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This chapter critically examines how recent government papers and policies have informed and contextualised the new Higher Education and Research Bill (HERB) passed in April 2017. In particular, it concerns itself with the issue of ‘teaching excellence’, through what has been termed the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) that has emerged as a key plank of the current government’s policy for future funding of higher education (HE). It will consider the other spurs for reform in HERB, such as the desire to create a culture in HE where teaching has equal status with research, the need to ensure that universities provide better information about their courses and the experiences that they can offer students and the predictable governmental requirement for institutions to give value for money and to be clearly held accountable for any failure to provide a quality service to students. Lastly, there is also a strong emphasis on widening student participation across the sector and ‘levelling the playing field’ so that new providers can set up with the minimum of red tape. It is interesting to note how each of these additional areas for reform is clearly linked to TEF, which, this chapter will argue, will be the key vehicle used to drive them forward.

This chapter draws on Michel de Certeau's work on strategies and tactics to critique the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and, importantly, suggests a form of creative resistance to it. The TEF operates as a strategy of English higher education to reduce teaching and learning to quantifiable proxy measures which are then used to hold academics' performance to account. The selection and use of these proxy measures introduces a specific relationship between academics and students rooted in the underlying neoliberal principles of exchange and private gain, reducing HE teaching and learning to a provider–consumer relationship. In defiance of this academics need to utilise increasingly creative tactics to enable them to conform to the requirements of the TEF while simultaneously resisting and subverting this provider–consumer relationship. De Certeau's work on la perruque, or wiggery, as alternative tactics disguised as work for an employer offers us a way to counter the pervasive presence of TEF. La perruque encourages us to make use of the structures and places provided to us by higher education institutions to make something alien to them, for example, reorganising classroom spaces in such a way that does not prioritise the presence of the lecturer or designing sessions and modules starting from existing student knowledge rather than assuming a deficit to be addressed. Each of these tactics of resistance is fleeting and temporary, but each provides academics with a creative possibility to navigate the tensions of neoliberal provider–consumer relationships on the one hand and collaborative knowledge production on the other.

This study investigates the role of transnational mixed-embeddedness when transnational entrepreneurial firms (TEFs) become internationalized. First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs who maintain business arrangements in their home and host countries own TEFs. In many cases, they internationalize from emerging economies to advanced economies. Nevertheless, this study focuses on TEF cases that internationalize from an advanced to an emerging economy, which prior transnational entrepreneurship studies have largely overlooked.

This research uses a qualitative approach based on six TEF case studies from Canada and the UK venturing into China to explore TEFs' internationalization.

The case studies explore the elements that constitute TEFs' cognitive and relational embeddedness—two main types of embeddedness—in home and host countries and how TEFs exploit such embeddedness for their internationalization. The results suggest that high levels of transnational mixed-embeddedness help TEFs reduce resource and institutional distance barriers in home countries, thereby assisting their internationalization. A framework that visualizes the role of transnational mixed-embeddedness in TEFs' internationalization and novel categorizations of transnational mixed-embeddedness is proposed.

Although there has been a growing demand for research on the emergence of internationalized smaller firms, there have been few empirical efforts on TEFs' internationalization. It is still unclear how TEFs internationalize differently than homegrown entrepreneurial firms. This study fills this gap in transnational entrepreneurship literature by examining the influence of transnational mixed-embeddedness on TEFs' internationalization.

Taken at face value, it may initially seem difficult to argue with the sentiments enshrined in the rhetoric that surrounds the TEF – raising the status of teaching in Higher Education (HE), rebalancing its relationship with research, incentivising institutions to focus on the quality of teaching and making them more accountable for ‘how well they ensure excellent outcomes for their students in terms of graduate-level employment or further study’ (OfS, 2018, p. 1). Clearly, these are laudable aspirations that will chime with anyone who believes in the importance of students experiencing an education that enriches and transforms them and their potential. Drawing on Fraser and Lamble's (2014/2015) use of queer theory in relation to pedagogy, however, this chapter aims to expose the TEF not just ‘as a landmark initiative that is designed to further embed a neoliberal audit and monitoring culture into Higher Education’ (Rudd, 2017, p. 59) but as a constraining exercise that restrains diversity and limits potential. Although queer theory is more usually linked with gender and sexuality studies, Fraser and Lamble show us that it can be used ‘in its broader political project of questioning norms, opening desires and creating possibilities’ (p. 64). In this way, the queer theoretical lens used here helps us to question, disrupt and contest the essentialising hegemonic logics behind the nature and purposes of the TEF and its effects in HE classrooms. Using the slantwise position of the homosexual (Foucault, 1996), this queer analysis of the TEF can thus be helpful as a politically generative exercise in opening up space for new possibilities.

