Assessing Higher Education Governance Reforms Impact on System and University Performance: Theoretical and Practical Contributions

Abstract

The panel aims to explore whether and how governance reforms in the field of higher education, and their organizational translation and implementation, affected the performance of higher education systems and institutions, as well as what this implies for policy-makers and higher education theory. Many higher education systems have undergone structural changes in their governance arrangements over the last decades (Paradeise et al. 2009; Musselin, and Teixeira 2014) to enhance the performance, effectiveness, and efficiency (Capano and Pritoni 2018) of higher education system as a whole as well as those of constituent institutions. Insofar, studies have addressed the changes in systemic governance regimes (e.g. set of adopted policy tools, interest alignments and prevailing shared ideas), national policy dynamics (process through which governance regimes are designed over time), and institutional responses (organizational changes triggered by the reforms), by stressing different understandings of global templates and governance-related policy. Recently, studies in the field have emphasized that these global governance templates have been translated and adapted in hybrid and heterogeneous ways by national (and regional) policy designers (Gornitzka and Maassen 2000; Jungblut and Vukasovic, 2013; Capano and Pritoni 2018; Donina and Hasanefendic 2018) as well as by individual higher education institutions (Paradeise and Thoenig 2013; Bleiklie, Enders and Lepori 2017; Donina and Hasanefendic 2018) due to national, sector, and organizational filters (Bleiklie, Enders and Lepori 2017). Nevertheless, there is still inconsistent empirical evidence assessing the impact of higher education governance reforms on system and university performance. Similarly, there is a void in understanding what these empirical findings mean and how they contribute to higher education theory. By stimulating discussions and comparisons across national and cross-national case studies, the goal of this panel is to shed light on the relationship between national public policy, higher education governance reforms, local organizational adaptations, and the multi-level, multi-faceted, and multi-dimensional concept of performance.