Concluding comments: when international, European and domestic influences collide

Abstract

The concluding commentary summarizes the contributions to the special issue, identifies a number of transversal themes and specifies their empirical and theoretical contributions. The interplay between international, European and domestic influences on national policy changes and university adaptation is highlighted. This is used as the basis for a sketch of a research agenda, outlining of a theoretical framework and suggestions for topics for further research.

Keywords:

• Europeanization
• internationalization
• policy change
• organizational adaptation

Notes on contributor

Martina Vukasovic is a postdoc researcher at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG). She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Sciences from the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on the interaction between European, national and organizational processes, primarily the emergence of the European governance layer and how it may affect changes of policy and organization in higher education, in particular in the post-Communist countries. She gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Odysseus program of the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO).

Notes

1. A search performed in August 2014 found almost 42,000 hits for ‘Bologna Process’ or ‘European Higher Education Area’ on Google Scholar and a bit less than 1200 articles in ISI (SSCI and CPCI-SSH).

2. The concept ‘epistemic communities’ is used here in a way that stretches its original meaning as used by Haas: ‘a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area’ (1992, 3). The stretching is warranted by the fact that some of the domestic actors on which the contributions focus do indeed conform to the Haas definition. Moreover, in the original article, Haas himself likened the ‘epistemic communities’ to ‘a thought collective’, a group with a common style of thinking which also shares a particular paradigm in the Kuhnian sense of the word, stressing shared beliefs and values.

3. See Corbett (2005) for the history of European coordination in the area of higher education and ENQA (2010), Schwarz and Westerheijden (2004) and Westerheijden, Brennan, and Massen (1994) for the overview of European initiatives in higher education in the area of quality assurance.

4. It should be noted here that both Kingdon and Zahariadis label this stream as a ‘policy stream’. This is not the approach used here given that, following Gornitzka (1999), policy is here understood consisting of both objectives (often termed as particular problems that need to be addressed) and intentions and actions (often seen as solutions operationalized with particular policy instruments). Thus, unlike the terminology employed by Kingdon or Zahariadis, the use of ‘solution stream’ also allows the useful distinction between problem-driven and solution-driven policies.