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The impact of new public management instruments on PhD education

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Abstract

New public governance emphasises less state, more market and more hierarchy as the cornerstones for effective steering of higher education institutions. Based on an explorative analysis of qualitative and quantitative data of fourteen German and European economics departments, we investigate the steering effects of six new public management instruments in the years 2001 and 2002 on subsequent placement success of PhD graduates. Using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to analyse the data, our results deliver strong support for the positive effects of competition for resources and the varying effects of hierarchy on PhD education. Governance of successful departments is characterised by two solutions: transparency over academic achievements as one single success factor in each solution or a combination of additional funding based on national competitive performance with either no public policy regulations for departments or no university regulations for departments. Governance of unsuccessful departments is characterised by one solution: university regulations for departments or a combination of no additional funding based on national competitive performance and no transparency over academic achievements. Our results strengthen the strong impact of selected competitive mechanisms as an effective governance instrument and the partially detrimental effects of state regulations. University regulations turn out to be successful if they increase transparency over academic achievements by faculty members. Success is unlikely if those rules intervene into PhD education.

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Notes

  1. He later extended the framework to ‘hierarchy’ as a fourth dimension (Clark 1998).

  2. We do not analyse the dimensions “stakeholder guidance” and “academic self-governance” because, in contrast to findings by Henkel (2000) and Leisyte (2007), nobody in our sample of interviewees indicated any external stakeholder or any reduction of academic self-governance, thus leaving us with no variance in these two dimensions.

  3. A majority of German states, for example, established a regime of quasi-competitive elements where they first forced university departments to cut their basic resources with the perspective to establish a kind of research foundation which will redistribute these savings according to a prospective reward system (Leszczensky and Orr 2004).

  4. Accreditation in the English Research Assessment Exercise took place in 2001 and 2008, for example.

  5. According to Combes and Linnemers (2003) weighted ranking of publications, the economics department in Toulouse (France), which would operate under a suboptimal governance regime, is ranked 1st and the London School of Economics (Great Britain), operating in a governance regime very close to “perfect” NPM criteria, is ranked 2nd for publications in Europe.

  6. In order not to confuse the basic assumptions of statistical methods with csQCA, we use the term “condition” instead of “independent variable”.

  7. Amir and Knauff (2008) point out the high correlation between placement success of PhD graduates and the academic level of the departments they graduated from.

  8. The figures match calculations of post-doc positions in several countries in the EU. In France and The Netherlands, around 29% of all PhD graduates obtain a job in academia. In Great Britain, about 27% of all PhD graduates pursue a job in universities (STRATA-ETAN 2002, pp. 84–86). In Germany, only little data exists regarding post-doc positions. But, as Enders and Bornmann (2001) have shown, around 29% of PhD graduates in biology and mathematics find a job in academia.

  9. Several statements were not made in English, which made the authors translate them in order to come as closely as possible to the original statements.

  10. We calculate the unique coverage scores with overlapping cases, but it is also possible to come to the same conclusion by subtracting the percentage of the raw coverage score of the opposite configuration from the total coverage, 100% (e.g. 100–57% = 43%). The latter procedure only works for two configurations.

  11. According to Ragin (2006), a coverage score of 0.326 is “substantial”, at least for fuzzy sets.

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Acknowledgments

Study was financially supported by the German Research Foundation “Internationale Wettbewerbs- und Innovationsfähigkeit von Universitäten und Forschungsorganisationen – Neue Governanceformen (FOR 517)”. Project title: “Die Förderung wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses: ein (lokales) Kollektivgut?” We would like to thank Martin Schneider, Lasse Cronqvist, Gregory Jackson, Jürgen Enders, Christine Musselin with her Centre de Sociologie des Organisations and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme as well as two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of the paper.

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  1. Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the EU (IAAEG), University of Trier, 54296, Trier, Germany

    Peter Schneider & Dieter Sadowski

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Schneider, P., Sadowski, D. The impact of new public management instruments on PhD education. High Educ 59, 543–565 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9264-3

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