Vassiliki Papatsiba

Making Higher Education More European through Student Mobility? Revisiting EU Initiatives in the Context of the Bologna Process.

This paper focuses on the analysis of student mobility in the EU as a means to stimulate convergence of diverse higher education systems. The argument is based on official texts and other texts of political communication of the European Commission. The following discussion is placed within the current context of the Bologna process and its aim to introduce system‐level changes towards convergence and harmonization that were not achieved through EU schemes of student mobility. Without disregarding the tension between popularity and limited impact of EU mobility programmes, I argue that promoting student mobility was not an act of a limited ambition, but on the contrary, an initiative aiming at the foundation of a system of higher education institutions at a European level.

Student Mobility in Europe: An Academic, Cultural and Mental Journey? Some Conceptual Reflections and Empirical Findings

The rise of the era of mobility, or at least of a rhetoric on the benefits of mobility for individuals, can closely be connected with the late modernity and optimist views of the selfs capacity to adapt to the challenges posed by globalisation. Mobility thus becomes an act expressing the individual appropriation of an “enlarged” action-space, supposed to become less constrained by social determinism. According to this assumption, mobility can also be seen as a form of elective biography (do-it-yourself biography) and would favour the emergence of a freer individual. Results of the analysis of 80 student accounts on experiences of Erasmus mobility within Europe have shown that student mobility reinforces the individual belief of being able to face changing environments, to monitor the self and to be monitored as a self, and to take control on ones life-path in a reflexive way, by accepting risks impelling new dynamics. From the students’ perspective, mobility experience seems to release impulses for personal growth and individual autonomy. Yet this advantage, however important it may be, often dominates the other outcomes of a mobility period, such as cultural and political awareness, intercultural competence and enlarged feeling of belonging. This result creates a tension with views and expectations for students to become “culture carriers” and vectors of Europeanisation, since the pro-social and societal dimensions of student mobility outcomes, as an experience supporting cultural awareness and understanding, tolerance and civic conscience were less systematically present at the end of the stay abroad.

European Higher Education Policy and the Formation of Entrepreneurial Students as Future European Citizens

In this article, the author argues that European education policies and rhetoric are imbued with orthodoxy of agency and models of empowered, entrepreneurial actors, striving to surpass the limits of national boundaries. Free circulation of citizens has progressively underpinned a new construction of ‘the European’, who is entrepreneurial, flexible and mobile. Ideals and practices of mobility have been premised on two competing agendas: one that focuses on economic imperatives, and the other that relates to a tradition of forming the citizenry. European Union higher education policy via student mobility programmes has been an effective vehicle for conveying images and models of the European citizen, untied from national bounds and with a thirst for new ventures and learning opportunities apt to convert into skills and capital. Arguably these policies, as rationalities with governing ends, aim to form identities and subjectivities. Although it can be argued that new facets of agency are made available to those who are willing to embrace entrepreneurial models, the question is whether and how these ‘talk back’ to a society and a polity in search of common good.

The Idea of Collaboration in the Academy: Its Epistemic and Social Potentials and Risks for Knowledge Generation.

This conceptual article explores the idea of academic collaboration from a perspective that places knowledge in the centre of the inquiry. It considers the extent to which collaboration maintains its intrinsic salience for the academy, despite the proliferation of external incentives and injunctions. As scientific and socio-economic progress has been associated with collaboration, this has come to be viewed as a carrier of scientific and social returns, thus worthy of policy and institutional support. At the same time, though, the value of collaboration has been questioned. What are the dangers and the potentials attributed to collaborative arrangements? Why is collaboration a well-embraced but also a contested notion? Despite various degrees of adherence to the idea of collaboration, a progressive shift from the lone scholar to collaborative formations can be traced, making collaborations an embedded feature of the changing face of higher education and research. Although the role of research funding and institutional governance in this development is undisputed, the argument put forth here is that knowledge-related rationales continue to underpin collaborative pursuits with a research component, but that often these influences tend to remain underemphasised and unexplored.

Conceptions and expectations of research collaboration in the European social sciences:Research policies, institutional contexts and the autonomy of the scientific field

This paper investigates the interactions between policy drivers and academic practice in international research collaboration. It draws on the case of the Open Research Area (ORA), a funding scheme in the social sciences across four national research agencies, seeking to boost collaboration by supporting “integrated” projects. The paper discusses the scheme’s governance and its place within the European policy space before turning to awarded researchers’ perceptions of its originality and impact on their project’s emergence and development. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, we analyse the scheme’s capacity to challenge researchers’ habitual collaborative practice as well as the hierarchical foundations of the social science field. We relate the discourses of researchers, located in France, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, to such structural dimensions of the academic profession as, disciplinary cultures, institutional environments and national performance management of research careers. The paper argues that the ORA introduced novel mechanisms of power sharing and answerability in social sciences research capable of unsettling the autonomy of the scientific field. This analysis offers a new perspective on the often unquestioned superiority of the model of international collaboration induced by schemes such as the ORA.

