Title: Governance of academic laboratories and the capabilisation of higher education students

Authors: Bruno F. Abrantes

Addresses: GENIE Center for Global Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Copenhagen Business College, Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract: Several education theorists advocate a capabilisation model based upon two pillars: professional emancipation and activation for citizenship comprised a balanced delivery of technical and research competences (TRC) and cross-disciplinary competences (CDC). Hence, this research makes a theoretical review of education governance literature and tests the capabilisation at Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Denmark confined to a subset of educational support infrastructures - academic laboratories (ALs) - to grasp their contribution to HES capabilisation, which constitutes a fairly unexplored research gap. The empirical paradigm consists of an iteration along a purposive sample of 15 HEIs. Results uncover a mismatch among national policies, universities/colleges' governance and firm expectations on graduate's competencies. A capability-gap is acknowledged concerning budgetary expenditure to education versus budgetary efficiency in graduate employment rates (GER); and between firm's capability-requirements (CR) and HES capability-delivery (CD) to the industry. The latter suggests the notion of capability-fitness, which constitutes the micro foundation for the balanced model of higher education student's capabilisation (BHESC) design.

Keywords: academic laboratories; BHESC taxonomy; capability-fitness; CDC; cross-disciplinary competence; HEI; higher education institution; TCL; transversal competences laboratory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIE.2020.105406

International Journal of Management in Education, 2020 Vol.14 No.2, pp.135 - 158

Received: 23 Oct 2018
Accepted: 13 Feb 2019

Published online: 28 Feb 2020 *

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