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Managed Learning Environments (MLE) in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), as a concept, are relatively new to the arena of Higher Education; nevertheless over 90% of institutions in the Higher and Further Education sector have been engaged in some kind of MLE development activity (University of Brighton, 2005). However, this increased use of learning technology has not produced a concomitant rise in appropriate forms of evaluation (Tricker et al., 2001; Bullock & Ory, 2000). There are no universally recognisable frameworks for evaluating MLEs in HEIs currently discussed within the literature. A review of the literature highlighted the importance of stakeholder involvements in the evaluation process. It was found that an appropriate framework for evaluation needs to be able to: capture the locally situated version of an MLE; cope with the complexity of a system with an unspecified number of variables; identify and encompass stakeholder needs; and understand why certain phenomena has been observed. Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) was considered to be an appropriate framework to cope with all these issues. It uses systems thinking as its theoretical base and one of the major strengths, from the point of view of this research, is its ability to cope explicitly with differing stakeholder views via the concept of Weltanschauung - the ‘world-view’ of different social actors (Rose & Haynes, 1999). This longitudinal study was conducted using a dual-cycle (McKay & Marshall, 2001) Action Research approach. The host university was Manchester Metropolitan University who, at the start of this research project, began a phased implementation of an MLE. An evaluation model (Rose & Haynes, 1999) was used which was adjusted to allow for a stakeholder analysis to drive the evaluation criteria. This study found SSM fulfilled the requirements of evaluation and so was considered a suitable approach. The study did however conclude that by contextualising SSM to the evaluation requirements of an MLE in a UK HEI, the measures of performance suggested by SSM may need to be adjusted. Four out of the five measures of performance were found to adequately provide the evaluation criteria. Ethicality was the only measure of performance found to not be considered as an explicit measure of the information system under study. Identification of stakeholders and encompassing their needs within evaluations were seen as key. This study found that a stakeholder classification framework, offered by Farbey et al. (1993), proved suitable in identifying relevant stakeholders to an MLE. It established that the framework facilitated a holistic representation of the key stakeholders and their views on key metrics on which to evaluate the MLE in situ. This research was also interested in the process of evaluation. The processes utilised were adapted and adjusted over time and a number of key elements are proposed in order to gain efficiencies in resource requirements throughout the evaluation process.

There is a paucity of efficiency studies on the higher education sector in Britain. Only a small subset of those utilise stochastic frontier analysis (Izadi et al., 2002; Stevens, 2005). This paper bolsters the existing UK higher education stochastic frontier analysis literature through application of the conditional heteroscedasticity approaches to modelling environmental variables suggested by Coelli et al. (1999). Our database consists of 142 higher education institutions within England and Wales from 2004 to 2009. Application of the net and gross efficiency concepts allows the paper to distinguish between factors which affect the level of frontier cost faced by an institution, from those which only impact on efficiency. The analysis shows that institutions with higher proportions of female students, non-EU students, and STEM students suffer from lower efficiency. Conversely higher levels of female staff, membership to the Russell Group, and offering a Law programme are associated with greater efficiency of institution. Additionally, we provide evidence against the efficiency impact of geographical location and changing fee regime before reporting overall efficiency scores. The disparity in efficiency between all institutions will enable Institutional managers to identify key examples of best practice within the Sector, allow managers to separate increased levels of cost from increased inefficiency, and will suggest potential future areas of regulation and legislation to policy makers. Furthermore, this paper contributes a newly derived measure for research output. This extends measures of research output currently used and improves the precision of the estimated frontier enabling future benchmarking analysis to be more robust. The efficiency measures generated suggest that there may be benefits to mergers within the higher education sector. Following the Bogetoft and Wang (2005) model we evaluate the potential gains in efficiency to be realised through merging various institutions. We find that in several instances there are indeed benefits to be achieved through merger, particularly through joining institutions with specific, narrow curricula to those with broader curricula. Additionally there is also benefit to scale efficiency through merging institutions which occupy similar geography such as Birmingham which hosts five institutions. This thesis finally considers the competitive nature of the higher education sector and how intense that competition is. Through a novel application of the Boone (2008) model we evaluate the change in efficiency over the period of the sample find that there was an increase in competition across the full sample immediately following the fee increase in 2006-2007, though interesting the effects of competition are different between Russell Group and non-Russell Group subsamples. The effects of merger and competition within the higher education sector could inform policy decisions with further fee increases looking ever more certain. Encouraging mergers amongst smaller, focused institutions may provide additional resilience within the system, however the effect on competitiveness within the system must also be considered to ensure ever increasing standards.

In this thesis, I endeavour to rethink the history of higher education in the United Kingdom after the Second World War through a framework generated using the work of Kojin Karatani. It explores three distinct perspectives – instrumentalism, idealism and community – which I argue form a triadic structure which, when grasped, opens the way to a heterodox reading of the postwar British university. This tripartite formulation draws from Karatani's work on the “triad of concepts” he locates in different spheres of philosophy, and is developed through a “trans-genealogical” methodology inspired by the historical-philosophical approaches of Michel Foucault and Karatani himself. The thesis can be divided into three parts. In the first part the thesis' methodology is elucidated from the aforementioned work of Foucault and Karatani. In the second part, I trace the development of each of the three perspectives or “questions” in the British university in order to present a counter-narrative to popular accounts which generally divide it into two phases, each characterised by a rupture: first, a social democratic rupture oriented by a principled, idealist vision, and, second, a neoliberal rupture characterised by an economistic and instrumentalist mentality. Contrary to this “two rupture thesis,” I argue for a view which posits an underlying continuity between the two phases, in that the essence of the later phase can, in fact, be found in the earlier phase, which laid the foundations for an instrumentalist university, the first perspective in the triad. Following this, the roots of idealism, the second perspective which appears opposed to the first, are untangled and revealed to be tainted by instrumentalism and fundamentally untenable. The third perspective of community is then investigated, with a focus on its contemporary manifestations. To end this second part, an alternative vision of higher education, which I call an associationist university, is explored and found to be a productive horizon to be approached but less helpful for immediate action. In the final part, I propose a way of dealing with the co-existence of the three questions or perspectives within the university at present. This way is founded upon the idea of vocation. Various tensions, such as that between partiality to one or more of these perspectives and attempts at integration, are interrogated. To flesh out these dynamics, the sphere of British critical legal theory is taken as a case study. The thesis concludes with a plea for a university that is grounded on the principle of transcritical oscillation.

