The Worldwide Instantiation of the University

Author(s):  
David John Frank ◽  
John W. Meyer

This chapter describes the multi-dimensional expansion of the university, focusing especially on its accumulating numbers and global diffusion. It stresses the transcendence and universalism of the university at the global level. It also analyzes how university expansion is expected to occur earlier and more fully in the global core than in the global periphery, in democracies than in dictatorships, in the natural sciences than in the social sciences or humanities, and in world-class research universities more than local teaching colleges. The chapter highlights the university as a global institution and the global knowledge society that arises upon it. It examines the spread of universities around the world and studies local instances of a general model that is a central point to sociological neo-institutional theory.

Dreyfus argues that there is a basic methodological difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences, a difference that derives from the different goals and practices of each. He goes on to argue that being a realist about natural entities is compatible with pluralism or, as he calls it, “plural realism.” If intelligibility is always grounded in our practices, Dreyfus points out, then there is no point of view from which one can ask about or provide an answer to the one true nature of ultimate reality. But that is consistent with believing that the natural sciences can still reveal the way the world is independent of our theories and practices.


Author(s):  
N.R. Madhava Menon

The purpose of looking at Indian universities in a comparative perspective is obviously to locate it among higher education institutions across the world and to identify its strengths and weaknesses in the advancement of learning and research. In doing so, one can discern the directions for reform in order to put the university system in a competitive advantage for an emerging knowledge society. This chapter looks at the current state of universities in India and highlights the initiatives under way for change and proposes required policy changes.


Author(s):  
Bibi van den Berg ◽  
Ruth Prins ◽  
Sanneke Kuipers

Security and safety are key topics of concern in the globalized and interconnected world. While the terms “safety” and “security” are often used interchangeably in everyday life, in academia, security is mostly studied in the social sciences, while safety is predominantly studied in the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine. However, developments and incidents that negatively affect society increasingly contain both safety and security aspects. Therefore, an integrated perspective on security and safety is beneficial. Such a perspective studies hazardous and harmful events and phenomena in the full breadth of their complexity—including the cause of the event, the target that is harmed, and whether the harm is direct or indirect. This leads to a richer understanding of the nature of incidents and the effects they may have on individuals, collectives, societies, nation-states, and the world at large.


2014 ◽  
pp. 4-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen MacGregor

Research universities in low and middle-income countries have crucial roles to play in developing differentiated and effective academic systems and in making it possible for their countries to join the global knowledge society and compete in sophisticated knowledge economies.


TEM Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 750-755
Author(s):  
Marcela Malindzakova ◽  
Dusan Malindzak

The paper deals with the implementation of the WCM (World Class Manufacturing) model. By implementing the WCM, it is possible to reduce costs in manufacturing operations by removing elements that does not bring added value, or generate losses, waste or even lead to accidents and errors. WCM as a management model includes its own methods and tools that enable the company to achieve profit and a competitive advantage based on the principle of "producing the highest quality products at low prices". The WCM model is based on four concepts to achieve zero waste, zero accidents, zero failures and zero stocks. A prerequisite for the development of the WCM model is the improvement of the company's organizational system in order to achieve a global level of competitiveness.


Author(s):  
Marlene M. Mendoza-Macías

The world is facing multiple changes and challenges; the environment shows inequalities, poverty, and corruption. Ecuador is not the exception. The man is declared the primary focus of the Ecuadorian Constitution to meet such changes. The objective of decreasing poverty, improving wealth distribution, and contributing to sustainable human development is unavoidable. In that context, the university has the pivotal role in generating interaction with society and its reality, to train professionals social and humanly responsible towards such facts, to promote the social management of knowledge from different action fields. The goal of this chapter is to specify the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in a society where they take part, to draw up social responsibility of universities in Guayaquil and the challenges they face, as well as actions that contribute to the eradication of corruption and greater wellbeing of the society.


Author(s):  
Neeta Baporikar

Research is a vital part of the social tapestry of a modern society. It is imperative to find suitable ways to respond to societal priorities. It can be an open-ended enquiry into the essence of phenomena, of who we are, individually and collectively, and of the world we inhabit. It not only enables derived knowledge, but is also a means of preserving, fabricating and resynthesizing existing knowledge and/for creating new knowledge. Apart from that research is a vital pillar of higher education. Moreover, in knowledge society today, research is deemed to be of more value when it rightly augments the economic development processes. Through in depth literature review and contextual analysis, the aim of this chapter is to aid institutions and scholars in recognizing the gains of adapting inclusive approach, suggesting strategies for promoting research culture so as to enhance scholarly communication apart from being a support system in knowledge society, so that the world of academia continues to excel in its role of knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and knowledge dissemination.


2019 ◽  
Vol 125 ◽  
pp. 23001
Author(s):  
Yos Johan Utama ◽  
Budi Setiyono ◽  
Jamari ◽  
Mohammad Tauviqirrahman ◽  
Heru Susanto

This paper presents the strategy of Diponegoro University to increase its research productivity towards the world-class university. Bibliometric indicators are employed to characterize the research activities of Diponegoro University, Indonesia with production in the period of 2014-2018 in publications that are indexed in the Scopus database. The number of documents and their comparison with other universities, and productive authors are of particular interest. The results reflect that the university documents improve significantly during the research time frame. In comparison with other top ten universities in Indonesia, for the last five years, Diponegoro University has achieved the fastest rate of publication (up to 471%). However, compared to other universities in neighboring countries, Diponegoro University is still left behind. In addition, it is shown that prolific authors contributing to documents in Scopus are uneven in terms of origin of faculty. Based on these results, a recommendation with respect to the research productivity is discussed in this paper.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Featherstone

The term global suggests all-inclusiveness and brings to mind connectivity, a notion that gained a boost from Marshall McLuhan's reference to the mass-mediated ‘global village’. In the past decade it has rapidly become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of academics and business people, but also has circulated widely in the media in various parts of the world. There have also been the beginnings of political movements against globalization and proposals for ‘de-globalization’ and ‘alternative globalizations’, projects to re-define the global. In effect, the terminology has globalized and globalization is varyingly lauded, reviled and debated around the world. The rationale of much previous thinking on humanity in the social sciences has been to assume a linear process of social integration, as more and more people are drawn into a widening circle of interdependencies in the movement to larger units, but the new forms of binding together of social life necessitate the development of new forms of global knowledge which go beyond the old classifications. It is also in this sense that the tightening of the interdependency chains between human beings, and also between human beings and other life forms, suggests we need to think about the relevance of academic knowledge to the emergent global public sphere.


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