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Since the late 1980s, a growing number of higher educational institutions have adopted the philosophy of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), commonly known in industry as Total Quality Management (TQM). Thousands of industrial organizations worldwide have practiced TQM for decades, and many have succeeded in improving quality, productivity and profitability with it. Nonetheless, reaping the benefits of this promising quality management approach presents a challenge to higher education since the academic culture differs dramatically from that of industry. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the optimal implementation characteristics of CQI in colleges and universities, and in particular, the most and least successful quality practices thus far implemented in academia. The underlying model used for testing the efficacy of TQM derives from six elements of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria, and consists of Leadership, Information and Analysis, Strategic Quality Planning, Faculty and Staff Involvement, Process Improvement, and Improvement Results. This dissertation comprised two stages. The first stage involved two field studies. The preliminary findings from these two studies were used to guide the development of a broader-based survey instrument. The second stage was a nationwide survey of colleges and universities that have been implementing CQI. The survey data were analyzed to examine the characteristics and effect of individual quality practices such as leadership, quality planning, faculty and staff involvement, teamwork, training, business and peer partnership, union support, reward and recognition, improvement measures, and quality system assessment, and to explore the relationship between success with CQI and these quality practices. Further, the most and least successful quality practices were identified by dividing the surveyed institutions that had implemented CQI into three groups: the Beginning Implementers, the Somewhat-experienced Implementers, and the Experienced Implementers. The findings of the study supported the hypothesis that the success of CQI in higher education depends on having a quality model for higher education that is well-developed and well-validated.

M. Ed. / There is no official management plan whereby former technical colleges in South Africa could be managed and operated strategically and efficiently. No distinction will be made between state and state aided colleges in future. The Act on Further Education and Training (Act 98 of 1998) only acknowledges two colleges of this nature for further education and training (FET), they are public and private institutions. Technical colleges will merge and continue to exist as public colleges for FET. A public college for FET will accordingly be forced to deliver proof of its physical, financial and human resources, to be declared a public college for FET. In this study, management areas were researched whereby a management plan could strategically and efficiently be developed and implemented at a college for FET. The purpose of such a management plan is to place a clear perspective on the management areas, ie. all the interested structures of a college whereby aspects of the organisational activities at a college, as well as the delivery of efficient educational and training services, can be attained. A thorough and comprehensive literary study of relevant and related literature was attempted to provide a solid theoretical foundation for the study. The result of this literary study gives a clear perspective on management areas of a management plan. Therefore such a management plan cannot only be developed but also implemented at a college for FET. A further empirical research, in the form of a questionnaire, in support of the literary study, was executed in order to determine to which extent, a college management will address managerial aspects as well as the development and applications thereof. Hypothesis was specifically directed at the context and aim of the research in order to establish not only the statistical significance of analysing the differences but also the interpretations thereof. It has been established that a management plan can be planned, developed and implemented according to a model at a public college for FET. This model poses as interaction between the management areas, levels and structures of the strategic, tactical and operational plans. The management plan is a professional and meaningful plan that sheds light on the mission, goals, objectives, priorities, policy and resources of the college, to ensure the involvement of staff members. The main objective is the understanding and aspirations of all concerned, to implement the mission and values of the college.

The research investigated the problem of the apparent lack of leadership among leaders in the higher education (HE) sector in South Africa (SA). In particular, the research investigated the perception that there is a lack of transformational leadership among leaders in the public institutions of higher learning. This will compromise the leaders’ ability to manage change successfully. This problem was therefore viewed from the perspective of the changing HE landscape in SA in which institutions of higher learning are being merged or incorporated. One of the potential consequences of these mergers and incorporations is that the newly formed institutions may be challenged by a lack of appropriate leadership. The view that a lack of appropriate leadership is one of the root causes of institutions finding themselves in a precarious situation is widely supported by scholars and role players in the HE sector. The aim of this research was to establish the frequency of exhibition of transformational leadership and its behaviours, as well as to ascertain the level of transformational leadership among leaders in the HE sector. Transformational leaders are, by definition, change agents. Therefore, the research was premised on the assumption that if leaders exhibit transformational leadership and its behaviours frequently, if not always, and if their level of transformational leadership is high, then they will necessarily be able to manage change successfully. The Full Range of Leadership Styles (FRL) was adopted in that in addition to transformational leadership, the transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles were also measured. Fundamental to the FRL model is that every leader exhibits each style to some extent and that the model represents how frequently a leader exhibits a particular style of leadership. The findings of the empirical study generally indicated that the picture painted by scholars and role players in the HE sector about leadership in that sector is not as bleak as they claim, although some improvements in developing transformational leadership still have to be made. / Prof. Frans Cilliers

