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Key to transnational higher education (HE) cooperation is building trust to allow for seamless recognition of studies. Building on the Tuning Educational Structures initiative (2001) and lessons learnt from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)-Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education (AHELO) feasibility study, this paper offers a sophisticated approach developed by the European Union (EU)-co-financed project Measuring and Comparing Achievements of Learning Outcomes in Europe (CALOHEE). These evidence the quality and relevance of learning by applying transparent and reliable indicators at the overarching and disciplinary levels. The model results allow for transnational diagnostic assessments to identify the strength and weaknesses of degree programmes.

The materials presented have been developed from 2016 to 2023, applying a bottom-up approach involving approximately 150 academics from 20+ European countries, reflecting the full spectrum of academic fields. Based on intensive face-to-face debate and consultation of stakeholders and anchored in academic literature and wide experience.

As a result, general (overarching) state-of-the-art reference frameworks have been prepared for the associated degree, bachelor, master and doctorate, as well as aligned qualifications reference frameworks and more detailed learning outcomes/assessment frameworks for 11 subject areas, offering a sound basis for quality assurance. As a follow-up, actual assessment formats for five academic fields have been developed to allow for measuring the actual level of learning at the institutional level from a comparative perspective.

Frameworks as well as assessment models and items are highly innovative, content-wise as in the strategy of development, involving renown academics finding common ground. Its value is not limited to Europe but has global significance. The model developed, is also relevant for micro-credentials in defining levels of mastery.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential, both analytically and practically, of understanding research methods as bridging devices. Methods can bridge theory and empirics, but it is argued that they can perform several bridging functions: between theory and praxis, between analysis and strategy and between past and future. The focus is on those forms of bridging relevant for understanding and effectuating change in governance, at community level and at the scale of organizations.

The paper develops a perspective on methods as bridging devices. It uses the newly minted methods of governance path and context mapping as a case study. These methods conceptually derive from evolutionary governance theory (EGT) and were developed and tested in Canadian empirical research. The case helps to develop insight in features, forms and limitations of methods as bridging devices in governance research and practice. The authors then use the case to further develop the initial concept of bridging more generally, emphasizing the shifting balance between methods as bridging and creating boundaries.

Both the case study and the theoretical analysis underline the necessary imperfection of any method as bridging device. The authors affirm the potential of method to perform different bridging functions at the same time, while revealing clear tradeoffs in each role. Tradeoffs occur with adapted versions of the method producing new strengths and weaknesses in new contexts. In each of the forms of bridging involved neither side can be reduced to the other, so a gap always remains. It is demonstrated that the practice of bridging through method in governance is greatly helped when methods are flexibly deployed in ongoing processes of bricolage, nesting and modification. Governance enables the continuous production of new framing devices and other methods.

The idea of methods as bridging devices is new, and can assist the development of a broader understanding of the various forms and functions of research methods. Moreover, it helps to discern roles of research methods in the functioning of governance. The context of governance helps to recognize the multi-functionality of research methods, and their transformation in a context of pressured decision-making. Moreover, this approach contributes to the understanding of governance as adumbrated by EGT.

This volume of Advances in Management Accounting begins with an article by C. J. McNair, Lidija Polutnik, Holly H. Johnston, Jason Augustyn and Charles R. Thomas on shifting perspectives involving accounting, visibility, and management action. The article attempts to determine whether or not the accounting abstraction appears to dominate the manager’s perceptions of the physical reality of the firm’s utilization of its physical assets. The article then looks at whether changes in the accounting abstraction (e.g. the addition of capacity cost management reports and measurements) lead to changes in how managers perceive and use their physical assets. Using a cognitive decision-making structure developed by Wagenaar et al. (1995), this study explores the interplay between the structure and nature of capacity reporting (the surface structure of the decision) and the subsequent analysis and choice of managers within the firm (the deep structure of the decision).

Racialization is an important concept when looking at structural mechanisms that perpetuate racial inequalities. The State, and its various organizational spaces of action, is often seen as a site for race to be enacted. Policy sectors such as housing, education, taxation, and immigration have been ripe areas of research that reflect this. However, media policy research has not effectively engaged with this critical conception. Media policy research has been driven by political economy perspectives within the field of Mass Communication and Media Studies, and can benefit from an approach that analyzes it in relation to social science perspectives that focus on processes which constitute, or are constituted by, actors, groups, and organizations. Our hope is that future researchers will find this volume useful in further developing critical studies of media policy that take into account race as a social force.

In this chapter, we identify three distinct transformational performance improvement (TPI) approaches commonly used to redesign work processes in health care organizations. We describe the unique components or tools that each approach uses to improve the delivery of health services. We also summarize what is empirically known about the effectiveness of each TPI approach according to systematic reviews and recent studies published in the peer-reviewed literature. Based on examination of this research, we discuss what knowledge is still needed to strengthen the evidence for whole system transformation. This involves the use of conceptual frameworks to assess and guide implementation efforts, and facilitators and barriers to change as revealed in a recent evaluation of one major initiative, the Lean Enterprise Transformation (LET) at the Veterans Health Administration. The analysis suggests ways in which TPI facilitators can be developed and barriers reduced to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of quality initiatives. Finally, we discuss appropriate study designs to evaluate TPI interventions that may strengthen the evidence for their effectiveness in real world practice settings.

In this chapter, we analyze the interactions between local governments and citizens’ initiatives. In the Netherlands, local governments take up the role of civic enabler based on a modest approach that leaves citizens room to invent and design initiatives on what they deem to be public issues by facilitating and activating their efforts. We focus on how a proactive form of this approach toward citizens’ initiatives in deprived neighborhoods affects citizen–government relations. Our research is based on a case study in the city of Amsterdam. We find that particularly more women and migrants took up a wide variety of initiatives, which suggests that the neighborhood approach is more inclusive than deliberative approaches. We also find that initiators developed a positive attitude toward public institutions that enable them and that they started to see frontline workers as collaborators in their initiatives with whom they could have personal and authentic interactions, as opposed to the cool bureaucratic response from government officials that they were used to. To close the chapter, we discuss some risks of the proactive enabling approach, we compare our findings to problems that citizens’ initiatives often face during their interactions with local institutional actors in the Netherlands found in other literature, and we briefly discuss possible implications of practicing a modest enabling approach for developments in governance.

This article argues that a more broadly based understanding of the processes of the enforcement of regulation and compliance needs to be developed. It highlights aspects of two recent newsworthy cases of non‐compliance with financial regulation. It concludes that future practice needs to be informed by research from a wider range of theoretical disciplines than have been employed in the study of financial regulation hitherto.

The papers in this collection address a set of important issues facing our discipline. These issues cross national boundaries, and indeed are important far beyond the sociological sphere. My brief comments here will use these papers as a springboard for noting several important curricular challenges and trends for sociology, in particular, and academia, more generally, as we enter the next century.