LAUSR

handle the theme of his text, which is basically the ‘shape-shifting’ of the German (Humboldtian) university as it moves into the USA. Not many people have tackled this theme well – although Herman Röhrs was an early exception. And one of the reasons why not many people have tackled this theme well is that this is not a comparative-education-by-juxtaposition which leads to policy advice. Shape-shifting has not been a salient theme –while obviously it should be, given the plethora of loud contemporary voices advocating the international ‘transfer’ of simplistic solutions to complex problems. Secondly, the book stands alone in the sense that it comes from a theory of ‘design’, a theory from the literature on administration and leadership, which shows the deliberate changing of ‘the German university’ in the USA in response to a sense of the changing sociology, politics and economics in the USA in specific local circumstances. The book is a remarkable example not merely of a comparative education which traces the theme of ‘as it moves, it morphs’, but also of the interplay of domestic and international politics in the construction of a university system. Thirdly, the book manages – almost en passant – a severe critique of the intellectual banalities, offered in the name of the World Bank, that are in the concept and in the dangers of the pursuit of ‘world-class universities’. Meyer uses this as ‘a hook’ at the front of the book – but that does not mean that the opening, which rapidly extends to ‘rankings’, can easily be dismissed as trivial. ‘The hook’, like the rest of the book, is a serious work of critique and academic scholarship. The strategic theme is ‘institutional learning’. The book is a sustained theoretical interpretation of a complex but coherent set of ideas. The significance of the theory is stated abstractly and then re-examined through a great deal of detailed narrative and good sociological thinking. This book is a sustained high-wire theoretical (and untheatrical) performance. It is outstanding in the contemporary literature on comparative higher education. I believe that it will, in the longer term, become recognised as a contemporary classic in that literature. Meyer’s invocation of Tocqueville and Weber and Mary Douglas is not ritualistic. He too has aimed high. His work is serious.