Structuring the Field of Excellence: A Comparative View on Policies in Four European Countries (England, France, Germany and Italy)

The paper analyses the policies for excellence on the background of the wider structural changes in which they are embedded and by which they derive their contents and orientations. It focuses on the policies for excellence enacted in the four national system distinguishing the two main domain to which they are addressed to, namely research and teaching. Finally, we provide a synthetic comparative framework underlining both differences and commonalities characterizing those policies in the four countries and we attempt a first provisional interpretation of excellence policy basing it on the concept of field structuration.