Internationalisation strategy implemented through Faculty Exchange: Strategic Entrepreneurship in a “new” United Kingdom University

The promotion of international staff mobility is a founding principle of the ‘Bologna Process’, designed to create a converged system of higher education across Europe as it is subjected to increasing globalisation. Many UK ‘new’ (ie post-1992) universities are engaged in the development of internationalisation and globalisation strategies which include staff exchange. Meanwhile, the failure to execute strategy is increasingly acknowledged as a major problem in organisational performance. Using a first-, second and third-person Insider Action Research (AR) approach, six chronological cycles of AR were enacted over a 28 month period in order to organise and implement an international staff exchange between universities in the UK and France. Data generated were subjected to a double process of analysis – four phase analysis and a meta-cycle of enquiry - in order to propose aspects of strategy execution through strategic entrepreneurship within the constraints of a post-1992 university business school in the UK. Concepts from the theoretical literature in three domains - entrepreneurship in higher education, globalisation of higher education and strategy execution through strategic entrepreneurship – are combined with the research analysis to propose that ‘strategic entrepreneurs’ can execute the riskier elements of an internationalisation strategy, such as staff exchange. This work broadens AR from education into strategic management. It goes beyond the common, well-intentioned and yet vague statements involving the ‘encouragement’ of international staff exchange to propose the elements of execution through strategic entrepreneurship

Organic Cereal Varieties: The Results of four years of Trials

Modern breeding has focussed on producing plants that perform well in a monoculture; they are designed to interfere minimally with their neighbours under high fertility conditions, where all ameliorable factors are controlled. The aim of this design is to provide a crop community that makes best use of light supply to the best advantage of grain production. Wheat is the most developed example of this approach - with a high proportion of seminal roots, erect leaves, large ears and a relatively dwarf structure - but all other cereal breeding follows it. This 'pedigree line for monoculture' approach is highly successful but it has delivered crop communities that do best where light is the only, or the main, limiting factor for productivity. Therefore the products of this approach to breeding require inputs to raise fertility, and to control weeds, pests and diseases. Clearly this is not the case in organic farming. Quick acting inputs are not generally available to control or mitigate negative abiotic and biotic interactions. Even within well-functioning organic systems the number of relatively uncontrollable factors and the complexity of their interaction across farms, fields and years are an order of magnitude different from conventional production

[Review of] Ranjit Arora and Carlton Duncan, eds. Multicultural Education : Towards Good Practice

The volume is a collection of loosely-coupled essays, several coupled somewhat more loosely than the others, and all relating to government provided elementary and secondary multicultural education and to teacher training in Britain. A good many British-education-bureaucracy abbreviations are used and these tend to slow the flow of the otherwise splendid cross-cultural transfer potential to American and other readers

Collecting, connoisseurship and commerce: an examination of the life and career of Stephen Wootton Bushell (1844-1908)

No abstract available