Can a Knowledge Sanctuary also be an Economic Engine? The Marketization of Higher Education as Institutional Boundary Work

Universities, particularly research‐intensive ones, have responded to a variety of external and internal influences by retooling their missions, culture, and organizational structures to generate revenue from market opportunities. This has resulted in the marketization of higher education: organizational practices that blur the boundary between knowledge‐driven and profit‐driven institutions. This blurring has spurred debates and uncertainties over the scope and boundaries of the 21st century university. We argue that these debates spring from institutional boundary work at the intersection of the three main missions of the contemporary academy: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. These missions can sometimes create areas of synergy, but also tensions that are particularly acute where market logics and business‐oriented practices contradict academic values. Within knowledge production, a key dilemma is the extent to which knowledge advancement should aim for transcendence versus revenue generation. Within student learning, the dilemma involves incommensurability between the ideals of democratic citizenship and demonstrable return on investment. Within the social charter mission, the dilemma is over whether the university can serve the public welfare while also facilitating the growth of local and national economies.     

Problems with Needs—Where Theory Meets Practice

During the last ten years there has been an increase in the number of attempts to include the assessment of 'needs' of people with mental handicaps. There has been a shift away from previous tendencies to make statements and arrange services in terms of 'problems', 'deficits' and 'defects'; instead individual practitioners have begun to develop 'needs assessments' in order to identify services for clients by borrowing ideas from other fields. These developments have been haphazard and have not been based upon a logical or formal theory. Instead, individuals and agencies have used the term to convey different ideas with dissimilar implications for people with mental handicaps. A review of the literature on 'needs assessment' reveals a confusing and poorly-defined concept with which to plan or implement services. Suggestions are offered to clarify thinking and improve mutual understanding for a possible way forward. Some practical recommendations are identified to assist development of services for people with mental handicap.     

Constructing women's psychological health in anti-abortion rhetoric

This paper considers the ways in which anti-abortion activists construct women's psychological experience of abortion and explores the rhetorical significance of this discourse in advancing the anti-abortion project. In particular we examine how the psychological concept of 'denial' contained in the (proposed) diagnostic category of 'Post-Abortion Syndrome' allows anti-abortionists to 'psychologise' and therefore undermine alternative constructions of the experience of abortion. Further, we explore how this construction of women's experience allows particular constructions of the foetus (ie, 'unborn child') to be advanced (and naturalised) without reference to overtly political argumentation. The significance of this development of the abortion debate and its implications for the dynamics of political mobilisation are discussed.     

Accountability in action?: the case of a database purchasing decision 1

The increasing prevalence of audit in university settings has raised concerns about the potentially adverse effects of invasive measures of performance upon the conduct of research and generation of knowledge. What sustains the current commitment to audit? It is argued that in order to address this question we need to understand how and to what extent notions of accountability are played out in practice. This is illustrated through the analysis of materials from an ethnographic study of ‘good management practice’ in the deployment of technologies in university settings. The paper examines the ways in which ideas of accountability — involving considerations such as ‘value for money’— inform the practical processes of deciding about the purchase of a new database technology.     

The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users; hence, they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA; i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the “golden” road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the “green” road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). Only 5% of journals are gold, but over 90% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10–20% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as the United Kingdom and the United States have recently recommended, and universities need to implement that mandate.     

An Empirical Evaluation of Conflict in the Franchise System

This paper articulates the theoretical rationale for conflict in franchising, operationalizes conflict through the measurement of franchisee satisfaction and labels empirically supported stratified satisfaction levels. Two propositions are advanced in relation to the drivers of conflict in franchise systems. The first proposition is underpinned by relational exchange theory, which postulates that franchisee–franchisor goal congruence is important to the fulfilment of the alliance efficiencies which motivate inter-organizational forms. Cooperation, communication, coordination and commitment, as perceived by the franchisees, are used in the context of a survey instrument to operationalize goal congruence.
The second proposition involves franchisor-provided services. Transaction-cost analysis suggests that long-term contractual relationships must be flexibly interpreted and governed if the relationship is to be maintained over a series of transactions. We propose that the transactional intersection of the franchise system is in franchisor-provided services. The perceived importance and subsequent adequacy of delivery of these services established a tolerance zone within which transactions support and/or enhance the relationship between the franchisor and the franchisee.
The empirical objectives of the study are accomplished utilizing a questionnaire sent to nine franchise systems, to which 621 franchisees responded. Three clear clusters of franchisee conflict emerged in near equal proportions. The propositions are supported and illustrated empirically and in CHAID tree diagram form.     

Industrial injuries in British manufacturing industry

This paper begitis by cotisidering the effects of the business cycle upon the incidence of industrial accidents in British manufacturing industries, arguing that a generalized discussion of such cycles obscures important aspects of the political economy within individual cycles. In particular, the strength of the labour movement is related to the incidence of accidents at work. Since the trade unions are only one part of the tripartite system of the legal regulation of safety in British manufacturing industries, the paper goes on to consider the effects of recent material and ideological initiatives on the part of both the government and employers upon the ability of the Health and Safety Executive in general and the Factory Inspectorate in particular, to fulfil their role in this tripartite system of self-regulation. As a result of weakened trade unions and emasculated regulatory agencies, it is argued that there has been a virtual demise of this system of self-regulation. While the analysis outlined does not suggest that this demise is causal of the decline in safety performance across much of British manufacturing industry in the present decade, the paper does argue that the role of the law and its (non) implementation is not an insignificant factor in explaining this decline.     

Negative affectivity and gender as moderators of the relationship between work-related stressors and depressed mood at work

The present study provided further evidence on the role of negative affectivity (NA) and gender as moderators of stressor-strain relations. Based on theoretical and empirical research, it was hypothesized that the moderating effects of NA would moderate the relationship between stressors (role ambiguity, workload, role conflict and interpersonal conflict) and work-related depression. Questionnaires were returned form 442 subjects of whom 74% were recruited from external degree courses and the rest were full-time employees. Results revealed significant three-way interactions for two of the four stressors (workload and role ambiguity) in predicting work-related depression. NA moderated the relationship between these stressors and work-related depression for females but not for males. These effects were modest, however. No significant interactions were found for role conflict and interpersonal conflict. The implications of these results are discssed.