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This paper examines how two Portuguese women rectors constructed narratives on their path to leadership positions and their performance of leadership roles. The study is based on a qualitative empirical analysis based on life story interviews with two women rectors in Portugal. The results from this research suggest that women rectors tend to develop narratives about their professional route to the top as based on merit and hard work, and tend to classify their leadership experience as gender-neutral and grounded on the establishment of good relationships with their peers along their professional path. These narratives may contribute to reinforcing the male norm that leads other women to blame themselves for not being able to progress in their career, hindering the creation of an organisational environment that is open to the development of institutional policies to improve equal opportunities. Portugal is a very interesting case study, considering that despite the long history of its higher education system and the high participation of women in higher education, there were only two women rectors in the country until 2014.

Portuguese higher education institutions (HEIs) are excellent case-studies of women representation in academia, considering their significant presence and rapid growth in HEIs. Nevertheless, and despite efforts to minimise gender gaps, women are still underrepresented in top management and leading positions, contributing to increment the phenomenon of vertical segregation. Based on the reality of the Portuguese academia, and focusing on an in-depth case study of a Portuguese university, this paper analyses if and how the way decision-making bodies are constituted, influence the gender balance of their members. Recently, within the New Public Management (NPM) context, HEIs have been subjected to external pressures to create a new organisational environment aiming at substituting the collegial model of governance with a managerial one. In this context, there has been a trend to replace the election by the nomination as the dominant process to occupy decision-making positions. The opening hypothesis of this study is that the way decision-making bodies are constituted, impacts on their gender balance. More specifically, it is argued that the nomination process tends to be more advantageous to women than the election. However, although it is possible to conclude that the gender balance decreases with the increasing importance of the decision-making body, it is not accurate to say that there is a direct relationship between the way actors are chosen to these bodies and their gender balance. In other words, the way actors are chosen can not be seen as the only factor influencing the gender constitution of decision-making bodies. The study provides a relevant contribution to the literature on mechanisms and strategies to improve gender equality in institutional decision-making processes and bodies.

Research into differentiation and profiling of knowledge producing institutions through the lenses of institutional logics and field embeddedness have proliferated in recent years. By discussing this process in the context of research groups, as those basic units in which knowledge production epistemically and practically takes place, this article offers a contribution to the theoretical discussion on organisational differentiation. Based on a small-N comparative case study of research groups operating in different national and organisational contexts on a single, highly competitive and interdisciplinary applied sciences field, nanosciences, the article proposes research group profiles as heuristic devices to explore both the embeddedness and strategic agency of research groups.

Finding the balance between adequately describing the uniqueness of the context of studied phenomena and maintaining sufficient common ground for comparability and analytical generalisation has widely been recognised as a key challenge in international comparative research. Methodological reflections on how to adequately cover context and comparability have extensively been discussed for quantitative survey or secondary data research. In addition, most recently, promising methodological considerations for qualitative comparative research have been suggested in comparative fields related to higher education. The article’s aim is to connect this discussion to comparative higher education research. Thus, the article discusses recent advancements in the methodology of qualitative international comparative research, connects them to older analytical methods that have been used within the field in the 1960s and 1970s, and demonstrates their analytical value based on their application to a qualitative small‐N case study on research groups in diverse organisational contexts in three country contexts.

The chapter demonstrates the relevance of contextual factors in the potential transformation of non-university institutions into ‘technical universities’. The phenomena of professional and academic drift have challenged the pertinence of the existence of binary Higher Education (HE) systems. Portugal and Finland have been facing this problem and the governments of both countries called on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to advise them on the relevance of its maintenance. The chapter aims at enriching the conceptual discussion over the social representation of the ‘technical university’ by discussing the relevance of the context in the evolving process of the actual non-university institutions. Data analysis is supported by empirical evidence gathered through 26 interviews conducted with key actors as well as on content analysis of policy reports in order to understand how the co-existence of different types of higher education institutions (HEI) is envisioned in the two countries. This chapter establishes a linkage to the scope of this volume by evidencing the relevance of contextual factors in the potential transformation of non-university institutions in ‘technical universities’ in the two countries. The results reveal a convergence in the recommendations regarding the maintenance and reinforcement of differentiated HE systems. However, the operationalisation of this differentiation translates into distinct roles for professional institutions in each country, suggesting a path of continuity for Portugal and discontinuity for Finland.

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