More than a decade of enormous changes in government policy (and power), funding and fees has transformed the scope, breadth and value of higher education in England (Featherstone, 2011). At the time of writing, the system of higher education in England is undergoing further substantial changes with funding cuts and vastly increased tuition fees that represent a further step in the neoliberalist marketisation of higher education (Collini, 2012; Holmwood, 2011). Such transformations in higher education (HE) bring further threats to social equality despite being hailed as the answer to upward social mobility (Reay, 2008b; Archer, 2007). This study was set up partly in response to the Widening Participation agenda promulgated by New Labour from 1997 onwards and under which, all of the students involved in this research were enrolled. Whilst the premise of the agenda – to open up university opportunities for groups of young people who previously would have been excluded - is undeniably a positive advancement, the significance (and naming) of class in the life trajectories of these (potential) students is largely absent. This research problematises the effacement of class in favour of educational discourses of social inclusion/exclusion, diversity and choice, and seeks to show how class is a real and active force in the lives of today’s students. Not only that, the dissertation shows that HE represents a social space in which class inequalities are perpetuated and which serves to disrupt and cause tensions in the experiences of some students as they navigate new and unfamiliar territory and occupy different relationships to normative student identities.

The theme of this research is knowledge transfer from UK universities. Growing recognition of the importance of innovation for economic growth in the UK led to funding streams targeted at UK universities since 1999. This encouraged UK universities to increase, or commence, knowledge transfer activities over the last decade. In the USA, technology transfer has been promoted through legislation for more than three decades. E2<tensive research has been conducted on American university technology transfer. Some credit university technology transfer with a resurgence in American industry. Therefore, American technology transfer is often used as a benchmark for activity undertaken by UK universities. The history and contexts for the development of knowledge transfer in the UK and technology transfer in the USA have been examined using institutional theory. UK knowledge transfer is compared with American technology transfer, by developing profiles of current day activity. These profiles are then considered in the context of relevant history. To further explorl3 knowledge transfer profiles and the paths that led to them, three case studies of UK universities are examined. These allow the rich influences to be explored in more detail. Finally, economic development work by universities is examined. Different approaches to this area of university knowledge transfer both within the UK, and comparing the UK and USA, have been studied using evolutionary theory. Perspectives on economic development activities differ at UK and American universities. Contributions made by this research include a systematic review of the UK knowledge transfer literature, use of theory, novel methodology, and the policy and practical implications for UK university knowledge transfer. The thesis concludes that some institutions ("formal and informal rules of the game") influencing UK universities, over the last few decades, discouraged engagement in knowledge transfer. In the USA, however, the institutions affecting universities encourage engagement with technology transfer.

This study takes as its starting point the recommendation of the National Committee into Higher Education (1997) that the Quality Assurance Agency should establish a system providing benchmark information on standards operating within the qualifications framework in UK higher education. The introduction of subject benchmarking led to fears of increased external intervention in the activities of universities and a more restrictive view of institutional autonomy, accompanied by an undermining of the academic profession, particularly through the perceived threat of the introduction of a national curriculum for higher education. The study situates subject benchmarking in the context of a potentially changing identity for UK higher education, which some observers see as dominated by a growing lack of trust in universities and university professionals on the part of government and articulated through the increasingly prevalent use of performance indicators requiring institutions and individuals to conform to externally imposed norms. The various requirements of the Quality Assurance Agency, including, therefore, subject benchmarks are seen by some as threatening diversity by enforcing conformity. After a consideration of the literature on various aspects of this context, and in particular of the benchmarking principle, the findings of an empirical investigation are presented in which higher education professionals in chemistry, history and quality assurance were asked about their perceptions of subject benchmarking and its impact. The investigation did not bear out the fears articulated at the inception of subject benchmarking. Furthermore, the investigation showed that subject benchmarking was perceived as having none of the characteristics normally associated with a benchmarking system; in particular, it was not perceived as leading to improvement. Finally, observations are offered on the way forward for subject benchmarking, and areas are suggested for further research.

Background Research on the way that sixth-form students utilise cultural and social capital when applying to university has suggested that students make differential choices on the basis of social class. Research has also highlighted the significance of intra-class differences amongst middle-class students. It suggests the extent to which family, school, peers, and the media may influence and impact on choices. Aim This research examines the extent to which students from similar socio-economic backgrounds, and in particular 'working-class' students, make choices. This process is examined in terms of the university and course choices made and associated social advantage and prestige. Methods This research employs an interpretative paradigm using qualitative methods and a conceptual framework derived from Bourdieu. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were used to investigate research questions and a grounded approach to data analysis was utilised. Findings Findings suggest that access to cultural and social capital is limited to familial influence. Students were influenced by their parents in differential ways, but also drew on the experience of their siblings.