General description

The course is offered at the Danube University Krems, Austria.

Learning outcomes

The students will understand the rationales and objectives of the major changes in the tertiary education and research system towards new public management, deregulation, autonomy and marketization and will be able to analyse these developments with theoretical approaches of New Public Management, institutional economics, governance theories and principal-agent theory. They will be able to gain insights from these approaches for practical problems of tertiary education and research management. The students will be able to analyse and deal with the tensions between New Public Management and academic culture. They will be able to recognize and deal productively with the potentials and limitations of management tools and economic thinking in a tertiary education and research context. They will be aware of the relationship between development of the system, governmental policy and institutional management.

Contents

- New Public Management as the starting point of managerial reforms in the academic sector
- Economic theories relevant for steering and management in the academic sector (institutional economics, principal-agent-theory, governance)
- Application and applicability of management tools to higher education, potentials and limits of managerialism
- Differences, as well as similarities of higher education with respect to other public sectors (e.g. health) and with respect to other stages of education (e.g. primary and secondary education)
- The use of market mechanisms in tertiary education and research institutions
- Case studies to illustrate the logic and limitations of New Public Management and the academic sector

Teaching methods

Teaching method	Contact	Online
Lectures	30 h	0 h
Independent work	95 h	0 h

Lectures
Case Studies
Literature review and Paper

Teaching language

English

Evaluation and evaluation criteria

Numeric 1-5.
Assessment methods: Literature review and paper (50%), class attendance and presentation (50%)

Study materials

    Recommended reading

• Barnett R (2003), Beyond All Reason, SRHE & Open University Press, Buckingham
• Clark B (1983), The Higher Education System: Academic organisation in crossnational perspective, University of California Press, Berkeley
• Clark BR (1998), Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organisational Pathways to Transformation, IAU Press/Pergamon, Oxford, New York, Tokyo
• Kerr C (2001), The Uses of the University, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
• Parsons T, Platt GM (1973), The American University, harvard University Press, Cambridge

Belongs to following study modules