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The aim of this research is to shed light on the role the Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MoHE) plays in private Jordanian universities (PJUs). Private universities in developing countries struggle with their financial resources. There is an argument that a decision to adopt a new approach for the financing and management of Jordanian higher education (HE) has been taken because both funding and ownership belong to private sources. However, the MoHE plays a role in the Jordanian context.

This study explains the relations between the MoHE and PJUs and describes the PJUs’ managerial context. It is based on the prior research related to HE and budgeting. A total of 16 budget preparers at 11 universities and a further three in the MoHE were interviewed. The research also uses observation to obtain direct knowledge of the research phenomena. It uses archival documents, guidelines and reports to accomplish the study’s objective.

This research presents an overview for private HE across the world with particular concentration being paid to the role of the MoHE in PJUs by presenting the regulations and laws related to HE in Jordan. It proves that the MoHE uses a budgeting formula to significantly increase its control over the private HE sector. Simultaneously, no government subsidies or tax exemptions (such as those given to public universities) have been made available to private universities. The results indicate that the MoHE controls the private universities by using accreditation tools, such as their budgets.

Jordan has a unique situation in terms of the relationship between its MoHE and Jordanian universities.

Purpose of paper: A growing number of studies of the issues of budget process and budget participation have recently emerged in management accounting literature. This paper extends this literature by explaining budget process and budget participation. This research explores the budget process in JPUs, studies the level of budget participation in these universities, and highlights the views and perceptions of budget preparers about the government budget format.

Design/methodology/approach: Nineteen interviews were conducted in 11 universities in Jordan and in the Ministry of Higher Education during 2008.

Findings: The data suggest that the budget usage varies between JPUs, and budget participation in some universities is not consistent where management is centralized. Although respondents understand the importance of budget usage, most of them are dissatisfied with the ministry budget format.

Research implications: The influence of budget participation on the university's overall performance and on performance of head of department may consider one of the important topics to be researched in the future. While, studying the impact of the ministry budget format on the university performance, the reverse impact and relation might be of vital interest to verify the government's expectation about the universities’ compliance and to highlight the importance of implementing a unique standard for all Jordanian universities.

Originality/value of paper: This study contributes to the literature as prior studies have researched budget process and participation in commercial companies in developed countries; this study combines the budget process, participation level while researching the governmental budget format in HEIs in a developing country.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the developmental level of entrepreneurship education within the context of Jordanian higher education. The level of development in such education is investigated based on two areas: the educational courses and programs themselves and the formal structures within which they are embedded.

The quantitative approach is based on a survey scan of all 29 Jordanian universities, including their course plans, educational programs, departments and centers. A list of entrepreneurship centers, programs and course subjects is provided and analyzed.

The main findings of study are: in Jordan, entrepreneurship education is still at an early stage of development, and its offerings are limited to a few courses covering some introductory subjects in small business and entrepreneurship courses. Of the Jordanian universities, one university offers a major educational graduate program in entrepreneurship and 27.5 percent have centers for innovation and entrepreneurship, but lack any entrepreneurship departments. Entrepreneurship education is new in Jordan: the first provided course was a small business management; the first center was established in 2004 and later in 2012, it offered the first educational programs in entrepreneurship.

This paper assists all stakeholders in higher education to build an understanding of the nature of entrepreneurship education in Jordan and supports the design of appropriate strategies for encouraging entrepreneurial subjects to be incorporated into the country’s universities educational programs.

The value of this study stems from its aim to provide an overview of the status of entrepreneurship education in Jordanian universities. It also makes a contribution to knowledge as the first nationwide study in this context.

This study aims to expand the authors’ exploratory qualitative study, describing the characteristics of the flow of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel (PAI) to Jordanian higher education (HE) institutes as an alternative to HE studies in Israel (Jordanization).

At this stage of the study, 460 PAI studying in six Jordanian universities answered a questionnaire indicating the factors that led them to seek HE in Jordan. Respondents’ comparisons between the Israeli and Jordanian HE systems were analysed.

Results showed that Jordanian HE attracts PAIs for practical reasons: lenient acceptance policy and better chances to graduate, while cultural and linguistic similarities between the PAI and Jordanian societies are less influential. Israel's HE is attractive for financial reasons and employment qualification.

Future research should compare the absorption of these graduates of Jordanian universities in Israel's labour market with the absorption of other graduates from Israeli and foreign universities.

The under‐representative proportion of PAI students in Israeli universities indicates the need for diversified programmes and reforms to bring more PAI students into Israeli campuses. Pre‐academic programmes focusing on acquisition of academic learning skills could assist PAI students during their first academic year and help prevent dropout.

