ABSTRACT
At a time when competition among institutions is rising and higher education, research, and innovation are seen by national governments as strategic goals for the economic development of knowledge economies, two main issues are at stake. The first relates to the structure of higher education systems and the kind of institutional design that might be adopted in order to improve their efficiency. In many countries, similar, but sometimes conflicting, answers are found in relation to, for instance, the transformation of relationships between the state and organized higher education interests on the one hand, and autonomous higher education institutions on the other (see, for instance, Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson, 2000; Amaral et al., 2002; Musselin, 2006; Krücken and Meier, 2006).
