures while reflexively adapting structures across the four levels of structuration. The paper extends extant pricing fairness research by illustrating how actors' construction of fairness flexibly develop fairness evaluations while responding to legitimacy and societal demands, including the needs of particular customer groups.