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This paper aims to use text mining methods to explore the similarities and differences between countries’ national digital transformation (DT) and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) policies. The study examines the applicability of text mining as an alternative for comprehensive clustering of national I4.0 and DT strategies, encouraging policy researchers toward data science that can offer rapid policy analysis and benchmarking.

With an exploratory research approach, topic modeling, principal component analysis and unsupervised machine learning algorithms (k-means and hierarchical clustering) are used for clustering national I4.0 and DT strategies. This paper uses a corpus of policy documents and related scientific publications from several countries and integrate their science and technology performance. The paper also presents the positioning of Türkiye’s I4.0 and DT national policy as a case from a developing country context.

Text mining provides meaningful clustering results on similarities and differences between countries regarding their national I4.0 and DT policies, aligned with their geographic, economic and political circumstances. Findings also shed light on the DT strategic landscape and the key themes spanning various policy dimensions. Drawing from the Turkish case, political options are discussed in the context of developing (follower) countries’ I4.0 and DT.

The paper reveals meaningful clustering results on similarities and differences between countries regarding their national I4.0 and DT policies, reflecting political proximities aligned with their geographic, economic and political circumstances. This can help policymakers to comparatively understand national DT and I4.0 policies and use this knowledge to reflect collaborative and competitive measures to their policies.

This paper provides a unique combined methodology for text mining-based policy analysis in the DT context, which has not been adopted. In an era where computational social science and machine learning have gained importance and adaptability to political and social science fields, and in the technology and innovation management discipline, clustering applications showed similar and different policy patterns in a timely and unbiased manner.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a national policy on sickness absence management is translated by HR managers into local human resource management (HRM) practices by developing and applying an analytical framework with three dimensions: individual preferences, strategic reframing, and local grounding.

The paper is based on policy documents and interviews with HR managers in Dutch law firms. The theoretical scope is the debate on HRM and institutional contexts.

The paper uncovers a variety of individual preferences among HR managers' interpretations of the national policy. However, in strategically reframing the policy, the organizations act upon it from a mainly “managerialist” perspective: they focus on reducing absence through increased control of employees, rather than reforming organizational practices that may adversely affect the health of workers. The local groundings reinforce unequal power relations between different categories of employees: HR managers/line managers; professionals/administrative personnel; men/women. The paper contributes to the understanding of how changes in institutional contexts are translated into organizations and the role of HR managers within this process.

The paper explores the translation process in a particular setting. It would be fruitful to broaden the scope to other institutional contexts and organizations and to include a diverse range of actors to develop additional knowledge of the interaction in the translation process.

The paper develops both empirical and theoretical conclusions on the translation, that is, the sense making of HRM in an uncertain environment of changing national institutions.

This paper aims to track the development of climate policy in the province of Alberta, Canada, particularly the province’s unique greenhouse gas emission offset mechanism. The analysis shows how the policy has influenced, and been influenced by, policy processes at the national and international levels.

The paper begins with an analytical framework that recognizes different types of influence between international, national and provincial climate policy processes. That framework is used to structure a review of four historical periods of climate policy change: prior to 1992, 1992 to 2002, 2002 to 2012 and between 2012 and mid-2015.

The analysis illustrates the interplay between the Alberta approach to climate policy and the international and national policy contexts. A period of intense policy conflict between Canada’s federal and provincial governments led to a situation in which the Alberta Government sought to lead rather than follow national policy. Subsequent periods have seen the Canadian national government oscillate between following the lead of Alberta or the USA.

Rather than national and international policies simply setting the context for Alberta’s policy, the paper identifies multiple flows of influence between the three levels of governance. The results illustrate the need to consider forward and backward flows of influence between the different levels of government that set climate change policies. Elements of several models of policy change are supported.

The Alberta climate mitigation policy has many elements that can be effective in reducing carbon emissions in a way that is both flexible and predictable. These elements are of interest to other jurisdictions. Other elements of the current policy, however, limit its effectiveness in reducing emissions. More concerted policy action is needed to mitigate carbon emissions in Alberta for Canada to meet its agreed targets.

No other paper has tracked the historical evolution of climate policy at the provincial/state level in a way that clarifies the forward and backward linkages with national and international policy.

Teacher effectiveness and teacher quality have become the focus of intense international attention and national concern. Dozens of nations are implementing a diverse set of strategies that aim to improve the quality of education by improving the quality of teachers. These efforts have not been well coordinated, and as the authors in this volume show, core constructs of quality have not been well defined. In this introductory chapter, we discuss why teachers are now “under the microscope” of policymaker’s attention and elaborate how the chapters in this volume identify particularly fruitful avenues for further study. The assembled chapters address two complex questions: (1) what existing cross-national measures of teacher effectiveness and teacher quality are most promising and how can these be aligned to maximize their research potential? and (2) what core constructs of teacher quality or effectiveness are missing from the evidence-base, and how can cross-national comparative research help refine these? To investigate these questions, the chapters in this volume address different aspects of “quality.” While quality may be politically contested, there is a significant need to continue to articulate a truly global perspective on teacher quality. The authors look at a wide range of aspects of quality in order to advance thinking about teacher education, instructional quality and workforce or organizational conditions that affect quality; to analyze instruments, tools, or measures used to assess quality; and identify what measures need to be developed further. We also note how scholarly study of the spread of transnational teacher reforms has failed to keep pace with national policy changes regarding teacher quality, and advance a more general theory of the forces affecting national policymakers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate diversity attitudes of business school students across three national contexts Norway; India and the Czech Republic. These three countries are dissimilar from one another in terms of values, such as individualism and collectivism (Hofstede, 2001) self-expression and secular-rationalism (Inglehart and Welzel, 2010) and inequality. The authors wanted to explore similarities and differences in diversity attitudes of respondents from these countries.

