Leadership development (LD) activity and its effectiveness has not been explored rigorously across changing university settings globally. As Higher Education settings change radically throughout the world, Higher Education professionals are operating in more uncertain environments, and leaders are taking increasingly complex and diverse approaches to their leadership roles. LD activities therefore become important in supporting this highly complex context, yet little is known in the literature about LD and its impact in Higher Education. We examine peer‐reviewed work on LD in Higher Education settings globally to understand what may be learned about its content, processes, outcomes and impact. Our results suggest the current literature is small‐scale, fragmented and often theoretically weak, with many different and coexisting models, approaches and methods, and little consensus on what may be suitable and effective in the Higher Education context. We reflect on this state of play and develop a novel theoretical approach for designing LD activity in Higher Education institutions.

The paper contributes to the literature of multi-level welfare governance and public accountability in the context of recent European hospital reforms. Focusing on the changing dynamics between regional and central governance of hospitals in Germany, Norway and Denmark, we raise concerns about the reshaping of traditional public accountability mechanisms. We argue that, triggered by growing financial pressures, corporatization and professionalization processes have increasingly removed decisionmaking power from regional political bodies in hospital funding and planning. National governments have tightened their control over the overall trajectory of their hospital systems, but they have also shifted significant responsibility downwards to the hospitallevel. This has reshaped public accountability relationships towards more managerial or professional types of accountability embedded within multi-level forms of governance.

Doctoral students have often been described as apprentices engaged in workplace learning. Further, assumptions are frequently made in the literature about the common nature of such learning experiences, e.g., in the sciences, research-related practices are learned in a lab within the supervisor’s program and team. A few recent studies of the science doctoral experience have challenged this view arguing such assumptions may overlook considerable variation. This longitudinal study, using frequently completed activity logs and an interview, reports on the research-related practices of twelve UK science doctoral students. The analysis, particularly of the logs, challenged some of the literature-based assumptions: students often chose to work in institutional offices, non-institutional sites and their homes rather than in labs; they did not necessarily engage regularly with a research team, nor were they necessarily engaged in a project directly linked to their supervisors’. That students chose not to work in traditionally assumed places suggests the importance of attending to: a) student agency, b) how research-related practices may be changing, and c) how sites of doctoral learning might need to be reconceived. As well, the findings suggest the value of non-traditional data collection methods in capturing variation in experience.