Abstract This European Review Focus is based on a conference on the topic ‘Institutional Perspectives on Universities’ held at the Wenner-Gren Centre in Stockholm on 21−23 May 2025 with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundations. The conference was part of a series arranged by the Higher Education, Research and Culture in European Society (HERCulES) group within Academia Europaea.

We propose and test the proposition that innate personality differences in trait affect explain significant variance in student satisfaction. Using three standard measures of trait affect and data from a student sample (n = 409) of PhD candidates across science, social science and humanities in 63 universities from 20 countries, we find that 24% of variance in student satisfaction is accounted for by trait affect. We also find that both discipline studied and research orientation of university have moderating effects on the relationship between trait affect and student satisfaction. Our findings suggest student satisfaction scores need to be viewed with caution because, in part, they merely reflect individual-level trait affect that - like all innate personality traits - academics, university administrators and education ministers alike are powerless to alter. Our findings indicate that governments, universities and other organisations gathering student satisfaction data could usefully adopt measures to control for trait affect. Our findings also raise the possibility that universities might strategically incorporate innate affect in their student selection criteria to game satisfaction ratings.

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational under-achievement, blaming victims and downplaying the complicity of universities in reproducing inequity. This article analyses the narratives of a group of Black working-class students, and academics on their in-depth experiences of educational success and failure in post-apartheid South African universities. Counter-storytelling is employed to foreground and promote the voice and lived experiences of those who often go unheard; and to highlight their narratives as valuable and critical in understanding persistent inequity in higher education. This article looks beyond the fixation on what students from marginalised communities are perceived to lack to reassert a place for institutional context in studying their experiences, to minimise the de-contextualisation of such experiences; and to illuminate areas of universities' complicity in reproducing untenable educational experiences and outcomes for those already in the margins. Participants' counter-stories are presented to deepen our understanding and theorisation of Black working-class students' lived experiences in a manner that enriches the work of researchers, policy makers and practitioners.

Business Schools exist in a world with deepening social, economic, cultural and political fractures. These include an exponential growth in inequality, the return of absolute poverty and growing fault lines between those who have secure employment, those who work in precarious conditions, and those who are excluded. Migration caused by war and poverty has led to large scale suffering. Social solidarity within and across countries has been undermined, leading to rising xenophobia. Business schools, as institutions that are both nationally anchored and globally linked, with connections to business, government and civil society have the potential to play an important part in responding to these catastrophes and contributing to the greater good. Excellence contests combine with rankings and a citation and publishing industry to construct standardised worldwide measures to access the quality of business school research.

The Governance of European Higher Education analyses governance at state and institutional levels in European higher education systems chosen as representative of the European higher education area as a whole: England, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Portugal, Scotland and Wales. Drawing on 180 detailed face-to-face interviews with policy makers and universities across the seven systems, the book explores the European higher education community and offers insights into the changes in governance that have occurred in the last decade since the completion of the Bologna Process.

This book explores the impact of localities and regions on universities and shows how the diversity of the higher education landscape is critically affected by the geophysical character of regions and their differentiated economies and cultures; regional inequalities bear heavily on universities’ strategy-making. A study of the interrelationship between higher and further education argues that from a regional perspective a change to a tertiary education system in England (following Wales) would create the conditions for better local and regional coordination. Universities make a significant contribution to ‘levelling up’ through technology transfer and the creation of innovation hubs but the contribution of locally or regionally based students who on graduation return to disadvantaged communities rather than seek employment elsewhere should be recognised also as a longer term step to redressing regional inequality. The book argues strongly that the time has come to decentralise the governance of a re-aligned tertiary system to regions and identifies the move to create metro mayors and combined authorities as providing the appropriate vehicle to release new initiative from regional sources. It cites the success of decentralisation to Scotland and Wales as offering relevant models for scrutiny. The authors draw on 12 UK widely differentiated university case studies, a survey of further education and a study of three continental European comparators (Germany, Ireland and Norway) to develop the argument.

This chapter discusses research on the emergence of a relatively new staff category in higher education that does no longer fit the traditional academic-administrative divide: new professionals who support processes in research, teaching, public engagement, and management. We argue that their rise is tied to the overall rise of management in higher education and to changes in contexts and conditions for universities over recent decades. In consequence, national variations as regards the quantitative and qualitative development of this new staff groups can be observed. We discuss their roles as hybrid professionals serving in a wide variety of specialised expert roles, their sources of professional legitimacy and power as well as their contestation. As situated professionals, this new staff group is not only embedded in but also dependent on local organisational orders that influence their professional boundary work with academics: reflecting rather traditional academic-administrative divides, third spaces of fluid collaborations, or managerialist disruptions of academic values and powers.

