Numerous universities throughout the world have established top-level advisory boards -- informal bodies and councils that the institutional leadership may consult on issues perceived as important. Through a series of qualitative interviews with members of such entities as well as representatives of the institutions appointing them, the article…

University governing bodies, especially academic boards, play a crucial role in policy formation. However, due to the predominance of managerial values over academic values in the policy-making process, a persistent divide exists between policy formulation and implementation. This divide results from the marginalisation of academics and the…

Despite recent evidence linking top management power with firm performance, our understanding about the interaction effect between power and personal characteristics of the top manager is still very limited. Building on and extending the Upper Echelons and Power literature, we address the empirical question: How, i.e. UK Vice-Chancellors' (VC)…

If centralising university services is regarded as operationally ineffective, why do managerialised universities continue to organise themselves this way? We investigate an occurrence of this paradox at a regional Australian university, where professional staff services were centralised for a period of 7 years. They were separated from academics…

The neo-institutional theory indicates the impact of the institutional environment on organizations. This leads to the creation of homogeneous institutional structures, due to the existence of dominant institutional logic. University reforms, embedded in ideas of New Public Management, mean that evolution of the institutional logic associated with…

In academia, plagiarism is considered detrimental to the advancement of sciences, and the plagiarists can be charged with sanctions. However, the plagiarism cases involving three rectors of universities in Indonesia stand out, as they could defend their stand for not committing academic misconduct despite evidence found. By analyzing the three…

Leadership is a critical determinant of university performance. While much attention has been given to the personal traits of university leaders, the differences in leaders' political capital are largely neglected. Grounded in the framework of power relations in the management domain and contextualised in Chinese elite universities, the study has…

At a time of the British government's heightened interest in Further Education (FE) college governance, this paper explores Academic Staff Governor (ASG)'s professional and power status at three colleges in England. The study draws upon relevant literature to identify concepts related to ASGs' power and professional status in governance. An…

There is a prevailing trend of distributed leadership in the West as it balances the weaknesses and combines the capabilities of different individuals in knowledge-based societies. Conversely, there is still a lack of understanding and literature on distributed leadership in Chinese universities. We know little about how faculty members in Chinese…

This article investigates whether the level of academics' societal engagement (ASE) is higher or lower at universities with leading research university (LRU) status compared with institutions at lower status levels within vertically stratified systems. In a theory-based purposeful sampling, we studied the correlation of LRU-status and ASE in…

The emergence of agreements between private pathway colleges and public English-medium institutions represents a new development in internationalization that further challenges the public higher education landscape. While these institutional arrangements are controversial and often criticized, university senior administrators have been…

This article examines the power dynamics underpinning performance management at a selected South African university. It specifically employs Michel Foucault's (1977) ideas on Governmentality to interpret the envisioning of performance management in this context at the level of Policy. The study employed a qualitative research methodology to…

Universities recognize they have a civic responsibility to engage and enrich the community in which they reside. This study looks at a community engagement project undertaken at one university that was intended to address significant recreational needs within the community while also furthering academic initiatives. As part of the appeal to…

This article is an ethnography of a student protest against a Finnish university's plans to give up 25 percent of its campus buildings until 2030. The Finnish universities faced financial deficits primarily due to education cuts implemented by Finland's right-wing government between 2015 and 2019. To balance the budget, Tampere University proposed…

Although many studies indicate that mentoring is an effective approach to developing leadership skills, there is no empirical research that provides support for the idea that mentoring can be effective in the cultural context of the Saudi system of higher education. The present study elicited the views of twelve university administrators…