units carry out their work. As the scope ofdevelopment units become established, new careeropportunities for experienced developers emerge.Five personal accounts of different senior roleswithin development units and the skills and abilitiesthat they require are offered in chapter nine.Graham Webb in Chapter 10 looks back on 30

years of professional development experience. Hebegins by reminding us that the work of develop-ment units remains peripheral to the concerns ofmost HEIs, since ‘‘in most of the world theUniversity teacher is non credentialed, unprofes-sionalised and untrained in the practice of HEteaching and ignorant of, uninterested in or toobusy to worry about the discourse’’ (p. 172).Relationships with senior management are againcrucial in determining the institutional supportsuch units obtain when meeting resistance, and sothe extent to which they can genuinely contributeto the improvement of teaching and learningwhich is after all their raison d’etre. There isthough life after development, and the chapterconcludes by assessing the experience that devel-opers acquire through their need to work flexiblywith a range of other professions and disciplineswithin complex organisational systems, and itsvalue in contexts beyond HEIs.

The final chapter draws on the previouscontributions and the writer’s experience tosuggest ways forward for the profession. Itreiterates the need for development units tobecome involved in developing institutional policyand strategy, if they are to contribute fully todeveloping the teachers, innovators, educationalprocesses and systems that will ultimately deter-mine how easily their institutions are able tocontinue to develop themselves.Societal expectations that HEIs should

provide high-quality teaching and learning, ap-propriate to a fast changing world, for anever growing student population, are more orless global today, although, as pointed outabove, their implications for traditional academiclife remain largely ignored. Thus althoughthis book is firmly situated in the Anglo-Austra-lian context, the issues discussed are of relevanceto a far wider audience, even if they do not yetknow it.

Martin WedellHead of International Development, School of

Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

E-mail address: m.wedell@education.leeds.ac.uk

10.1016/j.ijedudev.2004.09.014

Clive R. Belfield, Henry M. Levin (Eds.), The

Economics of Higher Education, The International

Library of Critical Writings in Economics, Elgar

Reference Collection, Cheltenham, UK and North-

ampton MA, USA, ISBN 1-84376-062-2, 2003

(719pp., £175.00).David Bridges

This book is the 165th volume of a series whichalready numbers 169 and for which a further 50titles are already announced, so presumably thepublishers have tapped a rich demand for compi-lations of this size and price. The economics of thepublishing industry continue to amaze me. Per-haps this will be the focus of a future volume inthis series.What you get for your £175 is a collection of 37

papers, all of them previously published in

journals (mainly) or edited books. Two earlypieces include Kenneth Arrow’s 1973 paper on‘Higher education as a filter’ (1973) and WilliamBecker’s ‘The university professor as a utilitymaximizer and producer of learning, research andincome’ (1974), both of which have a perfectlycontemporary ring. Only three of the papers werepublished after 2000, however, which, given theintense debates on the subject of the economics ofhigher education in the last few years, mightsuggest that the book’s value lies in its mapping ofthe territory rather than the immediacy of itscontent. From this point of view, however, it is alittle disappointing that the introductory chapterruns to a rather cursory eight pages. Someoneapproaching it with relatively little knowledge ofthe academic literature on the economics of higher

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education but wanting to understand what thisliterature has to contribute to wider policydebates, would, I imagine, welcome somethingwhich gives more shape to the field and the lines ofdebate and difference between those professionallyengaged in it. The separate sections on economicbenefits of higher education, student demand andstudent preference, technology and production ofhigher education; costs, financing higher educa-tion, and markets and competition might similarlyhave benefited from an introductory essay. This is,however, a compilation with minimal editorialinterference or contribution. The papers are forthe most part published as facsimiles of theiroriginal published form, so there is not evenconsistency of format, and the only index is anindex of names.The tone of the volume is set in the opening

words of the introduction: ‘‘Higher education isbig business—in the United States alone, 2.4million degrees were awarded during the1999–2000 academic year, from over 4000 publicand private degree-granting colleges and universi-tiesy. In the financial year 1997, current fundrevenues for public and not-for-profit US uni-versities were $330 billion or approximately 2.5%of Gross Domestic Product. A business of this sizeis ripe for economic analysis’’ (p.2). Indeed so—but this acknowledgement of the editors’ motiva-tion should warn us to expect a fairly narrowlydefined construction of the territory of economics(don’t anticipate any excursion into politicaleconomy or micro-economic systems), of themetrics of success (Amartya Sen does not evenmerit a reference in the 719 pages), and of the

world as viewed by these economists (the advancedindustrial world and in particular the UnitedStates). Only two papers directly address issuesof the developing world. One of these, by NancyBirdsall of the Inter American Development Bankis entitled ‘Public spending on higher education indeveloping countries: too much or too little?’, andthe second by George Psacharopolous of theWorld Bank is on ‘The economics of highereducation in developing countries’ but since thefirst was first published in 1996 and the second in1982, they miss out on the considerable body ofnew analysis and policy debate which hasappeared in the last 8 years. Their ‘Bank’perspectives also ensure an analysis almost totallydevoid of local contextual awareness.I do feel that those of us engaged in educational

policy and development need to be better informedby the perspectives that economists can bring tothe field of higher education, and there is materialhere that I shall dip into as I assemble my ownthoughts on, for example, the role of highereducation in regional development. It is probablya useful resource on library shelves (I can’timagine many individual purchasers at this price)but it mainly confirms me in the opinion that thereis another book which needs to be produced of amore rounded and grounded character and a moredevelopmental orientation.

David BridgesCentre for Applied Research in Education,

University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

E-mail address: d.bridges@uea.ac.uk (D. Bridges)

10.1016/j.ijedudev.2004.09.015

Hilary Perraton, Helen Lentell (Eds.), Policy for

Open and Distance Learning, Routledge Falmer in

association with the Commonwealth of Learning,

London, ISBN 0-415-26306-9 (hbk), 0-415-26307-7

(pbk), 2004 (259pp., and index).Terry Evans

This collection is the fourth volume in theCommonwealth of Learning’s World Review

of Distance Education and Open Learning series.It is a collection of 13 chapters from contributorsfrom approximately seven nations but withsubstantial experiences ranging more broadly.The book is organised into five parts: ThePolicy Agenda and its Context; Inputs; Process;Outputs; and Conclusion. The chapters covermatters such as human, physical and technological

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