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This chapter develops a theoretical account of higher education policy creation and the relationship between universities and the state. Through this process, it demonstrates the relevance of theories from political science – including policy analysis and parliamentary/legislative studies – to higher education policy analysis. The chapter outlines the enduring relevance of political factors in shaping higher education around the world and the different ways in which political and policy analysis can be positioned within higher education research. A series of theoretical frameworks are introduced including policy networks, neo-institutionalism and principal-agent theory. These theories account for how policy is made, the behaviour of universities and policy makers, and the dynamics within the relationship between universities and the state. The chapter explains how these approaches can be adapted and applied to higher education policy research, and how frameworks from political science can inform and enrich studies of higher education.

This chapter claims technology to be a principal mode of regulation in formal organizations alongside social structure and culture. Such a claim breaks with the conventional neo-institutional outlook that considers technology outside the object of institutional analysis of organizations. The distinctive regulative logic of computational technology is manifested in the increasing entanglement of domain-specific practices and their underlying cognitive and normative order with the decontextualized principles and methods that have traditionally been deployed in the management and control of work operations. Such entanglement and the effects it generates reflect the reshuffling of the regulative reach of technology, social structure and culture under the pressures exercised by the dynamics of current technological change and the impressive involvement of computational systems and artefacts in human affairs.

Against the background of a changing relation between the state and “its” education system, the present contribution focuses on two concepts that can be used as tools in order to explain the current transformations. “Governance” is more concerned with technical issues: with instruments and modes, procedures and actors, and with their constellations and forms of cooperation. It focuses research on questions such as: who provides educational services or what is the connection between public and private education. It has been employed to investigate the relation between the various levels of analysis and has proven particularly useful in creating an adequate theoretical understanding of the role of international organizations in shaping educational policies. Sociology and political science are the two disciplines most prominently associated with elaborating the concept under various perspectives. Governmentality, although sharing many characteristics with governance, is a Foucauldian term concerned with the generation of different subjectivities and collectivities through techniques and modes of ruling and guiding in an encompassing sense. A governmentality perspective thus focuses investigations on the typical Foucauldian knowledge/power nexus. While “governance” may be said to be more descriptive, more concerned with the “how” of current transformations, “governmentality” may be drawn on to argue that the changes are related to a reworking of the very modern Weberian notion of rationality, thus stressing the morphodynamics but not the reinvention of education. At stake is the increase of effectivity in order to augment and increase the “usefulness” and thus the value of the population.

In this paper, I discuss the possibility of creating a more fruitful conversation between institutional logics and institutional work as two central streams within institutional theory. I begin by situating each of these lines of theorizing within their respective intellectual traditions. I then elaborate on their core arguments alongside their theoretical assumptions. Specifically, I articulate how they each highlight some aspects of institutional dynamics while disregarding or downplaying others. Finally, I point to some similarities, differences, and possible analytic division of labor between them. I conclude by arguing that the tension between institutional logics and institutional work, as two frameworks for conceptualizing and exploring institutional dynamics, is the most recent incarnation of a long series of theoretical conundrums within neo-institutionalism, each triggering deep and ongoing discussions that enriched our thinking. As such, this tension is welcome and important, as long as each stream is able to define its own boundaries.

North America is both geographically large and demographically diverse, which makes a discussion about globalization in North America difficult to distinguish from globalization writ large. This chapter attempts to do so nonetheless by examining tangible, virtual, and envisioned versions of the globalization of education in North America specific to trends in immigration (and migration), identity, and imagination. A brief explanation of theories of globalization that intersect in the North American context includes world systems, neo-institutionalism, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, and post-colonialism, but could include many more. This chapter also suggests that the globalization of education in North America is not limited to the continent of North America due to the many external or global educational entanglements that North Americans have with other countries and regions worldwide.

To consider Critical Management Studies as a social movement.

The purpose is fulfilled by reflecting upon the history of Critical Management Studies by reference to social movement theory, institutional theory and the social theory of hegemony.

Critical Management Studies is plausibly understood as a social movement.

The chapter offers a fresh perspective on Critical Management Studies by representing it as a movement rather than as a specialist field of knowledge.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, disability rights found a place on the U.S. policy agenda. However, it did not do so because social movement groups pressured political elites or because politicians were responding to changes in public preferences. Drawing from recent work in neo-institutionalism and social movements, namely the theory of strategic action fields, I posit that exogenous shocks in the 1960s caused a disability policy monopoly to collapse giving way to a new policy community. Using original longitudinal data on congressional committees, hearings, bills, and laws, as well as data from the Policy Agendas Project, I demonstrate the ways in which entrepreneurs pursued a new policy image of rights within a context of increasing committee involvement, issue complexity, and space on the policy agenda, and the consequences this had on policy.

Our first goal is to discuss new information for national policymaking which may arise from the analyses of international achievement study data. The second is to illustrate this potential by exploring determinants of students' career plans in a cross-national perspective. Using neo-institutionalism as our theoretical framework, we propose that the influence of a global educational ideology encourages high levels of occupational ambitions among students. This is particularly the case in countries where the transfer of this ideology is supported by the reception of aid for education, where economic prosperity is at modest levels but the service sector employment is expanding. To explore this proposition, we analyze students' occupational expectations using the 2006 PISA surveys from 49 countries. We account for a broad range of possible determinants by estimating three-level hierarchical models in which students are clustered in schools and schools within countries. We find that at individual and school levels, ambition is positively correlated with economic and noneconomic resources. In contrast, students in poorer countries, where secondary education is not yet universally accessible, tend to be more ambitious. The global educational ideology, indicated by the reception of education-related aid, is associated with student career optimism, while students in affluent nations with less economic inequality have modest occupational plans. In addition, the rate of service sector expansion is positively related to high levels of ambition. These patterns hold even after we control for cross-national variation in the extent to which PISA respondents represent populations of 15-year-olds in their countries.

Entrepreneurial approaches to public mass education are not easily developed or managed by public sector institutions. Instead, private sector entities are often responsible for the development and implementation of innovative and entrepreneurial education. Part of the reason may be the resistance to change that isomorphism in mass education engenders, but the involvement of privately-funded, organized, and managed organizations plays a significant role as well. Private sector-driven educational change has become the dominant mode of entrepreneurship in 21st century national educational systems, but there are challenges and obstacles to privately managing public sector institutions such as education and the activities or curricula that comprise its core. To understand this phenomena the promises and challenges for innovation and entrepreneurship are discussed through an institutional framework.