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Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.

Higher education institutions have undergone a transformation over the past few decades, from loosely coupled systems to more centrally managed organizations. Central to this ongoing development is the increasing competition for resources and reputation, driving higher education institutions to rationalize their structures and practices. In our study, we focused on changes in job advertisements for professorships in Germany from 1990 to 2010. Findings showed that the requirements stipulated by universities for professorial positions have become increasingly differentiated (and measurable) over time. In this context, competitive aspects, such as third-party funding, international orientation, or publications, have particularly come to the fore and grown significantly in importance. We discuss these findings in light of an increasing managerialization of higher education institutions, which has a direct effect on collegiality. We argue that the differentiation of professorial job profiles leads to even more formalized appointment processes and may push collegial governance into the background.

Neo-institutional theory has been criticized for equating the macrolevel with the realm of unconsciously constraining institutions and the microlevel with the realm of actors’ reflexive agency and the origin of change. Considering the co-constitution of the macro and micro, the authors propose that change can be explained through reflexivity at the microlevel and through unconscious processes that affect the macrolevel. This chapter contributes to neo-institutional theory’s microfoundation by distinguishing four types of institutional changes. It will help institutionalists to become more explicit about what cognitive processes and what field conditions are related to what kinds of agency and change.

Recent changes in university systems, debates on academic freedom, and changing roles of knowledge in society all point to questions regarding how higher education and research should be governed and the role of scientists and faculty in this. Rationalizations of systems of higher education and research have been accompanied by the questioning and erosion of faculty authority and challenges to academic collegiality. In light of these developments, we see a need for a more conceptually precise discussion about what academic collegiality is, how it is practiced, how collegial forms of governance may be supported or challenged by other forms of governance, and finally, why collegial governance of higher education and research is important.

We see collegiality as an institution of self-governance that includes formal rules and structures for decision-making, normative and cognitive underpinnings of identities and purposes, and specific practices. Studies of collegiality then, need to capture structures and rules as well as identities, norms, purposes and practices. Distinguishing between vertical and horizontal collegiality, we show how they balance and support each other.

Universities are subject to mixed modes of governance related to the many tasks and missions that higher education and research is expected to fulfill. Mixed modes of governance also stem from reforms based on widely held ideals of governance and organization. We examine university reforms and challenges to collegiality through the lenses of three ideal types of governance – collegiality, bureaucracy and enterprise – and combinations thereof.

The purpose of this study is to develop a lower bainite structure consists of a dispersion of fine carbide inside plates of bainitic ferrite from chemical composition unmodified conventional pearlitic steel under bainitic transformation and to investigate its effect on tensile properties and wear resistance.

A commercial hypereutectoid pearlitic rail steel was subjected to three different bainitic transformation treatments followed by tempering to develop a desirable microstructure with a DIL805 BÄHR dilatometer. A comprehensive microstructural study was performed by scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy. Finally, the mechanical properties and wear resistance were evaluated by tensile, microhardness, and pin-on-disc tests.

The results showed that the best combination of mechanical properties and sliding wear resistance was obtained in the sample subjected to bainitic transformation at 300°C for 600 s followed by tempering at 400°C for 300 s. This sample, which contained a bainitic ferrite structure, exhibited approximately 20% higher hardness and approximately 53% less mass loss than the as-received pearlitic sample due to the mechanically induced transformation in the contact surface.

Although pearlitic steel is widely used in the construction of railways, recent studies have revealed that bainitic transformation at the same rail steels exhibited higher wear resistance and fatigue strengths than conventional pearlitic rail at the same hardness values. Such a bainitic microstructure can improve the mechanical properties and wear resistance, which is a great interest in the railway industry.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-07-2019-0282/

In the recent era, banking infrastructure constructs various remotely handled platforms for users. However, the security risk toward the banking sector has also elevated, as it is visible from the rising number of reported attacks against these security systems. Intelligence shows that cyberattacks of the crawlers are increasing. Malicious crawlers can crawl the Web pages, crack the passwords and reap the private data of the users. Besides, intrusion detection systems in a dynamic environment provide more false positives. The purpose of this research paper is to propose an efficient methodology to sense the attacks for creating low levels of false positives.

In this research, the authors have developed an efficient approach for malicious crawler detection and correlated the security alerts. The behavioral features of the crawlers are examined for the recognition of the malicious crawlers, and a novel methodology is proposed to improvise the bank user portal security. The authors have compared various machine learning strategies including Bayesian network, support sector machine (SVM) and decision tree.

This proposed work stretches in various aspects. Initially, the outcomes are stated for the mixture of different kinds of log files. Then, distinct sites of various log files are selected for the construction of the acceptable data sets. Session identification, attribute extraction, session labeling and classification were held. Moreover, this approach clustered the meta-alerts into higher level meta-alerts for fusing multistages of attacks and the various types of attacks.

This methodology used incremental clustering techniques and analyzed the probability of existing topologies in SVM classifiers for more deterministic classification. It also enhanced the taxonomy for various domains.