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This volume is a collection of papers first presented at a conference held in June 2004 dedicated to the memory of the late Tikva Lecker, hosted by Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago. A warm and lively member of the Department of Economics at Bar Ilan University, Professor Lecker's many interests included topics in labor economics, women and the economy, the economics of Judaism, the economics of migration, and every aspect of the economic experience of immigrants and their descendants.

This chapter focuses on theories and methods for policy studies in higher education, in an era of accelerating globalisation. Policy is increasingly conceived as a complex process which extends from global to local levels, and is contested at all levels. At the same time, higher education has assumed a more central role in the development of a so-called ‘global knowledge economy’. Thus, the re-conceptualisation of ‘policy’, along with the repositioning of the role of higher education in globalising times, call for a rethink on theory and method for higher education policy studies. With attempts to cover a broad global-local span, single theoretical framings are often insufficient, and theoretical eclecticism potentially offers more comprehensive insights into dynamic policy processes than single theories alone. In particular, the combination of critical theory and post-structural theory has presented a fruitful way to build policy ‘trajectory’ and ‘network’ analyses across multiple levels and sites.