This study provides unique and specific knowledge concerning the topic of indigenous ethnic minorities who migrate to study outside their states.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the internationalization market of higher education (HE) globally and HE field. It examines the internationalization status of HE in Jordan as influenced by institutional perspectives as an example from developing countries.

This paper adopts a quantitative research design that includes a statistical and SWOT analysis of HE in Jordan. Data were collected from different courses: documents and archival records, websites analysis, surveys, interviews with professors and administrators, and an SWOT analysis as well as TOWS matrix. The latter has been constructed as a picture of internationalized education in the Jordan that can be used as a basis for decision making and strategies for higher education institutions (HEIs).

The study findings reveal that it is important for Jordan to endorse itself as an “education hub” in the Middle East and to educate its community to the level of skills required by globalization. The challenges of internationalizing HE are revealed by the SWOT analysis and TOWS matrix that highlight a wide range of opportunities and strengths that encourages the Jordan HE system to accelerate internationalization. The opportunities include overall improvement in the quality of education, the diffusion of technology and creating a globally competent workforce. The internationalization status in Jordan HE is still in its embryonic stage. The HE should take serious steps toward the internationalization including admission of international students, foreign postgraduate students, international accreditation, global ranking, online education and smart education. These steps will help the universities leaders to improve their universities position internationally and financially.

The findings reveal implications for HE policy and strategy in the development of internationalized HE in the Jordan. The study shows how SWOT analysis and TOWS matrix can provide a solid platform against which particular case studies can be measured in terms of opportunities for and challenges of development. It also provides institutional perspectives with practical implications, focusing on some of the critical issues in this developing field for HE policy and strategy alike. A major threat to the Jordan progress in developing its HE sector identified in this study is external accreditation being seen as a signal of high quality, when more realistic standards are perhaps more relevant to the local population.

The paper is one of the very few studies in the area of the internationalization of HE in the Jordan that can contribute to the sustainability of the international dimension of HEIs. The opportunities and threats recognized in this paper can inform strategy for more balanced development of the Jordan’s internationalized HE, and for raising the quality of education overall.

The purposes of this research were to review, analyze, synthesize and define the principles, indicators and required design elements of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and the potential role of the design of the courtyards in preventing campus violence; to examine the relationships between built environment design and campus violence inside Al al-Bayt University (AABU), Jordan; and to examine to what extent the design of the open public spaces and courtyards inside AABU meet the design principles of the CPTED.

This research used descriptive-analytical approach, semi-structured interviews, archival records and videos to collect the location-based data of violent events and incidents that occurred on the campus of AABU (the locations of students' fights). Additionally, this research used AABU images; plans, spatial analysis, site visits and direct observations to analyze and assess the courtyards’ design and to examine to what extent the design of courtyards and open public spaces in AABU achieve the CPTED indicators, and the availability and the quality of the required design elements of CPTED and their role in violence prevention.

This research found that environmental-based design plays a major role in reducing crime opportunities and promote positive social behavior. This research found that the indicators to achieve the CPTED principles in all courtyard design inside AABU are very low and all the courtyards’ designs are not complied and conformed to the CPTED principles, and as a result, the design of the courtyards encourages and may facilitate violence in the university campus. It has been found that the availability and the quality of the required CPTED design elements are very low in all courtyards. Therefore, the existing design elements in all courtyards in AABU are not preventing the university violence. The correlation result revealed that there is significant relationship and strong/very strong negative linear association between the numbers of the students' fights and the applying of CPTED principles, indicators and required design elements (r = −0.85).

The data collected from AABU campus only and a larger study is certainly required to underpin these findings. Therefore, future research is needed to replicate and duplicate this research in order to expand the results.

This research has implications for designing/redesigning the open public space and courtyards inside universities. This research recommended that redesigning all courtyards and applying the principles of CPTED are necessary to prevent campus violence. Redesigning includes adding landscaping elements, fountains, water features, pedestrian furniture, portrait, setting areas, new modern sculptures, shaded areas, lighting, memorial places, digital screens and cameras. Moreover, this research recommended that the university should pay more attention to continuous control, repair and maintenance to all courtyards after redesigning them. Finally, this research introduced a design proposal for one of the courtyards to apply the CPTED principles that promote positive behavior and prevent campus violence.

