Comparative and International Higher Education (CIHE) Thematic Issue

Comparative and International Higher Education is the official newsletter of the Comparative and Inter-national Education Society’s (CIES) Higher Education Special Interest Group (HESIG), which was created in 2008. HESIG serves as a networking hub for promoting scholarship opportunities, critical dialogue, and linking professionals and academics to the international aspects of higher education. Accordingly, HESIG will serve as a professional forum supporting development, analysis, and dissemination of theory-, policy-, and practice-related issues that influence higher education. 

Call for Articles

Moving beyond Burton Clark’s Triangle: Thinking about Coordination of Higher Education in the Context of Globalization

Burton Clark has provided an influential model for analysis of governance and authority relations in higher education. In its breadth and scope, it represented one of the earliest attempts to merge sociological and political-theoretical approaches to thinking about higher education authority relations. Now, when considered in light of such developments that have spurred the emergence of a robust “transformation” in higher education and encompassed significant changes in the role of the state and is analyzed through the lenses of contemporary phenomena such as privatization, globalization, marketization, and ongoing debates over access and quality, Clark’s triangle begins to appear problematically static. It seems clear that Clark’s model may not adequately capture the evolving dynamics contributing to contemporary authority relations, considering the ways in which forces now commingle and jostle against one another, sometimes cooperating and sometimes not. While the model is universally admired as a foundational work that has given crucial insight into how an academic system can be ordered, it relies perhaps too heavily on a comparative function that does not offer much analytical insight.

Today, in an increasingly globalized world (in which some detect the emergence of a global market for higher education), comparative work is perhaps not as valued for its ability to descriptively evaluate different systems along some prescribed set of dimensions. Rather, it seems possible that comparative analysis can offer greater insights when focused on how forces of globalization apply uniform pressures across all postsecondary sectors, and the way in which systemic behaviors increasingly converge towards common responses. This issue of Comparative and International Higher Education (CIHE, ISSN 2151-0393, eISSN 2151-0407) seeks to advance scholarship on changes in the role of the state to the evolving relationship between the state and the higher education sector, or the way in which they are located in a constant state of contest and negotiation. We are particularly interested in articles using social-movements theory and concepts, case studies of movements that operate at the transnational level, case studies of movements that operate in countries other than the dominant Western societies, for instance, the US, UK, and Canada. Interested contributors are invited to submit an editable, electronic version of an original manuscript (no more than 2,500 words in length in Word Office) that has not been published and is not under consideration elsewhere. CIHE follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 16^th Edition B (a link to The Chicago Manual of Style online website can be found at: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/contents.html). Specific reference examples can be found in published articles available at: http://higheredsig.org/publications. Due to a partnership between CIHE and University World News (UWN), the articles published in CIHE could have the chance to be republished in UWN.

All submissions should be sent directly to the thematic issue editors Qiang Zha ([email protected]) and Jorge Enrique Delgado ([email protected]). THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS DECEMBER 19, 2014.