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Iryna Kushnir, Vitaliy Shpachuk, Sharifah Intan Sharina Syed-Abdullah
English higher education (HE) is experiencing acute financial instability, driven by rising staff and compliance costs, a cap on tuition fees, and declining international student income. This article offers the first synthesis of recent fragmented scholarship on how English universities are responding to these pressures, using Resource Dependence Theory (RDT). A scoping literature review of peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025 was conducted using Scopus with predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Records were screened for relevance and eligibility, and findings were analysed through thematic analysis; the review was complemented by case studies of three English universities to contextualise sector-wide patterns. Seventeen records were identified and sixteen studies met the inclusion criteria. Four strategic response patterns were identified: buffering (for example, voluntary redundancy schemes, course closures and operational streamlining), bridging (for example, internationalisation, industry partnerships and digital provision), restructuring (for example, intensified managerial control and consultancy logics) and sustainability, which emerged as a cross-cutting but fragile concern shaped by stakeholder power and financial slack. The findings suggest that, while universities display adaptive capacity, many responses generate new or intensified resource dependencies. More holistic approaches are therefore needed that balance financial efficiency with academic integrity, public purpose, stakeholder legitimacy, environmental sustainability and the governance implications of artificial intelligence.
23 September 2026
John Muellbauer
Many of the UK’s current economic and social problems, including its housing affordability crisis, can be traced to decades of land and housing policy failures. The role of land markets is strongly dependent on institutions, including land use regulation, financial regulation and property taxation. Transformative but deleterious changes to the institutional framework in the 1980s, that have persisted until recently, have resulted in high and volatile land prices (with several booms and busts in credit and house prices). The associated speculation diverted financial flows from more productive investment, damaging growth and competitiveness, and increasing financial instability risks. Policy remedies require a holistic package. This includes planning reform, land-value capture, expanding the social housing stock and reforming a dysfunctional property tax system.
21 September 2026
Cheryl Saunders
This essay explores the role of the idea of an imaginary in understanding the diversity of the constitutional systems of the world. It adapts to constitutional purposes Charles Taylor’s explanation of an imaginary as ‘that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. It extrapolates general characteristics of imaginaries from Taylor’s account of the Western imaginary to assist understanding of the imaginaries of communities elsewhere and to explain how and why they may differ from each other. The essay argues that the idea of an imaginary may have explanatory power in a range of significant constitutional contexts in the current age of globalisation. It illustrates the point by examining the potential relevance of imaginaries in constitution-making and implementation; activities that have been widespread across the world since the end of the cold war, with mixed results. It concludes by speculating about the implications for imaginaries of the current world disorder and suggesting that imaginaries might have new applications in these unpromising conditions.
16 September 2026
John Muellbauer
Many of the UK’s current economic and social problems, including its housing affordability crisis, can be traced to decades of land and housing policy failures. The role of land markets is strongly dependent on institutions, including land use regulation, financial regulation and property taxation. Transformative but deleterious changes to the institutional framework in the 1980s, that have persisted until recently, have resulted in high and volatile land prices (with several booms and busts in credit and house prices). The associated speculation diverted financial flows from more productive investment, damaging growth and competitiveness, and increasing financial instability risks. Policy remedies require a holistic package. This includes planning reform, land-value capture, expanding the social housing stock and reforming a dysfunctional property tax system.
21 September 2026
Cheryl Saunders
This essay explores the role of the idea of an imaginary in understanding the diversity of the constitutional systems of the world. It adapts to constitutional purposes Charles Taylor’s explanation of an imaginary as ‘that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. It extrapolates general characteristics of imaginaries from Taylor’s account of the Western imaginary to assist understanding of the imaginaries of communities elsewhere and to explain how and why they may differ from each other. The essay argues that the idea of an imaginary may have explanatory power in a range of significant constitutional contexts in the current age of globalisation. It illustrates the point by examining the potential relevance of imaginaries in constitution-making and implementation; activities that have been widespread across the world since the end of the cold war, with mixed results. It concludes by speculating about the implications for imaginaries of the current world disorder and suggesting that imaginaries might have new applications in these unpromising conditions.
16 September 2026
Elizabeth Edwards, Hilary Graham, Andrew Hadfield, Pablo Mukherjee, Mike Savage
The Editors introduce the second issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
17 June 2026
Eva Moreda Rodríguez
While the transnational and translational ramifications of art song have started to attract attention in recent years, there is little critical understanding of the unique modalities in which multilingualism expresses itself in the genre. In this context, this article has a two-fold aim. Firstly, drawing upon scholarship both on art song and Multilingualism Studies, I map out what I call the linguistic regime of art song, defined by the multilingual competences expected of individuals active in the art song ecosystem (singers, composers, translators, coaches, audiences) and the hegemony of certain languages over others. Secondly, on the basis of an empirical experiment involving practice-led research in singing, I consider how engagement with songs in lesser represented languages might be encouraged, and how such engagement might help expand and/or challenge some aspects of the linguistic regime of art song.
16 June 2026