Higher Education Quarterly 

About: Higher Education Quarterly is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Education policy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0951-5224. Over the lifetime, 1481 publications have been published receiving 24334 citations.

Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: The Emergence of "Third Space" Professionals in UK Higher Education.

Abstract: This paper adds to earlier reviews by the author of the changing roles and identities of contemporary professional staff in UK higher education (Whitchurch, 2004; 2006a; 2006b), and builds on a categorisation of professional staff identities as having bounded, cross-boundary, and unbounded characteristics (Whitchurch, 2008, forthcoming). Drawing on a study of fifty-four professional managers in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, it describes a further category of blended professionals, who have mixed backgrounds and portfolios, comprising elements of both professional and academic activity. The paper goes on to introduce the concept of third space as an emergent territory between academic and professional domains, which is colonised primarily by less bounded forms of professional. The implications of these developments for institutions and for individuals are considered, and some international comparisons drawn. Finally, it is suggested that third space working may be indicative of future trends in professional identities, which may increasingly coalesce with those of academic colleagues who undertake project- and managementoriented roles, so that new forms of third space professional are likely to continue to emerge.

Marketisation in Higher Education, Clark's Triangle and the Essential Ingredients of Markets

Abstract: While government intervention in the higher education market may be justified, it may come at the cost of lower consumer sovereignty and restricted producer autonomy. Through marketisation policy, students and higher education providers have more room to make their own trade-offs and interact more closely on the basis of reliable information. This article discusses eight conditions for a market and the extent to which these are met in Dutch higher education. It is argued that there is still a key role for the government to co-design framework conditions and facilitate interaction in a more demand-driven and liberalised higher education sector.

Undergraduate Non‐Completion: Developing an Explanatory Model

Abstract: This paper presents an explanatory model of undergraduate non-completion based, primarily, on the findings of a qualitative case study. Previous research in the field of non-completion is briefly reviewed. Such work is somewhat limited in its explanatory usefulness because it tends to focus on the student as the problem. The causes of non-completion can only be fully understood as the culmination of a complex social process of student-institution interaction which operates within the context of change in higher education. From this sociologically-informed theoretical framework an explanatory model has been devised that shows how the process of withdrawal for conventional students (i.e. students who enter HE through the traditional academic route) is markedly different from that for mature students. For conventional students the factors which appear to be of central importance are student preparedness, compatibility of choice, and time of exit. In contrast, mature students are often forced into non-completion because of external circumstances. Following a detailed description of our explanatory model of undergraduate non-completion, we present a number of strategies for intervention at both national and institutional levels and outline the implications for higher education policy.

Higher Education and Public Good

Abstract: Discussion about the purposes and benefits of higher education has been stymied by a particular construction of the relation between private and public benefits now dominant in policy circles and public debate. In this reading of higher education, the private and public benefits are rhetorically juxtaposed on a zero sum basis, while the individual benefits are defined as solely private and in economic terms. In liberal Western societies, in which limiting the role of the state is the central problem of politics, and individual freedoms tend to be positioned as outside both state and society, the collective conditions (‘social benefits’) provided by higher education are seen as exclusive of the individual benefits. These collective benefits are shadowy, undefined. Given that in liberal Western societies—especially English-speaking societies—understandings of the public good(s) created by higher education have become ideologically ‘frozen’, so that the public good can scarcely be identified, this suggests the need to look beyond liberal Western jurisdictions for fresh insights and conceptual frameworks. Notions of the role of government and of universities, the ‘social’, ‘community’, individual and collective, and public good, vary considerably between different traditions of higher education, for example the Nordic, German, Russian, Latin American and Chinese traditions as well as those in the United States and the Westminster countries. There is no good reason to treat the Anglo-American approach to public/private as the sum of all possibilities. By comparing the different approaches to ‘public good’ in higher education that have evolved across the world, generic elements can be identified, and a common language of public good developed. This also makes it possible to establish a broad-based notion of specifically global public goods.