Constructing a national higher education brand for the UK: positional competition and promised capitals

This article examines national branding of UK higher education, a strategic intent and action to collectively brand UK higher education with the aim to attract prospective international students, using a Bourdieusian approach to understanding promises of capitals. We trace its development between 1999 and 2014 through a sociological study, one of the first of its kind, from the ‘Education UK’ and subsumed under the broader ‘Britain is GREAT’ campaign of the Coalition Government. The findings reveal how a national higher education brand is construed by connecting particular representations of the nation with those of prospective international students and the higher education sector, which combine in the brand with promises of capitals to convert into positional advantage in a competitive environment. The conceptual framework proposed here seeks to connect national higher education branding to the concept of the competitive state, branded as a nation and committed to the knowledge economy.

Higher Education in Networked Knowledge Societies

This conceptual chapter articulates an analytical synthesis: Networked Knowledge Society. This synthesis incorporates the role of knowledge, information and communication technology (ICT) and networks in order to better understand the dynamic nature of contemporary societies. It also conceptualises the relationships between contemporary societies and higher education. A traditional approach to examining the relationships between higher education and society is to consider this from the societal point of departure to interpret or explain change in higher education. Our approach, by contrast, is relational with respect to the dynamic role of higher education in societies and the ways in which higher education both transforms – and is transformed by – changing societies. We propose to briefly concentrate more generally on the nature of contemporary social order. We then advance the analytical synthesis Networked Knowledge Society, which both integrates a view of knowledge, ICT, and networks as the most important social phenomena in contemporary societies and that also illuminates the key relationships necessary to better understand twenty-first century societies and higher education.

Diversity of Higher Education Institutions in Networked Knowledge Societies: A Comparative Examination

Within and across many expanded and diversified higher education systems, the recognition and understanding of differences between institutions becomes especially challenging. Forms of both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ differentiation frequently exist alongside each other, though with increasing attention given to the former. Institutional boundaries become more porous within intra-sector and cross-sector collaborations, as networks become increasingly important in both. Do the ways in which different kinds of higher education institutions interact within networks, as well as the nature of those networks, differ? To what extent do network configurations become platforms for distinct knowledge trajectories to develop? It is possible to detect trends of both convergence and differentiation in these developments within and across higher education systems, reflecting global, national, regional and local influences? In order to capture these trends empirically, the CINHEKS research team developed and applied a form of comparative grid analysis with which to construct profiles of 28 higher education institutions drawn from five countries: Finland, Germany, Portugal, the UK and the USA. Based largely on public information from institutional websites, profile grids were constructed to capture institutional characteristics in terms of context/mission, knowledge organisation, knowledge production, knowledge transmission and knowledge transfer. Within each grid, institutions were compared in respect of dimensions such as local/global, teaching/research, disciplinary/inter-disciplinary, considerable or little networking, inter-sectoral/cross-sectoral orientation, intellectual/entrepreneurial rationales, collaborative/individual approaches etc. The profiles revealed most institutions to be explicitly active in partnerships and networks. Most were active in both intra-sector and cross-sector partnerships. Patterns of difference and convergence emerged though, with the five national systems differentially located across the grids. Two key dimensions reflecting the differences were those of ‘domain’ – intra-sector or cross sector networking – and ‘mission’ – knowledge as a ‘private’ or a ‘public’ good.

Écrire pour une commande administrative : le destinataire, son rôle et son influence sur l’écriture d’une expérience étudiante

Cet article presente une etude de cas qui porte sur la question de production d’ecrits personnels a des fins administratives et institutionnelles. Il s’agit d’ecrire un rapport personnel sur une experience de formation, financee par des fonds publics ou collectifs. Le materiau de l’enquete est constitue par une serie de 80 rapports rediges par des etudiants francais ayant beneficie d’une bourse regionale et du programme de mobilite etudiante Erasmus. Dans ces textes, et en l’absence d’un destinataire precis, le scripteur s’engage a des degres variables. Des positions d’implication ou de distanciation ont ete identifiees et ont conduit a la constitution de deux sous-corpus representant la polarite enonciative du discours. Selon ces positions, les figures du destinataire choisi varient. Elles sont des lieux du discours qui devoilent des rapports que le scripteur a etablis a l’element de l’etranger et dans lesquels des conceptions universalistes ou relativistes sont en oeuvre. La commande administrative, en introduisant un lecteur appartenant a la sphere du culturellement familier, incite a une elaboration discursive de l’experience de l’etranger qui accroit les risques de jugements ethnocentriques et facilite l’annulation de l’alterite, dont la confrontation est pourtant l’enjeu majeur de ce type de formation.