Numerous countries have implemented excellence initiatives designed to establish world-class universities, boost research productivity, build up staff capacity, and thereby reform doctoral education systems as part of this agenda. To date, the relationship between excellence-driven initiatives and leading universities' doctoral education…

This article employs critical discourse analysis of the Spear's Schools Index of 'the best private schools in the world', the first such global ranking of schools, to understand representations of elite education in globalised societies. It argues that the Index is a powerful text that exemplifies a global gaze -- an imagined perspective from…

This study aims to critically and systematically investigate the contemporary discourse within scholarship on world-class universities in different higher education context. It applies critical discourse analysis to review articles from some top higher education academic journals and books published between 2000 and 2019. Exploring the notion of…

Why have regimes and societies that would otherwise argue for their distinctiveness and sovereign decision-making caught 'ranking fever' in HE? Why are they willing to give up their sovereignty in the field of HE, and why do they accept the requirement of homogeneity to succeed in global university rankings? This paradox is explored in the case of…

This paper explores the impacts of research excellence evaluation entailed in global ranking exercises, a control strategy characteristic of new managerialism, on Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) academics. The enquiry combines the Critical Incidents Technique (CIT) and internet-based discourse analysis, drawing on mass media texts and…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) created the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a political actor in global education through a logic of governance by numbers (Grek, 2009). This article discusses how PISA has became a major showcase for the OECD as an assessment tool par excellence while also…

Academic publication is an international phenomenon, annually involving thousands of scholars, publishers, and institutions worldwide. Despite global authorship, influential publications operate primarily zones of geopolitical and economic power in North America and Western Europe. The primary objective of this paper is to examine the effects of…

This study examines the ways in which different research perspectives have tended to problematize global university rankings (GURs). An analytical framework is applied to help articulate four distinct research discourses that have been applied to GURs. The framework distinguishes research problems which are locally defined and "emergent" from…

The university prospectus is supposed to be a forceful and pioneering text in promoting and marketing higher education. The present research will deal with the disparities in the frequencies of first and second person pronouns in online prospectuses in cross-cultural linguistics from marketing point of view. The research question is to which…