European Union

Roland Bloch and Alexander Mitterle

Universities have become central crossing points in modern society. They coproduce the narratives of our time, ranging from politics over neurogenetics to climate change. Universities educate students for diverse roles in society: nurses, musicians, lawyers, physicists, managers, neuroscientists, and philosophers have all been credentialized by higher education systems. In recent decades, there has been a consistent increase in the number of participants in higher education. The move from elite to mass education, has led to the emergence of an expansive, self-enforcing dynamic (Trow 2006).

 

Mass education implies that higher education has become crucial to securing access to labor markets, especially to positions with higher social status (Collins 1979). Over the decades, scholars have confirmed that educational credentials are door openers, which legitimate exclusive access to high-status professions and lead to occupational attainment (Abbott 2005). With the expansion of higher education, a growing differentiation, professionalization, and stratification within higher education systems can be perceived (Teichler 2008). Surprisingly, there has been less attention paid to how exactly the organization and (vertical) structure of higher education impacts on social structures and on occupational attainment. Beyond acknowledging the role of higher education in constructing elites, there has been a serious lack of research on the link between higher education and high-status positions.

 

Bringing the university back in

While acknowledging the important work that emphasizes the role of higher education in reproducing elites, our new book ‘Universities and the Production of Elites. Discourses, Policies, and Strategies of Excellence and Stratification in Higher Education’ (Bloch, Mitterle, Paradeise and Peter 2018) focusses on how universities as organizations produce elites.

 

As education provider and a research institution, the university “forms basic ideologies and creates academic degrees and expertise around these ideologies” (Baker 2014, p. 84). As a “sieve”, “incubator” or “hub” of society (Stevens et al. 2008), it both co-constructs and legitimizes “new classes of personnel with new types of authoritative knowledge” (Meyer 1977, p. 56). As an organization its forms of educational provision and its ties with the labour market are impacted by constant policy changes in the name of internationalization, excellence, New Public Management, quality improvement, efficiency and cost reduction (Paradeise and Thoenig 2015; Bloch and Mitterle 2017).

 

The aim of our book is to highlight the relationship between higher education institutions and the production of elites by focusing on how organizational change and increasing stratification in higher education impact on – or try to adjust to – the production of new elites for labor markets and academia. Its purpose is to provide new empirical and theoretical perspectives on this relationship and it focuses on the role of the university, rather than the labor market.

 

Discourses, policies, and strategies of excellence and stratification

The contributions originate from a small, intense workshop held at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in September 2015. The workshop brought together scholars from Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States to explore these issues. The endeavor is of course much greater than an edited book can handle. We see it as a starting point for a longer discussion. It thus provides relevant theoretical approaches that help to think the relationship anew, such as discourse analysis, new institutionalism, institutional habitus approaches, or visibility theory. The approaches are developed along concrete case studies in the respective countries on multiple levels along which this ordering takes place (such as programs, organizational units, universities, global business school fields, and nation states).

 

The book begins with addressing some of the discursive rationales that underlie recent policy changes toward increasing stratification in higher education and that emphasize individual actorhood, responsiveness, and competition. We then examine how governments take up these rationales – in response to massification and internationalization in higher education – when formulating policy changes. Examples from Finland, France, Germany, and Ireland describe how such policy changes impact on and reshape the structure of higher education systems. Policy devices that exemplify verticality in programs and institutions (such as rankings) are key to implementing and sustaining these changes in higher education. We show how policy devices – as objective status distributors – make hierarchies visible along specific indicators and how such devices impact on universities. Universities respond to these policy changes by adjusting to status demands. Common indicators play an important role in comparative positioning but local organizational arrangements are very heterogeneous. With regard to educational pathways, we draw on case studies from China, the United States, and Germany (business education and doctoral programs) to show how universities and their schools seek to employ international faculty, visualize elite architectures, or build privileged pathways to job positions. Finally, we discuss the role of specific logics of elite production. Examples from the United States and France each show that even if internationalization strategies are in place and although universities are global institutions, they still largely follow national production logics in the way that they educate and socialize their students.

 

Connecting the various empirical studies in this book opens up a new perspective for future research on the nexus between higher education and labor markets. The vertical differences and the way that they rebuild higher education matter, and they matter particularly for educational pathways leading to high-status positions.

 

Roland Bloch is a research associate at the Institute of Sociology and the Center for School and Educational Research at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He received his PhD at University of Leipzig with a dissertation on the study reforms in the course of the Bologna process and has worked on the structure of academic work at German universities. His latest research concerns stratifications in higher education, especially doctoral education.

 

Alexander Mitterle is a research associate at the Institute for Sociology and the Center for School and Educational Research at Martin-Luther-University. His recent research focuses on the development of stratification in German higher education. He has worked and published on various aspects of higher education including internationalization, private higher education, teaching structure and time as well as real-socialist higher education.

