In this paper we examine the role which distance, in a variety of forms, can play in the reproduction, intensification or reduction of educational inequality in different types of school systems in different countries. This is a very broad issue, and in the paper we examine the ways in which distance to school has emerged as an important factor in…

Robert Bostrom has not only left a listening legacy, but he was also a pioneer in the larger discipline of communication. Bostrom was one of the first scholars to focus on the dynamics of interpersonal contexts, thereby directly contributing to the transition of our field from "speech" to "communication." Early on he recognized the importance of…

For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic…

This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for studying power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in service of dominant norms in global higher education. (Contains 1 table and 1…

For the author, the key analytic question about a popular song is not "What does it mean?" or "What hidden or coded meaning does it express?" but "What does its popularity tell us about the cultural moment when it resonated with its public?" How did the song "create its audience," so to speak? Obviously, a 1973 hit song, if it could time-travel,…

Leadership profile pages on organizational websites have become staged opportunities for impression management. This research uses content analysis to examine the strategies of assertive impression management used to construct the leadership Web presence of the 70 presidents of national public universities, as identified in the "US News and…

From the moment children say "mine!" by two years of age, objects of possession change progressively from being experienced as primarily unalienable property (i.e., something that is absolute or nonnegotiable), to being alienable (i.e., something that is negotiable in reciprocal exchanges). As possession begins to be experienced as alienable, the…

Mill may be said either to have written rather little on education or to have written a very great deal. He himself distinguished between a "narrow" and a "wider" sense of education, the former limited to what happens in formal educational settings, the latter embracing all the influences that make us who and what we are. He wrote rather little on…

Borje Holmberg is Swedish and has been active in distance education as a theorist and practitioner for more than fifty years. He is the former president of the Wilhelm-Buchner Hochschule, a distance teaching university in Germany. Here, Holmberg is interviewed by William C. Diehl, the Interviews Editor for "The American Journal of Distance…

As a component of university international education programming, international volunteerism and global community engagement by university students and faculty are on the rise. While the benefits to student learning related to this kind of programming have been well researched, community impact is rarely assessed. This article considers the…

Mixed data analysis from 14 national research universities in Ukraine provides insights into the challenges faced by higher education reformers, as they push academic science to a higher position in the emerging knowledge economy, but are halted by deeply entrenched economic and political legacies. This paper examines competing forces that…

This essay looks at the influence of ranking and incentive systems on decisions higher education institutions are making with respect to research and academic publishing. It describes and analyses how institutions within the South African higher education system have navigated their way through the contradictory forces confronting them.…

In their study about the Dr. Fox lecture, Naftulin, Ware, and Donnelly (1973) claimed that an expressive speaker who delivered an attractive lecture devoid of any content could seduce students into believing that they had learned something significant. Over the decades, the study has been (and still is) cited hundreds of times and used by…

In an era of increasing global competition in education related markets, many higher education institutions in the United States have come to realize the need to market better for international students. Community colleges are no exception and have become increasingly active in recruiting international students using education agents. Using…

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education (HE) and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu's framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two…