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Backstage KU Leuven
The concept “back stage” was already used many years before it got a place in sociology and other social sciences. It was used to refer at the part of the theatre behind the stage. Erving Goffman uses this concept to describe the social environment where the actors, after having left the visible and audible situation of a communication situation, act freely from the standards determining this communication situation. What Goffman presented as a ...
Understanding higher education system reform: Practices, patterns and pathways KU Leuven
The previous twelve case studies have analysed and discussed the way the higher education systems positioned themselves over the years, in relation to the stipulated Bologna goals. Light has been shed on the reform path, on the rationale behind the reform, and on the battle between triggering and impeding forces. In this concluding chapter we bring together what can be witnessed from those case studies, we highlight divergences and convergences, ...
Higher education system reform in Flanders KU Leuven
The most recent system reform in Flanders, which will be the focus of this chapter, was induced by the Bologna Process. As one of the signatories of the Bologna Declaration, Flanders started a reform that would transform the higher education system in many aspects. Again this was embodied in new legislation, starting in 2003 with the act on the structure of higher education that introduced the Bachelor- Master structure, and followed-up by acts ...
An introduction to the study of higher education policy reforms KU Leuven
The book offers a description and an analysis of HE policy reforms on the system level of 12 European Higher Education Systems and takes as its starting point the Bologna Process that was initiated in 1999, as this process has been an important impetus for HE reform in many European HE systems. In this introduction we outline the research questions that delineate the contours of the analysis in each country chapter. These research questions are, ...
Merger of university colleges in Flanders (Belgium) KU Leuven
In the course of last 25 years, the sector of the university colleges in Flanders has seen a significant number of mergers. The result of these mergers has been that the number of university colleges in Flanders has dropped from 164 (in 1994) to 13 (in 2018), and that the profile of the course programmes they offer has become focused on vocational higher education. We discern three separate waves of mergers. First, in the period from 1995 to ...
Higher education for Public Value: taking the debate beyond New Public Management KU Leuven
Many higher education (HE) system reforms in the past decades have been built on the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM). However, these reforms have not allowed HE to fully take its value for society into account. In recent years a growing call can be heard to orient the HE sector towards more collaboration, a focus on a larger set of socio-economic objectives instead of on performance alone, less pressure, more trust and legitimacy. In ...
The state of the art of Higher Education Research on Flanders. KU Leuven
Higher education systems of small(er) countries may be less attractive to investigate, and it is likely that only a small indigenous research community is interested in and capable of researching such small systems. In this chapter, we map which studies have been carried out at the meso- and macro-levels of the Flemish higher education system since the early 2000s. It allows us to discover gaps in our understanding of that particular system. We ...
Higher education research: looking beyond New Public Management KU Leuven
This chapter discusses the implications of New Public Management (NPM) and of alternative theories on the higher education sector. Three clusters of alternative concepts and theories are identified, positioned in relation to NPM, and discussed. The chapter concludes that the different theoretical approaches: (1) cannot always be distinguished easily, (2) entail a risk of normativity due to the position of higher education in society, and (3) ...