 

References

Abbott, A. (2005). ‘Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions‘. Sociological Theory, 23(3), pp. 245–274.

Baker, D.P. (2014). The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Bloch, R. and Mitterle, A. (2017). On stratification in changing higher education: The ‘analysis of status’ revisited, Higher Education, 73(6), pp. 929–946. DOI: 10.1007/s10734-017-0113-5.

Bloch, R., Mitterle, A., Paradeise, C. and Peter, T. (eds.) (2018). Universities and the Production of Elites. Discourses, Policies, and Strategies of Excellence and Stratification in Higher Education. Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Collins, R. (1979). The credential society: an historical sociology of education and stratification. New York: Academic Press.

Meyer, J.W. (1977). The Effects of Education as an Institution. The American Journal of Sociology, 83(1), pp. 55–77.

Paradeise, C. and Thoenig, J.C. (2015). In search of academic quality. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stevens, M.L., Armstrong, E.A. and Arum, R. (2008). Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34(1), pp. 127–151.

Teichler, U. (2008). Diversification? Trends and explanations of the shape and size of higher education, Higher Education, 56(3), pp. 349–379. DOI: 10.1007/s10734-008-9122-8.

Trow, Martin (2006). Reflections on the transition from elite to mass to universal access: forms and phases of higher education in modern societies since WWII. In: James J. F. Forest und Philip G. Altbach eds., International Handbook of Higher Education. Vol. 1. Global Themes and Contemporary Challenges. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 243-280.

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Icap and Others v Commission
Competition
The EU General Court annuls in part the Commission’s decision against the Icap Group in the cartels relating to Yen interest rate derivatives

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EU Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Trade meet on 10 November 2017 in Brussels to discuss the latest developments and prospects for the 11th WTO ministerial conference which will take place from 10 to 13 December in Buenos Aires. The agenda also includes the ongoing negotiations with Mexico and Mercosur as well as the state of play of preparations of the free trade agreement with Japan.

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Twenty-eight years ago today, on 9 November 1989, the people of Berlin – east and west – joined together to dismantle the wall that had cruelly separated their city for twenty-eight years.

It was a momentous event that led to the downfall of the Soviet communist regime, followed eventually by applications to join the European Union by most of the former Iron Curtain countries, fully supported and encouraged by our UK government.

It’s an event worth remembering and celebrating.

But there is also another event that happened on this day in history that we should surely also not forget, but which we cannot celebrate.

On this day, on 9 November 1938, commenced 48-hours of ‘Kristallnacht’, also known as ‘The night of broken glass’.

Throughout Germany and Austria, Nazi Stormtroopers – ‘Brown shirts’ – together with non-Jewish civilians, commenced a co-ordinated series of vicious attacks against Jewish people and their properties.

The name Kristallnacht comes from the millions of fragments of shattered glass strewn across the streets after Jewish homes, shops, buildings, schools, hospitals and synagogues were ransacked and their windows mercilessly smashed with boots and sledge hammers.

Over 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed. At least 91 Jewish people were killed and 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. The two nights of terror were widely reported by the media and sent shock waves around the world.

Soon these events led to the Holocaust, which saw the horrific, industrial-scale murder of 11 million victims across most of Europe, including six million Jewish people.

It was arranged with meticulous calculated efficiency by the Nazi regime, which was only eventually defeated by the combined forces of Russia, USA, Britain and their Allies following a terrifying five-year world war.

But instead of celebrating liberation following the end of Nazism in 1945, half of Europe’s countries were then consumed by another totalitarian regime, Communism.

It was only 44 years later, as the Berlin wall began to crumble, that those countries could see freedom at last.

This was Europe’s gruelling arduous road to peace and liberation that we should surely reflect upon today.

When I visited Amsterdam in September, my Dutch friend said to me, “Why are you doing Brexit? Europe is integrated now!’

Maybe this is something we, as islanders, simply don’t understand as deeply as those who live on the mainland of our continent.

Europe has suffered profound pain on its path to find peace and ‘integration’. It was previously commonplace on our continent for differences between countries to be resolved through violence and war. Indeed, the planet’s two world wars originated right here on our continent.

For many, the Second World War only ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the half of our continent that was hidden from us behind an ‘Iron Curtain’ was liberated at last.

We saw the fall of the oppressive Soviet Union, and many of the countries that had been trapped in its sphere then re-joined our family of countries through the European Union.

Following our continent’s long and harrowing journey, we have found peace, and yes, integration at last.

And yet, in response, Britain is on the road to Brexit, snubbing our friends and neighbours on our own continent, and putting at risk Europe’s profound and remarkable accomplishments of recent decades.

Do we really know what we’re doing?