This chapter provides a look at the experiences of two Teacher Educators in the Field (TEFs) as they work to shift writing instruction in suburban districts across the Houston metroplex. A review of the literature on most promising practices for literacy educators is provided along with narrative interspersion of restoried enactments of TEFs in public education systems serving students in grades 6–12. Our planned and lived experiences were often dissonant due to the complexity of increasingly diverse demographic populations in fast-growing districts who struggled to shift the focus of instruction in correlation to audience. Our stories present focused reflection on the need for additional supports geared toward teacher development, TEF retention, and consistent engagement from campus and district-level administrators.

The Teaching Excellence Framework was explicitly introduced as a mechanism to ‘enhance teaching’ in universities. This chapter suggests, however, that the highly complex ‘black box’ methodology used to calculate TEF outcomes effectively blunts its purpose as a policy lever. As a result, TEF appears to function primarily as performative policy act, merely gesturing towards a concern with social mobility. Informed by the data and metrics driven Deliverology approach to public management, I suggest the opacity of the TEF's assessment approach enables policymakers to distance themselves from and sidestep the wicked problems raised by the complicated contexts of contemporary higher education learning and teaching. At the same time, however, I argue that the very indeterminacy through which the framework achieves this sleight of hand creates a space in which engaged teaching practitioners can push through a more progressive approach to inclusive success.

This chapter discusses the institutional contextual narratives provided as part of the evaluation of universities in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in England. The purpose of the TEF is to allow differentiation between higher education institutions on the basis of teaching quality, but the equality challenge unit has expressed reservations about the TEF’s ability to make sense of, or reflect, diverse student experiences of being taught. The authors follow the methodology of critical policy ethnography using higher education and government policy documents as a field of anthropological data and contend that, in order to understand large-scale transformations, such as the educational experience of students, the authors have to examine the ‘policy field’ and then locate more precise sites, in this case the TEF, for understanding the larger environment. The authors have systematically determined our search terms and used text-mining tools to search all the institutional narratives and obtain a broad ‘policy field’; we then select some key examples to analyse particular cases in more detail. This provides us with evidence from the statements to determine both how the perspective of students has been included in preparing the TEF contextual narratives and how diversity is being addressed.

The purpose of this research paper is to discuss a software reliability growth model (SRGM) based on the non‐homogeneous Poisson process which incorporates the Burr type X testing‐effort function (TEF), and to determine the optimal release‐time based on cost‐reliability criteria.

It is shown that the Burr type X TEF can be expressed as a software development/testing‐effort consumption curve. Weighted least squares estimation method is proposed to estimate the TEF parameters. The SRGM parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation method. The standard errors and confidence intervals of SRGM parameters are also obtained. Furthermore, the optimal release‐time determination based on cost‐reliability criteria has been discussed within the framework.

The performance of the proposed SRGM is demonstrated by using actual data sets from three software projects. Results are compared with other traditional SRGMs to show that the proposed model has a fairly better prediction capability and that the Burr type X TEF is suitable for incorporating into software reliability modelling. Results also reveal that the SRGM with Burr type X TEF can estimate the number of initial faults better than that of other traditional SRGMs.

The paper presents the estimation method with equal weight. Future research may include extending the present study to unequal weight.

The new SRGM may be useful in detecting more faults that are difficult to find during regular testing, and in assisting software engineers to improve their software development process.

The incorporated TEF is flexible and can be used to describe the actual expenditure patterns more faithfully during software development.

Case study research undertaken in Spring 2019 uncovered that only a small percentage of a university workforce were able to engage with a large, influential teaching regulation. This “exclusivity” impacted on the relationships in the academic schools studied and by extension, the capacity that the regulation had to enhance teaching. Key findings included the regulatory agenda elevating the status of some workers while increasing the precariousness of others, an inability to agree on a local definition of excellence and general confusion, ambivalence and disdain surrounding structural and cultural changes.

This chapter uses the example of the English Teaching Excellence Framework, a relatively new centrally imposed quality framework, to explore “frontline” professional services staff as policy actors. This chapter will use the study’s findings to explore the complex identities, tensions, and workplace dynamics of staff working to implement regulation locally and provide a reflection of the case study methodology used to expose these findings. In its exploration of the complex reality of policy enactment, I hope to encourage institutions to consider local engagement with regulation by repositioning them within institutional discourse as opportunities rather than threats. This study should speak to those that are navigating HE governance and management to meet commanding central regulation.