This book examines tensions between the Chinese state and Chinese universities. It looks at the state’s demand for political socialization as a restriction on university autonomy and the university’s promotion of academic development through promoting academic freedom and fostering critical thinkers, using Jour University in PRC, as a case study. The book focuses on the dynamics and complexity of the interplay between the state, universities, faculty, staff and students in the process of socialization through political education and academic affairs. Theories on political socialization and higher education guide this study. As universities’ socio-political task of imbuing students with a certain type of ideology coexists with their role of promoting university autonomy, examining China’s higher education system provides important insights as different players’ interaction. These present a dynamic picture of role differentiation as a strategy to cope with a politically restricted autonomy, which challenges some common stereotypes that have been put on Chinese universities within the global community.

Green sheds light onto the mercurial and ill-defined boundaries of institutional governance within China’s unique system of higher education, a national system that remains misunderstood by scholars who continue to position it as little more than a research arm of the party/state. Through a synthesis of systems theory, complexity theory, and institutional logics, Green provides a relational accounting of "Higher Education with Chinese Characteristics" – a complex, adaptive social system whose paradoxical modernization ideology of pragmatic instrumentalism, in conjunction with a centralized-decentralized governance model, foments rational chaos at the institutional level. Specifically, his book highlights the concept of rational chaos – an observable phenomenon of evolutionary emergence experienced by subaltern actors engaged with the confusing and often paradoxical institutional logics of meso/micro-level governance. Moreover, developed through in-depth narrative interviews, Green’s conceptualization of collective-individualism provides a glimpse into the diverse patterns of identity that have developed within a single institutional governance context. These discrete identity formations, patterned through varying understandings of individual self-determinism, collective role fulfillment, norms and structures of governance, and subsequent changemaking efforts, call into question culturally deterministic research surrounding self-mastery, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom within the Chinese higher education context. His book highlights a subaltern institutional lifeworld accounting of higher education governance that will speak to anyone grappling with neoliberal commodification, managerialism, academic nationalism and the increasing onset of transnational academic (im)mobility. It is ideal for students and scholars of international comparative education, higher education governance, and Chinese studies.

The current social reality and changing global forces and spaces are inspiring the rethinking, refining, and re-empowering of the world social sciences to broach the frontiers of human knowledge, enhance mutual understanding across cultures and civilizations, and shape a better world. Taking Tsinghua University’s sociology as a case, this book concentrates on how internationalization shapes disciplinary development in a global context of asymmetrical academic relations. This inquiry is set amidst China’s dramatic economic, social, political, and cultural transformations, as well as the institutional reforms in this Chinese flagship university. This book seeks to probe how Chinese and Western knowledge, institutions, and cultures are integrated in the ongoing process of internationalization and concentrates on the disciplinary evolution of Tsinghua’s sociology—intellectually, institutionally, and culturally—drawing on top-down higher education policy and bottom-up perceptions and experiences of Tsinghua’s social scientists. This book highlights that higher education internationalization is an evolving process whose advanced phase would require Chinese social scientists to bring China to the world. It is time for Tsinghua University to reassess the long-term impact of internationalization on its academic disciplines and provide sufficient support for the development of the social sciences.This book will attract academics, practitioners, and postgraduate students interested in higher education internationalization, international academic relations, global constellation and distribution of academic power, academic knowledge production, and the development and intellectual influences of the Chinese social sciences.

Gathering unique and thoughtful contributions from leading international scholars, this timely Research Handbook offers diverse perspectives on university rankings twenty years after the first global rankings emerged. It presents an in-depth analysis that reflects the current state of research on rankings, their influence and impact.

This book will examine how universities in China and the US are responding to markets and increasing global competition. For both countries, a university education is seen as key to economic development. While China and the US have two very different political systems, they represent the two largest economies in the world and share beliefs that higher education plays an integral role to economic development. The book will bring together scholars with multiple perspectives on the topic to create dialogue around similarities and differences. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and higher educational administrators in both countries and other countries as well who are seeking to understand the strategic change in higher education in both China and the US. ​

The present volume sets out in the wider context of globalization to critically examine how selected countries / societies in Asia have responded to the growing pressures of globalization for improving university performance in the global market place. In order to enhance the global competitiveness of their higher education systems, many governments in Asia have started comprehensive reforms and adopted new governance measures to enhance their universities. Incorporation and corporatization have been identified as important strategies to restructure and re-engineer university governance around the world. Contributors in this volume critically examine how the quest for world-class university status (as a global movement) has affected the way their universities are governed. Despite the popularity of management reforms and restructuring exercises in line with neoliberalism and managerialism worldwide, whether and how these reforms have actually transformed the heart of the public sector is still subject to debate. This book offers critical reflections on the governance change taking place in the Asian university systems and examines how far the restructuring of higher education governance through incorporation, privatization, and corporatization has really transformed the values and practices of those who work in the higher education sector.

The annual is a venue of publication for sociological studies of Chinese societies and the Chinese all over the world. The main focus is on social transformations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the mainland, Singapore and Chinese overseas.