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The benefits of student-faculty interactions are substantial in fostering undergraduate students' social and intellectual growth throughout their academic pathways. In particular, out-of-class interactions offer several opportunities for students to engage meaningfully with faculty members in the campus environment. This study employs a qualitative approach to investigate how students interact with faculty outside the classroom and how students interpret faculty's accessibility for out-of-class interactions. It also seeks to understand the challenges faced by students during these encounters. The findings of this study indicate that students seek out faculty outside the classroom for several reasons, but most of all for grade-related issues. While some students experienced a positive perception of faculty behaviour during informal contacts, the issue of infrequent interactions was emphasized as one of the challenges. The study indicates a variety of situations causing hesitancy and preventing students from seeking help outside the classroom. The ability to persist and complete a degree with success depends on many factors within an academic context. Psychologists and educators have provided many theories and pedagogical approaches to improve our understanding of how students learn. However, my interest in the field of teaching and learning in higher education goes beyond the understanding of how pedagogical approaches can improve a student's learning and academic outcomes. As a sociologist, we often provide an explanation of how social categories affect individuals in a social context. My contribution through this research is to investigate the role of social aspects of the student experience in higher education, in particular the contribution of the major socializing agents on campus (interactions with faculty members). In this study, I tried to contribute to the understanding of these interactions in a challenged context where students were less likely to seek faculty beyond the classroom.

Internationalisation of the curriculum has been the subject of various debates in recent years in higher education institutions. In particular, the need to incorporate local knowledge systems when internationalising the curriculum continues to be a major challenge in African universities. This study explores faculty members' experiences inherent in the internationalisation of the curriculum at one Mozambican university. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with eleven faculty members, two research questions were investigated: (1) How do faculty members understand the internationalisation of the curriculum in their university? (2) How are local knowledge systems embedded in the internationalisation of the university curriculum? The findings revealed that the internationalisation of the curriculum is mainly understood in terms of developing intercultural knowledge, skills and values; mobility of students, teachers and academic programmes; and teaching international students and languages. Some practices suggest opportunities for a more decolonised approach in the internationalisation of the university curriculum, such as the integration of local languages and the practice of ethnoscience, with the main focus on ethnomathematics.

This paper explores the complex mix of rationales behind major change initiatives in the Swedish higher education sector. In three case studies, the paper investigates how changes are motivated, communicated and made sense of by higher education institutions. The cases show that the external drivers, related to the need for quality improvement, resource accumulation and reputation-building, are highlighted in the official communication by the institutional management. Interviews with various internal and external stakeholders reveal additional, internal rationales such as economic rationalization opportunities and the personal motives of individuals. It is argued that the notion of legitimacy is fundamental to the understanding of this mix of rationales. References to the state and the EU are frequent and so are similar comparable universities and the need to adapt to globally circulated ideas. Furthermore, administrative rationales are not enough to make a change process legitimate in these cases. A grander, structural rationale related to quality and reputation is also perceived to be required.

The volume examines ongoing dynamics within the organizational fields of health care and higher education, as seen from an institutional theory perspective. To date, few studies have attempted to compare developments across these two critical societal sectors and actors.

Classifications of higher education institutions into categories that are more or less clearly differentiated through prestige and status are legion in the world of higher education. The notion of parallel categories with comparable statuses, such as those of different types of universities, is however much less well understood. This paper investigates how universities navigate between such alternative categories. We examine boundary work and institutional change involving Swedish higher education institutions with significant activity in engineering sciences in order to analyse how actors relate to ideas regarding the category ‘technical university’ as an ideal potentially distinct from that of the broad, comprehensive university. Analysis of two cases in the second half of the twentieth century shows that for engineering faculty, a focused technical university was an attractive alternative to the institutional model of the broad university. In contrast, analysis of two twenty-first-century cases suggests that aspirations to be recognised as a technical university were largely driven by adaption to external stakeholders’ interests. We discuss these findings in light of the emergence of the global hegemonic category ‘research university’. We also suggest that the organisational identity of a HEI may be tied to ideas about an organisational category through imprinting and path dependency. Moreover, we propose that changes over time in how categories are perceived may serve as an impetus to organisational change.

