International Comparative Research on University Governance Reform: Exploring the Role of Organisational Culture and Staff Development

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the course of recent university reforms in Japan, explicit elements of the institutional governance, such as organisational structures and distribution of responsibilities (particularly in favour of top-down decision-making), have been emphasised by the government, thus leading all the universities more or less towards the same direction in terms of governance arrangements. This research, however, has revealed that, through a questionnaire survey and international comparison, university governance is very diverse and that there is no single form that may be generally used across institutions. This fact implies that governance-related policy should not be across-the-board for all the universities but that it should rather assist each university in effectively devising its own governance arrangements with a particular focus on implicit elements such as active participation of constituencies, trust among them, consensus building and supportive leadership across the institution.