This
paper is concerned with providing an analytical understanding of the way decision-making
power works in higher level education and research institutes
cross-nationally.
It draws on documentary and interview data from a purposive sample of twenty-five people involved in power
structures in academic organizations in Ireland, Turkey and Italy. Drawing particularly on Lukes’ (2005, 1974) work it looks first at the
centralization of power at the level of strategy and resource allocation. It then identifies three kinds of practices
that obscure that centralization: ‘talking shops’; loyalty to positional power
holders and the absence of alternatives. In contrast to the similarities
existing cross-nationally in the centralization of power, there was evidence of
some local variation in such practices. Local variation also existed in the perceived
legitimacy of power in general, with Irish women being most likely to make visible
gendered power in particular.