Higher Education (HE) institutions are constantly facing change. Accountability; the metaphor of student as consumer; a focus on management and leadership; and changing global economic conditions all affect the way institutions function. Recently, there has also been an increase in focus on accreditation procedures and organizational change. Although it can be difficult to measure the impact of quality assurance, this research focuses on exploring change and an accreditation procedure conducted by the Japan University Accreditation Association at a Japanese private university. Higher education institutions are social constructions and largely exist in the mind and as such, during change, some faculty members share values, rules of behaviour, and norms that become stabilized in institutional structures. This is due to the establishment of a common understanding. Conversely, there can be differences between groups in the institution. Thus, research needs to be conducted on how people make sense of change and their institution; the way information is processed and disseminated. By utilizing Ericson’s (2001) conceptual framework of four ideal types of meaning, and using Weick’s (2005) concept of sensemaking as a lens to examine the change, this research explores how faculty members make sense of change and accreditation and asks how far does this instance correspond to or otherwise illuminate Ericson’s (2001) conceptual framework for understanding change? This research contributes to our understanding of change, higher education institutions in Japan and accreditation, acknowledging the importance of effective management and leadership in HE institutions.

Calls for more effective and modern teaching practices, higher research outputs, leaner administrative processes, greater community engagement, and more student-centred approaches to the business of higher education have intensified the challenges of working in a university. These challenges have added considerable complexity to the roles of academic staff, many of whom are facing increasing demands for which they are ill equipped to deal in terms of their formal education. To succeed in the highly competitive and changing environment that is higher education today, universities need to ensure that the requisite capabilities are developed in their academic staff. The key question underpinning this study is: how can the provision of professional development for academic staff be optimised to enhance university performance? The focus of the research is on identifying the ways in which higher education institutions provide formal offerings of professional development to academic staff, how they are organised to do this, who is entrusted with the task, and what are the strengths and limitations of the approaches taken. The research is informed by literature concerning higher education management, academic development, and strategic human resource management. Taking a critical realist ontological perspective, case studies of professional development provision in two Irish universities are presented. Findings reveal that while effective professional development is an espoused priority it is not a managed priority. While there is some evidence of good practice, the fragmented organisational structures in place for delivery of professional development reveal an absence of coordination and gaps in provision. The connection between professional development and organisational performance is loose. Recommendations are made on how the provision of professional development for academics can be managed to enhance university performance. A framework for designing performance-led professional development activities that aligns organisational and individual goals is proposed. An organisational structure that takes a more conscious approach to the management of the full range of professional development provision is put forward.

This research is at the intersection of strategic management, international business and internationalisation of higher education institutions (HEIs). It focuses on the managerial aspects of higher education institutions with offshore branch campuses. In the past couple of decades the number of offshore branch campuses established by HEIs - mainly universities - has increased dramatically, but most research carried out to date in this field has been anecdotal and the number of theoretical studies in this area is very limited. Thus, the aim of this research is to breach this gap by developing a theoretical framework that is capable of explaining the managerial aspects of foreign branch campus operations. The key research question in this study is how transnational higher education institutions (TNHEIs) strategically manage their offshore branch campuses. In order to address this question, the literature on TNHEIs with regard to managerial complexities is reviewed. By assimilating and reconceptualising this literature, a multidimensional framework is constructed, which encapsulates the most pertinent ramifications of managing an offshore branch campus. The framework has been constructed by drawing on a widely used paradigm in the international business discipline, known as the dichotomy of global integration versus local responsiveness (I-R dichotomy). It helps to portray the TNHEIs’ strategic positions and positional change strategies on three dimensions of curriculum, research activities and staffing.

Research into leadership in the higher education environment has traditionally mirrored business related constructs. Many of the models and instruments that have been developed for the business environment such as the transactional transformational leadership dyad have been transposed to the higher education environment with relatively minor adaptation. On the other hand, there has been relatively little exploration of leadership models for the Virtual Organisation. This research brings together the literatures of virtuality and the virtual organisation, leadership and higher education management to interrogate the effect of virtuality on leadership styles within the volatile global higher education environment caused by the liberalisation of the sector. Through a case study of a higher education institution (HEI) that is developing a virtual campus, the research explores the perceptions of leadership skills, competencies and behaviours within the virtual higher education environment to determine whether a new model or framework can be developed for a virtual and widely distributed environment. The data from interviews, surveys and focus groups carried out in the case study show that virtuality does impact leadership skills in nuanced ways, thus proposing a configuration of behaviours, skills and competencies more relevant to the virtual higher education environment. The proposed framework adds to the literature on leadership in higher education as well as leadership in the virtual environment and contributes to practice in the areas of recruitment and training of leaders and managers in the virtual higher education sector.

