0000000000606939
AUTHOR
Jana Bacevic
University Autonomy, Agenda Setting and the Construction of Agency : the case of the European University Association in the European Higher Education Area
This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of ‘autonomy’ as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and Jepperson's heuristic of agentic actors, to show how the practice of knowledge production can shape the European higher education policy. The article offers a contribution to the debate aiming to develop a more critical perspective on the development of the European Higher Education Area, which sees the process as constituted through the activities of, and t…
Agenda Setting and Policy Development, Higher Education
Agenda setting is one of key concepts in the critical or interpretative approaches in the study of policy development. Developed in response to positivist paradigms, which saw policies as largely technical solutions to objectively existing problems, critical or interpretive analysis emphasises the constructed, contingent, and processual nature of policies, in particular the role of differently positioned actors in bringing specific issues to the fore (Fischer, 2003). In this sense, the use of agenda setting in the research on higher education policy is fundamentally related to the questions of political power and influence, and thus to the relationship between longer-term structural change …