• Photo of Kristallnacht by Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1970-083-42 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5418870

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Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Egenberger
Principles of Community law
According to Advocate General Tanchev, occupational requirements set by religious organisations are subject to judicial review with respect to alleged unlawful discrimination on the basis of belief

Altun and Others
Social security for migrant workers
According to Advocate General Saugmandsgaard Øe, a national court may, in the event of fraud, disapply the social security certificate of posted workers in the European Union

Espadas Recio
SOPO
The method used in Spain to determine the basis for the calculation of the duration of unemployment benefit for ‘vertical’ part-time workers is contrary to EU law

Maio Marques da Rosa
SOPO
The weekly rest period for workers does not necessarily have to be granted the day following six consecutive working days

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Annual report on the implementation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy
Annual report on the implementation of the Common Security and Defence Policy
Outcome of the trilogue negotiations in view of the first reading agreement - provisional agreement (Rule 69f(4))
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Length of video : 154'
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Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

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EU Finance Ministers of the eurozone meet on 6 November 2017 in Brussels to discuss euro area aspects of the banking union as well as public investment in human capital. Afterwards, in an inclusive format, ministers are preparing for the December Euro Summit, covering topics such as the completion of the banking union and fiscal governance in the euro area.

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DRAFT OPINION on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the European Defence Industrial Development Programme aiming at supporting the competitiveness and innovative capacity of the EU defence industry
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Ioan Mircea Paşcu

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

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Signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Finance Ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to develop a regional capital market in the Baltic states, on 6 November 2017, in Brussels.

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Parliament is inviting African leaders to Brussels on 22 November to discuss development ahead of the next EU-Africa summit. The conference is set to discuss issues such as peace and security, human rights, sustainable development and migration. African political leaders, African Union representatives and UN officials will debate with MEPs, Parliament President Tajani and Federica Mogherini, the EU's foreign affairs chief.

Over the last few decades there have been significant demographic shifts in Africa. Since the 1980s the population has nearly trebled. The continent's population is also very young: 40% is less than 15 years old, while 15-24-year-olds make up another 20%.

This population growth leads to challenges regarding economic growth and job creation, as well as for security, migration and political participation.

The conference on Africa, hosted by the European Parliament will take place in Brussels on 22 November in the run-up to the Africa-EU summit at the end of November in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. You have until 16 November to register for the conference at the Parliament. Check out the link below.

Further information
More information
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Place:        Justus Lipsius building, Brussels
Chair:        Mr. Tarmo Tamm, minister of Rural Affairs of the Republic of Estonia

All times are approximate and subject to change

+/- 08.30          
Arrivals         

 +/- 09.00
Doorstep by Minister Tarmo Tamm

+/- 10.00
Beginning of the meeting (Roundtable - TV/Photo opportunity)
Adoption of the agenda
Adoption of non-legislative A items
Adoption of legislative A items (public session) 

AGRICULTURE

+/- 10.10
Sustainable use of pesticides (public session)
+/- 11.40
Any other business:
- Outcome of the summit on "Equal quality of products for all" (public session)
+/- 12.00     
Sustainable soil management

+/- 15.00    
Trade-related agricultural issues
+/- 16.30     
Any other business:
- Outcome of the meeting of the Visegrad group on:
   - renewable energey directive
   -  BIOEAST

+/- 17.10     
Press conference with Commissioner Hogan  (live streaming)

 

On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, the European Union commends the work of journalists in uncovering abuses of power, shining a light on corruption and human right violations, and questioning received opinion, often putting themselves at risk of intimidation, violence and death. An independent and free media is the basis of a participatory and pluralist democracy, and a tool to make governments accountable for their actions.

An attack on journalists represents an attack on democracy and pluralistic societies. Information comes to us at a price: journalists are still being persecuted, detained or even killed, not only in situations of armed conflict, but also in peacetime, including in the European Union, as we have sadly witnessed only a few weeks ago. Violence against journalists and media actors not only represents an attack on the victim, but also limits the ability of the public to access information and ideas of all kinds, both online and offline.

The EU will continue to use all appropriate external policy and financial instruments to enhance the quality of journalism, access to public information and freedom of expression. The EU plays a key role in funding the European Centre for Press and Media freedom (ECPMF) and provides targeted protection through Human Rights Defenders programmes.

We condemn killings, acts of violence, intimidation and harassment against journalists and other media actors in the strongest possible terms. We expect State authorities to uphold their international obligations by protecting journalists against intimidation, threats and violence, irrespective of their source, whether governmental, judicial, religious, economic or criminal. Any alleged unlawful killing, ill-treatment, threat or attack against journalists, whether by State or non-State actors, should be promptly investigated in an effective and independent manner, with a view to prosecuting the perpetrators of such crimes and bringing them to justice. Any impunity for these crimes is a blow to democracy and to the fundamental rights such as freedom of expression.

 

Catalonia's suspended president Carles Puigdemont, who is facing charges of rebellion, said on Tuesday in Brussels that he will only return to Spain if he is guaranteed a fair trial. If he fails to appear in court on Thursday an arrest warrant could be issued against him. Commentators take stock of Puigdemont's appearance in Belgium.