This thesis explores the implications of the changes in the political and social conceptions of higher education and the resulting crisis of higher education in the UK. The specific focus is placed on business schools as institutions operating in increasingly competitive management education markets, and on postgraduate students as key stakeholders that are largely neglected in academic and public discussions. It explores how the emerging characteristics of the management education, such as the reliance on specialised rankings and corporate-inspired business school designs, influence student perceptions of the purposes of education and their experiences of their chosen the programmes of study. In doing so, the thesis draws from theoretical discussions on mechanisms for mediation of market values and principles to students. Specifically, the thesis focuses on commodification of education through commensuration and standardisation embedded in specialised media rankings, and the representation of market values through the features of business school space. A qualitative exploratory study was conducted over a period of one academic year with 61 students enrolled on a postgraduate taught (MSc) programme in Management at a reputable UK business school. Data was collected on student behaviours, activities, opinions and views, as well as on their relationship with their social and organisational surroundings. Student views and perceptions were gathered through observations, informal conversations and 20 in-depth interviews from the chosen programme. Additional interviews with 12 postgraduate students from other schools informed the discussion by providing insights into the similarities and differences between student perceptions and experiences in different institutional settings. Data collection was supplemented with secondary data, including policy documents and visual data. Contrary to the prescriptive, linear and goal-oriented perspective on students dominating contemporary academic and policy discourses, findings suggest that students experience education as a messy and a transformative process, with ambiguous and uncertain outcomes. The thesis contributes to academic debates on the social roles and functions of specialised rankings by providing insights into the nature of the student consumption of rankings, and their influence on student experiences. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature on the implicit and informal elements of business school settings by recognising space as an active and constitutive part of student experience. The thesis challenges the prevalent institutional and political reduction of students to consumers of education, and instead implies that student experience should be treated as a complex, multi-layered and, above all, fluid process. In doing so, the thesis offers a novel approach towards a more comprehensive understanding of the roles and purposes of higher education in contemporary society.

D.Technologiae / Higher education, as both a “place” and a “paradigm”, has throughout its history confronted challenges in the internal and external environments of its functioning (Brennan et al., 1999; Hirsch & Weber, 1999). In the twenty-first century, the nature of these challenges has necessitated that both the organizational character and curriculum offerings of higher education institutions be adaptive and responsive to changes occurring in the external environment. How institutions of higher learning react to these changes, is an issue of divergent viewpoints. “Reform” and “transformation” – in the same mould as “adaptation” and “responsiveness” – are viewed in this study as the fundamental points of departure in articulating a trajectory along which change in the curriculum perspectives has to occur. As a ‘product’ offered to its ‘consumers’ – the paying students – the higher education curriculum has been a fiercely contested epistemological terrain. On the one hand is the concern that it services the interests of industry and commerce, to the detriment of society; while on the other, the curriculum has been viewed as reproducing elitist values. The problem then, is located in the realm of the curriculum’s capacity to respond to the contradictory nature of the multiple stakeholder interests. The South African higher education system is faced with the problem of firstly, de-contextualizing and disengaging the curriculum from its erstwhile political ramifications (CHE, 2000b). Secondly, affordable and quality higher education is expected to be assimilated into the broader national socioeconomic imperatives. From this study’s perspective, the problem statement is situated in the context of the curriculum’s capacity to meet the local reconstruction and developmental needs; while also adhering to international imperatives ushered in mainly by globalisation and the concomitant proliferation of alternative providers who have challenged the claim to epistemological hegemony by traditional universities. In other words, are current curriculum trends in higher education directed at meeting society’s needs; or is the entrepreneurial imperative more sacrosanct? One of the main challenges for South African higher education curriculum reform/transformation policy concerns then, should be to define and determine how the local and global curriculum polemics are to be reined-in in the broader ‘public good’ and social contract in improving the lives of all citizens. Through its empirical phase, the study has attempted to investigate the extent to which higher education curriculum trends ‘conform’ or ‘deviate’ from worldwide curriculum practices. In that regard, policy rhetoric was able to be differentiated from actual policy implementation. In order that problems of critical generalisability be obviated, data and method triangulation were utilised; also taking into account the institutional reconfiguration that had major consequences for the curriculum, especially at institutions undergoing “comprehensive” organizational and curriculum restructuring. The extent of institutional curriculum ‘deviation’ or ‘conformity’ was therefore determined on the basis of the collective integration of literature-based and empirical data and information/knowledge. The case study research conducted through questionnaires and interviews at the designated research sites (two higher education institutions with disparate academic cultures) therefore serves as the basis upon which larger investigations and broader perspectives could be incorporated, particularly from the extensive literature review. While the two case studies could have limitations of generalisability, some practices and trends lend themselves to a greater degree of the transferability of the findings. For instance, the knowledge stratification inherent in the Western university model (Makgoba, 1998; Scott, 1997) has perpetrated an environment of epistemological ‘supremacy’ within local higher education curriculum policy formulation frameworks. In that regard, it has emerged from the case study that Africanisation (in its epistemological, rather than ‘anthropological/cultural’ sense) is not part of a critical and mainstream curriculum organization tenet. While this observation could be argued to be institution-specific, it certainly also reflects a systemic trend. In the light of the epistemological context cited above, is it to be assumed then that the ‘politics of knowledge’ (Apple, 1990; Lyotard, 1994; Muller, 2000) is an extant curriculum/epistemological nuance even in the twenty-first century? The realizable outcomes of the study materialized in the conceptualisation and development of a trilogy of models on Africanisation; in which the input, mediating/modulating, and output triad factor characterises an environment of possibilities for its integration into the mainstream higher education curriculum.