GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO DO ITS JOB. A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GOVERNANCE SHIFTS IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy‐making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education.