Editorial Introduction

The higher education research community is steadily increasing in size and influence. Much of the interest in higher education research remains, however, at the level of critique of trends in policy or evaluation of the effectiveness of changes in practice. On the basis of an analysis of the implicit or explicit use of theory in contributions to 17 higher education journals in 2000, one of us concluded that higher education researchers constituted an a-theoretical community of practice (Tight, 2004). A more recent analysis (Tight, 2012) seems to suggest that, over time, there is more theoretical engagement present in journal articles. The other editor (Huisman, 2009) has argued that much could be gained if higher education researchers would make much more use of theoretical insights and frameworks from the social science disciplines.