In the last few years in Jordan, some of the public and private Jordanian universities suffered from a newly emerging negative phenomenon, which is violence between students inside the campus. Many researchers and governmental institutions have stressed the urgency to explore the social, cultural, behavioral and environmental strategies that may effectively prevent campus violence. Additionally, little attention has been paid to the role of built environmental design in preventing campus violence. Moreover, no research assesses the applying of the CPTED principles and their indicators in courtyards’ design in Jordanian campuses.

This paper explores the applications of lean thinking in re-evaluating the business school curriculum, syllabus and intended learning objectives to enhance the employability of graduates through identifying and eliminating non–value-added activities.

The research employed multilevel qualitative methodology, where 55 semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data from academics, students and graduates from several private and public universities in Jordan.

The study finds that the application of lean thinking in the business school is twofold – it helps the developer of the school curriculum to get rid of many superfluous and non–value-added activities and also emphasises and reinforces the value-added activities. Value stream mapping, with a consideration for internal and external outputs, has been found to be a useful tool for developing an employability-focussed curriculum that equips business school students with the required competences and skills in the labour market.

The study is based on a qualitative research approach. The generalisability of the findings is difficult to assess, and future research would benefit from the insights obtained from the quantitative data

In practice, this study has identified different types of non–value-added and unnecessary activities in business school curriculum and has made suggestions for the development of a more employability-focussed curriculum.

This paper investigates the non–value-added activities of the business school curriculum, syllabus and the intended learning objectives to enhance the employability of graduates in Jordan.

This study aims to uncover graduating students’ standpoints on Wasta through exploring their motives to use it and its potential influences on them particularly when they move to a workplace (i.e. after leveraging it to gain employment).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 graduating students studying at a Jordanian private university.

Graduating students considered Wasta as a gateway to employment, which rationalised their motives to use it in terms of the perceived lack of equal opportunities in the market, and the absence of rules and regulations that inhibit it. However, they also perceived that being hired through Wasta could have positive and negative impacts on them.

The findings of the study enriched the understanding of various aspects of Wasta, such as why it is used, how it works and how it could have harmful effects on those who benefit from it in addition to those who do not have it, while previous literature primarily focussed on the latter. Although individuals may share similar contextual pressures that encourage them to use Wasta for employment purposes, this research shows that they would accept and justify its use for themselves, yet reject it for others. This study emphasises the need to conduct further research to explain these contradictory views. It also suggests exploring the motives of the patrons of Wasta and its influences on them when they offer it. This is to understand the psychology of offering Wasta and identify the roles of the parties who get involved in it.

Educational institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are striving for better resource management and finance. The bottom-up budgeting approach plays an important role in motivating executives' performance. The main aim of this paper is to discover whether there is a significant difference between bottom-up and a top-down approaches to budgeting in terms of managers' performance.

Questionnaires were distributed to 453 university executives in 21 MENA educational institutions. The Kruskal–Wallis test was utilized to test the difference between the three groups (bottom-up, top-down and consultative approaches). Further analysis was conducted to test the difference between the two groups using the Mann–Whitney test.

The results show that there is a significant difference between a bottom-up and top-down approach in terms of managerial performance. The study's findings indicate that the bottom-up approach to budgeting leads to higher performance indicators than a top-down approach to budgeting.

The current study contributes to the research as it increases awareness of budgeting approaches that are used in higher education institutions, specifically in terms of the effect of these differences on executives' performance.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a field study, investigating accounting, strategising and accounting for strategic management and power structures in the Jordanian higher education (HE) sector on the basis of Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

This paper adopts an interpretive stance, seeking to investigate the perceptions of actors in the field, with regard to accounting, strategising and accounting for strategic management in HE. The adopted methodology is adapted grounded theory, as this study assumes a prior theoretical stance of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts. Data were collected through participant observation in meetings, at the workplace, interviews and documentation.

The main findings of this paper reflect how strategising and accounting in practice manifest themselves in the Jordanian HE sector. Bourdieu’s theory of practice sets the meta-theoretical context of the current study, with field setting the scene, and habitus being represented in the strategising mind-set participants adopt. The mind-set determines how strategic management accounting is perceived and dealt with. Strategic management accounting takes place at varying degrees. The power structures that influence and determine strategising and accounting in support thereof are researched on the basis of Bourdieu’s forms of capital. Different forms of capital matter in the HE sector determined by fields’ doxa.

The researcher is a part of the field, the Jordanian HE sector; thus, their habitus has been exposed to its characteristics and features. Thus, certain internalised structures and experiences needed to be challenged for this analysis, which was not an easy task.

This study investigates accounting, strategic management and power structures in HE, and it highlights the different power structures, using Bourdieu’s forms of capital, which offers a great insight into how different cultures approach similar issues.