This study aims to contribute to the understanding of knowledge interactions, particularly personnel mobility, between university and industry. More specifically, this paper studies the appointment of senior industry practitioners as part-time visiting professors at universities, in the role of adjunct professors. The paper relies on qualitative data, documents and 29 interviews, all from two Swedish universities. The findings highlight a distinction between the approaches from top and local management. Top university management has institutionalised an established practice of appointing adjunct professors, but the appointments still rely on personal networks at local level. The paper also shows that benefits generally applied to university–industry engagement, such as learning, access to in-kind resources and access to funding, are applicable. Furthermore, two additional perceived benefits come to the fore. Firstly, adjunct professors are appointed to increase the visibility of the university, and secondly, they undertake an essential part of the workload in some environments.

In this article, we study how meritocratic systems and gender equality concerns are negotiated across different organisational spaces in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Based on a case study of the organising of a tenure track system in a Swedish university, we suggest that the intersection of meritocratic processes and gender equality work can be analysed as a set of negotiated orders in these spaces. This fragmentation may imply problems for advancing gender equality agendas in relation to established notions of meritocracy but may also imply opportunities for change as existing organisational spaces can be reconstructed or new ones created. Our notions of fragmentation and negotiated orders thereby suggest that the current situation is both stable and legitimate and that re-negotiations need to involve reconstructions of the various spaces and not only interventions into them.

This article analyses how the future has been discussed in Swedish higher education and research policy, providing an overview of public inquiries during the period 1970-2020. Expanding on the conceptual framework of German historian Reinhart Koselleck, the article approaches discourses on the future through the analytical lens of sociology of expectations. The findings demonstrate that all inquiries that attempt to advance arguments for policy change address the future-with temporal perspectives usually limited to the coming 15-20 years-whereby the future is conceptualised as an unknown and complex 'knowledge society', characterised by acceleration, high demands and fierce competition. A number of inquiries discuss the future development based on empirical data like shrinking age cohorts among potential students, while others describe threats and challenges based on needs for creating a sense of urgency. Inter- and multidisciplinarity, with respect to such future needs in both research and education, is consequently a key area of discussion throughout the period in question. Several other themes emerge as prevalent, including technological change and digitalisation as well as broader issues of how to organise the curriculum and lifelong learning. The historical analysis presented in this article is crucial for ongoing university debates, as it is demonstrated that temporal dynamics and future imaginaries have been highly formative for the development of Swedish higher education and research. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

This paper investigates the accountability mechanisms introduced in the universities in the Nordic countries by building on a typology of accountability types. By utilising survey data, it analyses how academics experience the changes in accountability mechanisms and how they perceive the impact of these changes on their performance. The analysis shows that especially political/bureaucratic and managerial accountability demands have been strengthened. This development has fostered debates on how to measure academic performance. Some academics, more in Denmark than in the other countries, have experienced the development as a sign of mistrust.

The aim of this study is to explore the functions that professional networks could have as sense givers during the process in which professional support staff at higher education institutions make sense of their roles. The empirical data comprise interviews with three categories of support staff at three technical universities in Sweden and a review of home pages and other written sources from ten, both Swedish and international, professional networks. One conclusion is that the networks can serve as sense givers for the professional support staff related either to the professional task or to the relational characteristics. However, these functions are not straightforward. The support staff in focus comprise a new category, with no ready-made scripts for their roles. Given that membership in these networks is voluntary, the networks may face challenges in their functions as sense givers. The networks thus opt for other ways of attracting members. This voluntariness in combination with a plasticity in the roles of the support staff suggests that the functions of professional networks not only will vary, but might also be limited as sense givers in the sense making process of professional support staff at higher education institutions (HEIs).