This case study probes recent developments in a number of academic and non-academic aspects of a private research university in response to current globalization trends. Under the name of internationalization, university administrators and external firms are emerging as powerful decision-makers shaping academic content and even academic governance. This is manifested in student recruitment and in the hiring of prestigious professors and researchers to increase university reputation and thus to appeal to more students and secure more research funds. Among disciplines central to economic and technological globalization, such as communication, business, and engineering, patterns of convergence are emerging. Rather than internationalism, internationalization is found to prevail, and internationalization is found to signify predominantly a search for student markets domestically and abroad rather than positioning the university's knowledge at the service of others in less advantaged parts of the world.

IntroductionDerided by institutions and governments when it first appeared three decades ago, the concept of women's empowerment has now become highly esteemed, though judging from available literature, it is still much more in use in the women's movement and among international development agencies than in the academic world. Women's empowerment figures explicitly as a fundamental piece of the policies adopted by international development agencies, but in contrast is given weak treatment by educational publications. A review of article titles in three prestigious comparative education journals (Comparative Education Review, Compare, and the European Journal of Education) over the past 10 years identified a total of three articles using 'empowerment' in their title.This article examines empowerment as a theory of social change and addresses the realities of women in both developing and industrialised countries which, though different in degree, present significant commonalities that cut national boundaries and even levels of socioeconomic development. It comprises five parts: the first discusses the concept of empowerment and its theoretical architecture; the second deals with the role of formal education in the empowering of girls; the third examines the contributions of non-formal education to empowering adult women; the fourth considers the role of women-led NGOs as key actors in the promotion of empowerment; and the fifth provides examples of successful instances of the implementation of empowerment through education. The article concludes with an assessment of the possibilities for and challenges to making empowerment a concrete reality.

Organisational efforts to alter gender asymmetries are relatively rare, yet they are taking place in a number of universities. In the USA, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, ADVANCE programmes implement a number of interventions to improve the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women faculty. This study focused on one common intervention, faculty peer networks, and the role they play in gender equity reform. Longitudinal and cross-sectional qualitative data indicate that such peer networks function as catalysts for women's career agency, and challenge gendered organisational practices. Two key features of the peer networks, their structure and internal dynamics, facilitate these outcomes. At the same time, peer networks are limited by design in promoting structural change and must be implemented in concert with other forms of policy and structural change to be effective mechanisms for gender equity reform.

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