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Studying academic careers can be particularly useful for discussions about new forms of professional careers. This conceptual paper seeks to shed light on academic careers by discussing the (changing) multiple contexts governing academic careers.

A neo‐institutional framework for analysing academic careers is developed that treats them as outcomes of overlapping institutions belonging to the different social contexts in which academics simultaneously act. This approach allows one to locate academic careers in the context of new and traditional career literature and to address changes in the institutional context of academic careers.

Shows how traditional structures and mechanisms of academic careers are interwoven with the overall patterns of national higher education systems and their societal embeddedness. Empirical evidence was found that academic careers are becoming more boundaryless. But evidence was also found that academic careers are more bound to the organisation due to recent changes in university policies and practices.

The paper is limited to the discussion of overlapping institutional contexts governing academic careers. Further international comparisons could deepen understanding of specific formal and informal rules. Future macro‐micro research enables one to show how the career models can be traced to the career experiences and practices. Micro‐macro research allows one to see how the aggregate outcomes of individual actions can be traced to the overall performance of a given higher education system.

This conceptual paper proposes a neo‐institutional framework for analysing academic careers. This approach is useful for cross‐national comparisons, the study of emerging new career models and practices in academe, and the study of macro‐micro‐links in career research.

The boom in online products and services is radically changing many aspects of both the economy and everyday life, and will increasingly affect individuals’ learning needs. This article examines how education systems see their role in the “new economy”, and the means by which they can prepare students for the new tasks, challenges and opportunities they will encounter, while still having to cope with the constraints and contradictions affecting how they operate today.

The purpose of this paper is to address the key developments concerning innovation at universities at a macro level. It describes the key trends and changes in the governance of universities and the transformation of universities into organizational actors. This also affects the governance on academic research in the sense that it leads to a gradual evolution of the specific public science system in which research is being initiated and executed.

Cultural evolution involves social articulation and transmission of knowledge. What makes a culture distinctive is how it distributes interactions in the information-space.

The innovation policies of the European Union play a noticeable, but not yet dominant, role in the EU member states, at least not in the large member states. The wide gap between the North of Europe and the South and East of Europe in innovative performance is – despite the innovation policies of the European Union – still difficult to overcome.

The actual innovative performance of ten European countries has been evaluated. Northern European countries show a higher score on the Innovation Index, whereas countries in Southern Europe score relatively low. Can we relate this difference to cultural factors?

States that the participation of men and women in the German academic and scientific system is unequally distributed. Shows that the higher the status at the university, the lower the female proportion and that women also choose different subjects to men. Asks why more men choose science and engineering and what social cognitive characteristics do women show who opt for a “male” subject. Presents the theoretical background to the above before providing some insights using surveys carried out in Germany.

The libraries of more and more universities and research institutions have local digital repositories, and the amount of material is increasing every day. Users need an integrated retrieval interface that allows aggregated searching across multiple document servers without having to resort to manual processes. ProPrint offers an on‐demand print service within Germany for over 2,000 monographs and 1,000 journals. Partners worldwide are now invited to join.

Higher education institutions have undergone a transformation over the past few decades, from loosely coupled systems to more centrally managed organizations. Central to this ongoing development is the increasing competition for resources and reputation, driving higher education institutions to rationalize their structures and practices. In our study, we focused on changes in job advertisements for professorships in Germany from 1990 to 2010. Findings showed that the requirements stipulated by universities for professorial positions have become increasingly differentiated (and measurable) over time. In this context, competitive aspects, such as third-party funding, international orientation, or publications, have particularly come to the fore and grown significantly in importance. We discuss these findings in light of an increasing managerialization of higher education institutions, which has a direct effect on collegiality. We argue that the differentiation of professorial job profiles leads to even more formalized appointment processes and may push collegial governance into the background.

University reforms have been pervasive in European higher education over decades. Analyses of these reforms are still incomplete, however. To find a more comprehensive approach in explaining the relentless transformation of public universities, this paper suggests a novel, interactionist point of view. Drawing on ideational aspects of universities as institutions, the paper first explores the differentiation of basic, influential ideas of change. A recently developed typology is then used to further elaborate upon the composition and relation of these ideas. Finally, evidence is provided that supports a non-linear dynamic consisting of reciprocal influences, which overall indicates a recursive contingency between institutional context and coexistent frames of change.