The Global Scale in Higher Education and Research

Along with communications, higher education and research are among the most globalized sectors, and this continued in the decade after 2010 when there was a partial retreat from globalization of the political economy. In science the global system has arguably become primary in terms of knowledge formation, though the national scale remains highly determining in institutional higher education. The chapter discusses the main features of globalization in higher education and science (global systems, global connections, and global diffusion) and reviews the relationship between the global science system and the connected national science systems. It finishes with a discussion of scale and its materiality, and reflects on the potential contribution of plural scalar perspectives and Amartya Sen’s transpositional analytical framework to understandings of higher education.