Using the diversity attitude scale developed by De Meuse and Hostager (2001) the authors conducted comparative research and collected data from 234 business school graduate students.

The authors found that all groups were positive towards diversity, however, there were significant differences in diversity attitudes between the countries. The Czech Republic had the most positive diversity scores and India the least positive.

This study used convenient samples of business students which might not be representative of the future management in these countries. However, the findings do suggest that attitudes towards diversity are generally positive across these very different national contexts.

The findings suggest that in today’s international context people are becoming more positive towards diversity – at least on the conceptual level and a bottom up approach from MNC to diversity management might be easier to implement than previously thought. The preliminary evidence from the study suggests that this first step of introducing diversity policies across national borders might not meet as much resistance as previously anticipated.

The movement towards seeing and accepting different others is moving in the right direction.

To use this established diversity attitudes measure across three very different national cultures. In the literature there is a call for more comparative research on diversity management.

In order to address the gender divide in technology entrepreneurship, we explore how different national contexts impact policies and policy implementation. We investigate how transnational concerns (macro level) about women’s low participation in (technology) entrepreneurship are translated and implemented amongst actors at the meso level (technology incubators) and understood at the micro level (women tech entrepreneurs).

We adopt gender institutionalism as a theoretical lens to understand what happens in the implementation of gender equality goals in technology entrepreneurship policy. We apply Gains and Lowndes’ (2014) conceptual framework to investigate the gendered character and effects of institutional formation. Four countries represent different levels of gender equality: high (Norway and Sweden), medium (Ireland) and low (Israel). An initial policy document analysis provides the macro level understanding (Heilbrunn et al., 2020). At the meso level, managers of technology business incubators (n = 3–5) in each country were interviewed. At the micro level, 10 female technology entrepreneurs in each country were interviewed. We use an inductive research approach, combined with thematic analysis.

Policies differ across the four countries, ranging from women-centred approaches to gender mainstreaming. Macro level policies are interpreted and implemented in different ways amongst actors at the meso level, who tend to act in line with given national policies. Actors at the micro level often understand gender equality in ways that reflect their national policies. However, women in all four countries share similar struggles with work-life balance and gendered expectations in relation to family responsibilities.

The contribution of our paper is to (1) entrepreneurship theory by applying gendered institutionalism theory to (tech) entrepreneurship, and (2) our findings clearly show that the gendered context matters for policy implementation.

This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers' instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein's theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.

In this chapter, we argue from a theoretical perspective that globalisation has impacted differentiation within higher education systems. The three propositions about mechanisms affecting diversity distinguished by van Vught (environmental conditions, competition for resources and academic norms) remain the same, but the initial conditions have changed. Governmental policy, in particular, affects the degree of openness of higher education systems (positively or negatively), either through (de-)regulation or by affecting higher education institutions’ strategies for internationalisation. Thus, we add as a fourth proposition that increasing institutional autonomy increases system diversity in the context of globalisation.

Following publication of a new vision for the English National Health Service (NHS) in 2014, known as the NHS Five-Year Forward View, a Vanguard programme was introduced by NHS England charged with the task of designing and delivering a range of new care models (NCMs) aimed at tackling deep-seated problems of a type facing all health systems to a greater or lesser degree. Drawing upon recent theoretical developments on the multilevel nature of context, we explore factors shaping the implementation of five NCM initiatives in the North East of England.

Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews (66 in total) between December 2016 and May 2017 with key informants at each site and a detailed review of Trusts' internal documents and policies related to the implementation of each NCM. Our analysis explores factors shaping the implementation of five NCM pilot sites as they touched on the multiple levels of context ranging from the macro policy level to the micro-level setting of workforce redesign.

It is far too early to conclude with any confidence that a successful outcome for the NCM programme will be forthcoming although the NHS Long-Term Plan seeks to build on the earlier vision set out in the Five-Year Forward View. Early indications show some signs of promise, especially where there is evidence of the ground having been prepared and changes already being put in place prior to the official launch of NCM initiatives. At the same time our findings demonstrate that all five pilot sites experienced, and were subject to, unrealistic pressure placed upon them to deliver outcomes.

Our findings demonstrate the need for a deeper understanding of the multilevel nature of context by exploring factors shaping the implementation of five NCMs in the North East of England. Exploring the wider national policy context is desirable as well as understanding the perceptions of front-line staff and service users in order to establish the degree of alignment or, conversely, to identify where policy and practice are at risk of pushing and pulling against each other.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the governance of educational reform, as an interpretive process – “interpretive governance” – through a case study of five superintendents living in a predominantly Swedish-speaking region in Finland.

To foreground superintendents’ perspectives on reforms as simultaneously reflective and constitutive of governance processes, the research applies and extends Rhodes’ (2012) notions of “network governance,” “meta-governance” and “interpretive governance.” Interpretive governance, an underresearched area, is construed as particularly important for developing better insights into how school reform is understood by key actors involved in its enactment.

The research identifies what are described as three “deliberative” dimensions of interpretive governance; these modes of governance are elaborated as “dialogic,” “directive” and “defensive” in nature.

The study reveals senior educators’ interpretations of governance as multifaceted, and argues that these complex modes of deliberation need to be taken into account to better understand how school development is understood and enacted in municipal and school settings.