高等院校管理育人问题

大学管理育人和服务育人是一篇大文章,是弥补中小学教育做人教育、素质教育缺失的有效过程和手段,是培养高素质、具有创新能力社会主义现代化建设事业接班人的重要环节。高等学校一定要对此高度重视,认真谋划,纳入教育教学体系,使管理育人和服务育人由号召、口号成为现实,发挥应有的功效。     

建立与中国金融崛起相适应的高等金融教育

目前,我国金融从业人员的知识技能水平与发达国家相比仍有较大的差距,缺乏具有战略眼光、熟悉国际金融业务并具有防范金融风险能力的高层次金融人才,高层次金融人才的培养主要靠高等金融院校。本文探讨了振兴我国高等金融教育的几种途径。     

Budgetary Reforms in the Non-profit Sector: A Comparative Analysis of Experiences in Health Care and Higher Education in the Netherlands

This study reports on budgetary reforms in the Dutch health care and higher education sector in the last twenty years. Comparisons between the two sectors reveal that not all reforms adhere to the principles of New Public Management. New budget systems in both sectors are mixed systems, with university budgets developing from input to more output based systems and hospital budgeting systems from output to more input oriented systems. More output-based budget systems appear to stimulate production, contradicting government's policy of cost reduction. The most effective reform measures turn out to be those who are best aligned with opinions and attitudes of medical and academic professionals.     

Implementation Mode and Local Government Performance Measurement: A Norwegian Experience

This study explores how implementation approaches affect implementation success of performance measurement. A theory is developed using case studies of four projects from Norwegian local government in the period 1983–98. `Implementation mode' is defined as to what extent a system is coupled to organisational objectives during the implementation process. An implementation mode which decouples performance indicators (PIs) from organisational objectives seems to further implementation success. This paradoxical theory of implementation mode gives new insights both relative to classical implementation theory as in MBO, and to theories of loose coupling in implementation and reforms common in the New Institutionalist Theory.     

Measuring the Effect of Federal Research Funding on Private Donations at Research Universities: Is Federal Research Funding More than a Substitute for Private Donations?

The nature of federal research funding has changed in the United States over the last 30 years. In part, federal research funding has changed in the distribution of funding across disciplines and across universities. Federal funding to universities with historically low levels of funding has also experienced greater growth than those universities with historically high levels of funding. In addition, universities have become more involved in the political process with respect to the allocation of funding for higher education. As the nature of government funding changes, this paper questions its effect on private donations to research and non-research universities. The general presumption of much of the existing theoretical work is that government and private funding for charitable goods are substitutes. Limited evidence exists to suggest, in some circumstances, there may be a positive correlation between these two sources of funding. Potentially, because the government undertakes the expense to gather information about the research universities, and engages in such activities as peer-review of research proposals, the government through its grant awards may provide a signal of quality of research or other information to donors that is less noisy than that available to private donors. Similarly, there may be other types of spillover effects from research funding to private donations. In this case, a change in government grants has both a positive and negative effect on private donations, suggesting a positive correlation between private and public donations if the effect from the dissemination of information is greater than the substitution effect of government grants. I examine data for private and public universities in the United States to measure the relationship between private and public donations under a fixed-effects OLS regression. I explore issues of bias from endogeneity or omitted variables and report the results from a two stage least squares regression in which I use a set of measures that affect federal research funding but not private donations. Regardless of the specification, the results suggest private and public donations are positively correlated for research universities and negatively correlated for non-research institutions. On average, increasing federal research funding by one dollar increases private donations by 65 cents at research universities, decreases private donations by 9 cents at universities whose highest degree granted is a masters, and decreases private donations by 45 cents at liberal arts colleges.     

Do accountabilities change when public organisations transform to service systems: A new conceptual approach

In this conceptual paper, we discuss from the service systems perspective how accountabilities differ from a hierarchic and organisational perspective within the domain of New Public Management, looking to shed new light upon accountability as a research topic. The concept of service systems and their accountabilities are scrutinised and the role of integrated social and health care services is discussed in particular. The main argument in the text is the changing nature of accountabilities as the public organisations are being transformed into service systems. To date, the understanding of accountability has remained structural by nature – such is the case also for productivity measurement – but the shift from organisations towards services systems means that accountability ought to be considered as processual by nature. By processual it is meant that accountability should be considered as flows within systems – that is: flows between agents the content of which we argue includes not only knowledge on the outputs of public services, but also values, empathy and thus multi‐layered understanding of accountability. The paper concludes with practical insights for managerial purposes on the basis for this accountability shift.     

