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Public Policy Design and University Reform: Insights into Academic Change

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Reforming Higher Education

Part of the book series: Higher Education Dynamics ((HEDY,volume 41))

Abstract

The massification and increasing global competition of higher education pose major challenges to the design of effective national policies to steer universities. A generalization of contemporary studies of higher education is that significant changes within universities are being caused primarily by government policy reforms reflecting the “New Public Management” (NPM). NPM has been influenced by the “new institutional economics,” emphasizing transaction costs, property rights, and principal-agent relationships. Following this framework national reforms of higher education often seek to make the nature and distribution of information on academic behavior much more explicit. But the “new institutional economics” also perceives organizational change to be a result of the complex interactions among the regulations of the state, the forces of the market, and social norms. Therefore this chapter reviews the impact of contemporary government reforms, changing market forces, and alterations in the academic professions on the process of change within universities, exploring what we are learning about the role of information in the functioning of higher education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 917 Emory Drive, 27517, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    David D. Dill

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  1. David D. Dill
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Correspondence to David D. Dill .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre de Sociologie des Organisations Sciences Po & CNRS, Paris, France

    Christine Musselin

  2. CIPES and Faculty of Economics, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Pedro N. Teixeira

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Dill, D.D. (2014). Public Policy Design and University Reform: Insights into Academic Change. In: Musselin, C., Teixeira, P. (eds) Reforming Higher Education. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7028-7_2

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