This article investigates the form of European universities to determine the extent to which they resemble the characteristics of complete organizations and whether the forms are associated with modernization policy pressure, national institutional frames and organizational characteristics. An original data set of twenty-six universities from eight countries was used. Specialist universities have a stronger identity, whereas the level of hierarchy and rationality is clearly associated with the intensity of modernization policies. At the same time, evidence suggests limitations for universities to become complete, as mechanisms allowing the development of some dimensions seemingly constrain the capability to develop others.

n recent decades internationalization has risen to prominence in higher edu-cation institutions (HEIs). Scholars have identified several rationales for internationaliza-tion. There is however a lack of conceptual understanding and empirical evidence forwhich rationale(s) for internationalization are chosen by a given HEI and why. The goal ofthis article is to fill this gap. We develop and test a conceptual framework to predict thesalience of a given rationale for a specific HEI. The framework integrates factors atmultiple levels, namely competitive and institutional forces in the global and nationalcontexts, the organizational goals and the influence of internal actors. The empiricalanalysis employs information on more than 400 European HEIs from two large datasets ontheir organizational characteristics and from a large-scale survey on internationalization ofuniversities. The findings show that the HEIs embedded in a global context more fre-quently conceive internationalization as an instrumental to prestige. The national contextsdo not greatly affect HEIs’ rationales, and the amount of res.ources is less important thanthe competition for resources. Organizational goals as well as the influence of students,faculty members and middle managers on the internationalization process partly predict theprominence of specific rationales. The paper closes discussing the findings and theimplication for scholarly researc

There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices that challenge the scientific ethos, and the individual and contextual factors that affect their likelihood. This article aims to fill these gaps by studying the opportunistic use of selfcitations, i.e. citations of one's own work to boost metric scores. Based on sociological and economic literature exploring the factors driving scientists' behaviour, we develop hypotheses on the predictors of strategic increase in self-citations. We test the hypotheses in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received. The sample includes 886 scientists from four of science's main disciplinary sectors, employs different metrics approaches, and covers an observation period beginning in 2002 and ending in 2014. We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that while metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices.

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