Financial and technical competence of municipal board members: Empirical evidence from the water sector

The purpose of this article is to investigate municipal board members’ financial and technical competence and analyse factors explaining the presence of such competence. Financial expertise estimates were constructed based on the board members’ education and professional experience, while financial literacy levels were estimated based on prior board experience and participation in additional training in accounting and finance. Board members’ technical competence was assessed in terms of their education. Quantitative data was derived from a survey administered to 354 municipal water utility board members in Finland. The response rate was 52%. The results of the study indicate, first of all, that municipal board members’ estimated financial competence levels are not high and that financial competence is associated with organizational form. Secondly, board members’ technical competence levels are also fairly low and technical competence is associated with political affiliation. Stewardship theory offers the most plausible explanation for the influence of organizational form on financial and technical competence, while the resource dependency view provides an explanation for the effect of political affiliation on technical competence.     

New Public Management between reality and illusion: Analysing the validity of performance-based budgeting

Drawing from the theoretical insights of pragmatic constructivism, this paper aims to explain the difficulties faced by organizational actors in the translation of performance-based budgeting (PBB) into practice. The dichotomy of reality and illusion at the centre of pragmatic constructivism sheds light on the limitations and shortcomings that characterize the implementation of a business-like practice introduced as a component of the reform movement known as New Public Management (NPM). The paper investigates the case of an Italian Ministry through the analysis of interviews, policy documents, and governmental reports. The analysis shows that a failed integration of communication, values and aims between actors and an illusionary analysis of factual possibilities constrain the construction of causalities, hence jeopardizing the successful implementation of the performance-based budgeting reform. Rather than engaging in a co-authoring process, the actors are left with illusionary constructs that, while providing the appearance of a compliant organization, fail to produce the desired changes.     

Higher Education Finance in the UK*

The introduction of top‐up fees for home‐domiciled undergraduate tuition in England from 2006–07 – and their planned increase in 2012–13 – raises important issues for university funding in Scotland, since it abolished tuition fees for Scottish and EU students in 2000–01. This paper focuses on what the increase in resources directed at English universities arising from top‐up fees means for the relative funding of English and Scottish undergraduates. Widely‐used funding‐per‐head figures do not provide an accurate picture of home‐ and EU‐domiciled undergraduate funding, as they include funding for research, postgraduate degrees and overseas students. The empirical work of this paper focuses on creating a consistent series of funding per full‐time equivalent undergraduate over time for England and for Scotland, stripping out funding for research, non‐EU students and postgraduate degrees to create a more accurate picture of the funding gap between the two countries. It also takes into account the different composition of undergraduate degree subjects taken in England and Scotland. The findings indicate that the apparent historical advantage in funding per head in Scottish institutions compared with English ones has been largely driven by compositional differences: Scotland has a high proportion of medical, science and engineering undergraduates – subjects that command greater funding due to their relative complexity to teach. The top‐up fee introduced in 2006–07 brought funding per head in England to a level similar to that experienced in Scotland, and the future increase will result in funding per head in England outstripping that in Scotland by some magnitude. This suggests that the funding of Scottish students will fall significantly behind that of English students unless additional new sources of public or private funding for nScottish universities are found.     

e‐Government in the Irish Revenue: The Revenue On‐Line Service (ROS): A Success Story?

The Revenue Online Service (ROS) is one of the first e‐government initiatives introduced in Ireland. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine this reform initiative in the Irish Revenue, assess it through the lens of the New Public Management (NPM) and e‐government literatures and to critically assess whether its implementation can be deemed ‘a success story’. Many of the components of NPM were evident in the introduction of ROS which facilitated its implementation: decentralisation, the use of private sector styles of management, an emphasis on performance measurement and a search for efficiencies. ROS has, inter alia, transformed both access to taxation information for taxpayers and their agents, and the system of tax payment and filing in Ireland. Assessing its implementation in terms of the objectives of an e‐government initiative, ROS is ‘a success story’, and the Irish Revenue organisation has clearly benefited from its introduction in many ways. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that tax/accounting practitioners are also beneficiaries of this e‐government initiative. However, a critical analysis of the findings of this study contests the idea that ROS is an unqualified success story.     

STRINGS ATTACHED: NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT, COMPETITIVE GRANT FUNDING AND SOCIAL CAPITAL

This paper first investigates the impact of New Public Management (NPM) practices, particularly competitive grant funding, on Bushcare New South Wales (NSW), an Australian environmental volunteering organisation. Secondly, identifying such local volunteering organisations as repositories of valuable social capital, it explores the link between volunteering and social capital. Using mixed methods and institutional theory, the study reveals that an increased level of professionalism and accountability is required of Bushcare groups, and that local coordinators face a challenge in balancing local, regional and national priorities without sacrificing Bushcare's mission. These dynamics, it is proposed, have potentially serious social capital implications.     

MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING CHANGE AND NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT: A REASSESSMENT OF AMBITIONS AND RESULTS — AN INSTITUTIONALIST APPROACH TO ACCOUNTING CHANGE IN THE DUTCH PUBLIC SECTOR

Dutch municipalities and provinces, denoted here as local government, have seen a succession of changes in their management accounting systems and have also introduced other changes related to New Public Management (NPM) in the last twenty years. This paper examines accounting changes, such as the introduction of accrual accounting, output and outcome budgets and performance measurement, from an institutionalist point of view. The paper presents experiences of 23 politicians and professional managers with the various changes over a period of fifteen to twenty years. The interviewees, just like various researchers in the field of NPM, were critical of the accounting changes and their effects. However, several of them also made clear that, seen over the long run, the changes did have some effects that they liked and seem to be in line with the ‘ideals’ presented in NPM literature. The paper suggests that an institutionalist perspective is helpful for studying change processes in organizations and for observing factors and developments that might not be noticed when a more functional and short‐term perspective is adopted.     

Ordering a Profession: Swedish Nurses Encounter New Public Management Reforms

This article deals with professional responses to and handling of New Public Management reforms in the context of Swedish health care. The focus is on Swedish nurses, and the argument is that the extent to which a profession is heterogeneous and embraces a variety of ordering processes explains differing, and even contradictory, responses within a single profession. The paper shows that the ordering processes within the Swedish nursing profession provided a wide variety of conditions for nurses' encounter with the reforms. Overall, the transformations brought about by the New Public Management reforms aligned more easily with the process of ordering nurses into administrative leaders than with the process of ordering nurses into experts in caring.     

Usefulness of consolidated government accounts: A comparative study

This comparative empirical study on consolidated government accounting reforms in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Sweden reveals contextual differences affecting their adoption and usefulness. It can help policy-makers, public managers, and academics understand the gap between claims associated with the adoption of accounting technologies and their usefulness, as well as provide insights into dichotomies between their global proliferation and localized adaptations.     

高职教育教学改革的研究和探索

本文以高等职业教育的培养目标为基础,借鉴已有高等职业教育的改革成果,对高等职业教育教学改革,从理论教学和实践教学两方面进行研究。     

New development: Determinants of financial performance in public organizations

In the slipstream of NPM, public organizations worldwide have had to increase their financial performance by adopting management practices. Nonetheless, financial performance (FP) might be mostly predicted by contingencies that are not within direct managerial control. Drawing on evidence from 308 Flemish municipalities, this article shows that organizational and environmental contingencies affect FP, but a significant amount of variation in FP is unexplained—indicating that management could well matter.     

Consulting University: A Reflection from Inside

This paper contributes to a growing literature on the role of management consultants in the public sector by examining a sensitive area of management consulting, as exercised by university faculty members and as applied to universities. It frames the development of management consulting as an idea that originated in universities, travelled first into the private sector and then into the public sector, from country to country, and was eventually applied to universities – with problematic effects.     

内蒙古高等职业教育的多元驱动发展模式研究

高等职业教育的多元驱动模式是政府主导、行业指导、企业参与、学校为主的共同驱动的四维一体的一种职业教育模式。该模式的实施依赖于:政府要把高等职业教育纳入社会经济发展和产业规划;内蒙古行业管理部门要发挥在高等职业教育中的桥梁纽带作用;内蒙古当地各类企业要积极主动参与高等职业教育;内蒙古高等职业教育要制定科学的高等职业教育培养目标,突出办学特色,完善教学手段,建设和扩展教学活动的实训基地,使高等职业教育与区域经济紧密结合。     

高等教育财政管理:我国的实践及改革方向

高等教育已成为知识经济发展的关键要素，同时也成为社会“最重要消费品”。正因如此，其重要性使得高等教育的财政管理日益受到重视。本文在概述高等教育财政管理内容和要素的基础上，对我国的高等教育财政管理进行了一番现实的考察，并据此提出改进的路径选择。     

内蒙古高等职业教育创新发展模式研究

基于内蒙古高等职业教育培养模式单一、教学模式和运行机制难以满足当地经济发展的需要、办学条件难以可持续发展的现状,本文认为内蒙古高等职业教育应该对其教育目标进行重新定位,本着着力培养学生的职业道德、职业技能和就业能力和创业能力的原则,从根本上对学科建设、专业建设、办学体制进行创新。