International schools in China have enjoyed soaring popularity in recent years. Many of these schools adopt curricular forms and/or school brands originating from the US, UK or Canada, and they brand themselves as American-style ("meishi"), British-style ("yingshi") and Sino-Canadian ("zhongjia") international schools…

Business organizations adopt innovation with the objective of meeting competition and improving their business performance; education organizations, likewise, operate in a competitive environment, are evaluated by stakeholders, and adopt innovation. The research presented here links these two sectors; its objective was to characterize the process…

The last 40 years have seen great political attention paid to issues of inclusion in education, both from international organisations and also individual nations. This flexible concept has been adopted enthusiastically in education reforms concerned with increased standardisation of teaching and learning, decentralisation of education management,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of principals in light of public management reforms taking place in the German educational system and in reference to the empirical patterns uncovered by the papers contained in the Special Issue. Policy makers have created new expectations and new technologies that seem to suggest to…

Why can't colleges act more like businesses? For the past century, legislators, boards of trustees, and private sector leaders have been befuddled by academic traditions. The scions of law-making and industry have scratched their heads and wondered why institutions of higher learning do not respond to the same prompts and incentives that work well…

Market reforms in education are part of the educational policy landscape in many countries. Central to arguments for market reforms is the idea that competition and choice will spur changes in schools to be more innovative, which in turn will lead to better student outcomes. We define innovation in terms of a practice's relative prevalence in a…

A number of UK universities prioritize economic development or regeneration activities and for some of these universities such activities are the main focus of their knowledge transfer work. This study compares two regions of the UK--the North West and the South East of England--which have very different levels of economic performance.…

Using the notion of travelling global policy, this paper discusses the ways in which teacher education in Scotland has responded to world-wide demands on school systems. It highlights the embedded practices which have resisted an unequivocal move to a market-based approach in initial teacher education and contrasts this with approaches to…