Universities everywhere are being forced to carefully reconsider their role in society and to evaluate the relationships with their various constituencies, stakeholders, and communities. In this article, stakeholder analysis is put forward as a tool to assist universities in classifying stakeholders and determining stakeholder salience. Increasingly universities are expected to assume a third mission and to engage in interactions with industrial and regional partners. While incentive schemes and government programmes try to encourage universities to reach out more to external communities, some important barriers to such linkages still remain. To fulfil their obligation towards being a socially accountable institution and to prevent mission overload, universities will have to carefully select their stakeholders and identify the 'right' degree of differentiation. For the university, thinking in terms of partnerships with key stakeholders has important implications for its governance and accountability arrangements. For the future of the universities we foresee a change towards networked governance and arrangements to ensure accountability along the lines of corporate social responsibility. In order to further explore some of these concepts and to empirically investigate the tendencies suggested here, this article proposes an ambitious research agenda for tackling the emerging issues of governance, stakeholder management and higher education's interaction with society.

The new phenomenon of European integration has again challenged our conceptual and empirical tools for higher education studies to integrate the international dimension into frameworks that tend to concentrate on the single nation state and domestic policies even where international comparisons are made. It drives as well the awareness of certain blind spots: namely (1) the concentration on policy effects, neglecting the input side of policy formation, and (2) the concern with macro level policy-making and meso level organisational adaptation, neglecting to some extend the micro dynamics and effects in the actual practices and performances of academic work. This paper makes an attempt to contribute from a certain perspective on governance studies to the ongoing debate on the challenges "internationalisation" or "globalisation" bring up for higher education policy analyses and especially for comparative research in that area. The development of governance theory towards a multi-level and multi-actor approach is discussed and its strengths and weaknesses for higher education studies in an internationalising environment are addressed.

During the past few decades traditional state-centred governing arrangements have been critiqued and replaced by alternative modes of governance. Higher education is one of the public sectors where such shifts in governance have been seen. As a consequence of the reshuffl ing of authority and responsibilities across the different levels in Dutch higher education, universities as organizations have become important foci of attention in the system ' s coordination. The main question addressed in this article is to what extent we can speak of an organizational transformation of Dutch universities. Based on conceptual ideas from researchers such as Hinings (1996), Ferlie et al. (1996) , and Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson (2000) , we use a framework that focuses attention on the concepts of the construction of identity, hierarchy and rationality to systematically analyse the various aspects of transformations of professional organizations.

The main aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of organizational autonomy and control in higher education reform and related expectations as regards the performance of universities. Our analyses draws on principal-agent models as a normative theory of policy reform, and institutionalist approaches in public policy and institutional design as an analytical theory of policy reform. We discuss how the dominant narrative of political reform moves away from traditional beliefs in university autonomy that are built on institutional trust and linked to professional autonomy. In the emerging narrative of political change, autonomy becomes re-defined as the 'new organizational autonomy' of universities as both strategic actors and as an addressee of governmental control. The concept of 'regulatory autonomy' captures the use of organizational autonomy of universities as a tool of a new regime of governmental control. Exemplified by the Dutch case, we analyze autonomy policies for strengthening managerial discretion and internal control of universities that are combined with regulatory policies for external control that steer organizational choices. Regulatory autonomy thus aims at aligning universities more closely with governmental goals and improve respective performance. Our literature review shows, however, that there is scarce, inconclusive and methodologically problematic evidence for a link between 'organizational autonomy and performance'. We point at promising avenues for further research on autonomy and performance as two core concepts in the contemporary higher education debate.

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