Jan Kohoutek

University Complexity and Regional Development in the Periphery

Higher education institutions (HEIs) located in peripheral areas tend to struggle when it comes to attracting talented students, staff, and competitive funding, and they often lack in-house research capacity, which limits the developmental roles they can play in their host regions. This, in turn, generates a set of internal and external tensions that universities need to address in their quests for legitimate places in the increasingly competitive domestic and international higher education field, as well as in their immediate geographic surroundings. Building on earlier work in the field, combining seminal insights from organisational and higher education studies, this chapter provides a broad conceptual framework against which the case studies that form the bulk of this volume can be assessed and interpreted. In addition, the chapter provides a brief snapshot of the case regions and HEIs.

The roads of ‘excellence’ in Central and Eastern Europe

The aim of the article is to explore the impact of excellence as a powerful policy idea in the context of recent and contemporary developments in three selected Central and Eastern European countries, namely, the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine. More specifically, we explore how excellence as a ‘global script’ was translated by policy makers into local contexts with institutionalized practices. It shows that the translation of the idea of excellence involved the rise of a series of novel policy measures such as long-term strategic funding and the establishment of various pertinent schemes (e.g. flagship universities, centres of excellence). By doing so, the analysis – which is comparative by nature – focuses on exploring major differences and similarities in the conceptualization and implementation of the idea of excellence in the three local contexts of science.