Higher Education QuarterlyVolume 75, Issue 1 p. 189-192 BOOK REVIEW Higher Education in Germany—Recent Developments in an International Perspective Otto Hüther, Georg Krücken Springer, Cham, Higher Education Dynamics 49, 2018. xxi + 263 pp. ISBN 978-3319614786. 93,59€ (hardcover). ISBN 978-3319614793. 74,89€ (eBook) Jürgen Enders, Corresponding Author Jürgen Enders j.enders@bath.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0003-1835-3587 School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, UKSearch for more papers by this author Jürgen Enders, Corresponding Author Jürgen Enders j.enders@bath.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0003-1835-3587 School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 October 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12284Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume75, Issue1January 2021Pages 189-192 RelatedInformation

Our paper examines the rise of a new category of professional support staff whom we refer to as 'audit-market intermediaries' in the context of a rapidly changing regulatory and funding environment in British higher education. We explore the roles they play in articulating environmental changes in research-intensive universities related to the auditing of teaching via demands for quality assurance and the marketisation of higher education via the rise of the student as a fee-paying consumer. The qualitative data reveals the internal and external sources of legitimacy and power of the audit-market intermediaries as well their contestation. We show how these actors serve as mediators of audit and market forces undertaking institutional work by translating, amplifying or buffering-related pressures within the university; and point at the relevance of the specific organisational context for understanding differing patterns of their institutional work.

In English higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework represents a very significant recent policy lever in the continued operation of a measured market in the sector. Conceived as a policy to enhance and make further transparent the quality of teaching, it utilises a variety of key measurements to establish sets of related outcomes upon which effective teaching can be assessed. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and adopting policy framing as an analytical approach, we illustrate how the Teaching Excellence Framework and its related discursive techniques are significant in (re)producing the institutional conditions which enable market policy to operate effectively. The article focuses specifically on three core pillars of the marketisation project of English higher education that are strongly affirmed: the further enactment of students as consumers and universities as producers, the related pre-occupation with graduates’ employability and future returns and the uncritical application of metrics to signify institutions’ performance value. We show how misrecognition operates by a market policy cloaking itself under the guise of student empowerment and quality, and call for academic and political practices that forge acts of resistance.

The main research question of this book is the question of what has happened to European universities as organizations after several decades of university reform. To what extent are European public universities still decentralized, loosely coupled organizations as opposed to the centrally managed organizations controlled by a powerful central leadership that reformers have aimed to develop? What are the effects of higher education policies on individual university institutions? This chapter develops the conceptual approach for the book by discussing how leadership control of universities as professional organizations has changed, suggesting the concept of penetrated hierarchies as a new conceptual understanding of current universities as organizations. It also suggests how public European universities are shaped by national political administrative regimes as well as sectoral higher education policy regimes. The last part of this chapter outlines the content of the individual chapters of the book.

Over recent decades, 'autonomy' has become a buzz word in higher education reform and universities were thought to be empowered to determine their own destiny. This chapter examines the organisational autonomy of universities in Europe. The multidimensional analyses of autonomy show that universities in practice experience considerable decision-making space, which in many cases is even more than expected, given their formal, legal autonomy situation. At the same time, the autonomy of universities is strongly circumscribed by their lasting financial dependence on the public purse, by contractual performance agreements, multiple accountability requirements, and by working in the shadow of governmental rules and expectations. Granting universities more autonomy does not reflect a weakening influence of government but new ways of controlling and influencing organisational behaviour.

Given the highly differentiated and nuanced analyses of change processes in university systems provided by the TRUE project, the chapter first reviews this evidence along a set of common dimensions concerning variation in organizational university configurations and their linkages to HE policies and related environmental pressures. This review underscores the need for a more refined analytical framework to accommodate the diversity of empirical observations and provide a more nuanced approach on how environmental contingencies impact organizations. In the last section, we propose a framework building on recent developments in neo-institutional theory, arguing that concepts like institutional pluralism and organizational hybridity provide useful analytical lenses for understanding changes in contemporary university organizations, the potential of which remains largely unexplored.

The idea of a ‘higher education system’ emerged in the wake of massification as a popular political and academic construct. While the term ‘system’ was rarely conceptualized in terms of ‘system theory’, it assumed higher education as a separate entity differentiated from other parts of society. This chapter addresses the rise of ‘national higher education systems’ as a sociopolitical reality and the interrelated forces at work challenging systems thinking in higher education. It draws on insights from the interdisciplinary study of institutional fields, proposing a perspective on field dynamics as a tool for understanding the changing political economy of higher education. These include processes of economic, political, and technological globalization which challenge national conceptions of the field; processes of regulatory decentration (e.g. internationalization and privatization) which challenge the organizational integration of the field; and institutional pressures which blur boundaries between higher education and other parts of the economy and society.