The dimensions of social dynamics in comparative studies on higher education

This article discusses social dynamics of higher education which is one of the most crucial but neglected perspectives in comparative studies of higher education. We pay attention to the importance of time, space and contexts—both geographical and socio-cultural ones—to reveal how they influence on different social dynamics in various systems of higher education. The article focuses on the national higher education system level. Theoretically we approach higher education systems from a relational perspective paying attention to dynamics created by changing relationships between different actors in cultural, geographical and historical contexts. peerReviewed

Institutional Autonomy and the Attractiveness of the European Higher Education Area – Facts or Tokenistic Discourse?

In the discourse of the Bologna Process, the notion of competitiveness as the focal goal of Bologna Process, and university autonomy as one of its founding principles are consistently linked. Autonomy is framed as a precondition of competitiveness, while competitiveness is framed in terms of attractiveness of European higher education and higher education institutions. This paper examines their relationship, discussing whether there is ground for the repeated policy argument of their going hand in hand. Do the more attractive countries have higher autonomy, are the countries with higher autonomy more attractive? Or are these phenomena linked only in the simplified arguments of the policy di…

Legitimations of Finnish education export–exploring the plurality of guiding principles

This paper explores the legitimation of Finnish education export (EE) activities linked to higher education institutions. As a small non-English speaking country with only recent involvement in the EE market, Finland provides an underexplored context to consider the legitimation of overseas, fee-based educational services from the perspective of EE providers. In this qualitative case study comprising two Finnish EE endeavours, we draw on convention theory to argue that the legitimation of education export is based on multiple roles of such export, not just on generating revenue for the provider institution. We show that legitimations are linked to multiple guiding principles, illustrated in…

Rahoitusmalli vie osaoptimointiin

Between context and comparability: Exploring new solutions for a familiar methodological challenge in qualitative comparative research

Finding the balance between adequately describing the uniqueness of the context of studied phenomena and maintaining sufficient common ground for comparability and analytical generalisation has widely been recognised as a key challenge in international comparative research. Methodological reflections on how to adequately cover context and comparability have extensively been discussed for quantitative survey or secondary data research. In addition, most recently, promising methodological considerations for qualitative comparative research have been suggested in comparative fields related to higher education. The article’s aim is to connect this discussion to comparative higher education rese…

It runs in the family?

AbstractFamily background has been shown to be a strong determinant of educational attainment, yet relatively little is known about the role that family background plays in PhD attainment or in the selection into academic careers. In this study, we estimate sibling correlations from Finnish full population register data to comprehensively assess the importance of family background in selection into academia. Our results show that family background accounts for over a third of the overall variation in becoming a PhD and subsequently an academic — a share which is up to four times as large as implied by conventional comparisons by parental education. However, we did not find evidence that fam…

‘World Class Local Heroes’: Emerging Competitive Horizons and Transnational Academic Capitalism in Finnish Higher Education – 2010–2012

This chapter introduces an analysis based on institutional profiles of higher education institutions and the two institutional case studies that were carried out in Finland as part of the CINHEKS study. The purposeful selection of the profiles and case studies was based on historical contextualization, the spectrum of higher education institutions in Finland, as well as the twin effects of a major legislative reform, carried out as the global economic crisis of 2008/09 unfolded. In terms of theory of the middle range, empirical focus was achieved via a purposeful selection based on mission emphasis, disciplinary cultures, career stage and competitive horizons. This analysis spotlights three…

Finnish mergers : Change in the Context of Continuity

This chapter focuses on three prominent university mergers in Finland which took place during the last decade. In order to understand the mergers and the developments that led to them, we highlight broader higher education policy change, most notably the making and implementation of the new Universities Act (558/2009). The changing discourse around the role of higher education (Nokkala, 2016) and the changing of the Universities Act took place in parallel to the merger processes, thus forming the broader political context which the structural development took place. In our analysis, we take as our central perspective the roles of the national actors to introduce national translations and so…

Multidisciplinary Peer-Mentoring Groups Supporting Knowledge Sharing in Doctoral Education

Obtaining a doctoral degree requires acquisition of different types of skills and knowledge. The aim of this article is to explore multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups (PMGs) facilitated by senior academics as a knowledge sharing practice in doctoral education. Drawing from interviews with participants of PMGs at a Finnish university, we found that the participants perceived that cultures and practices of doctoral education in departments and faculties, as well as limited support from supervisors might hinder knowledge sharing. They highlighted that a flat hierarchy and confidential atmosphere supported by the multidisciplinary group composition promoted knowledge sharing and emotional s…

University Autonomy, Agenda Setting and the Construction of Agency : the case of the European University Association in the European Higher Education Area

This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of ‘autonomy’ as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and Jepperson's heuristic of agentic actors, to show how the practice of knowledge production can shape the European higher education policy. The article offers a contribution to the debate aiming to develop a more critical perspective on the development of the European Higher Education Area, which sees the process as constituted through the activities of, and t…

Multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups facilitating change?

This article discusses the potential of multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups to facilitate individual and institutional change. To do this, we view peer mentoring as a form of critical education praxis (Mahon et al. 2019), the purpose of which is to create a space for reflexive thinking and asking critical questions. The data were collected by interviewing all thirteen participants – doctoral students and more established scholars – of a multidisciplinary peer-mentoring pilot project. The results show a variety of both individual changes and desired changes within the university, which were brought into view as a result of the sharing of experiences, views and ideas in an open, confident…

Ranking lists and European Framework Programmes: Does university status matter for performance in Framework Programmes?

The operational context for higher education institutions has become increasingly competitive: universities have to compete on national and international markets for students, staff, funding and prestige. In this context, universities have increasingly become to think of themselves as actors who are in direct competition with others, and adapt their strategies to increase their status and survive in the new environment. The possibly best-known approach to measuring the status of universities is through the various ranking lists. Though focusing on different indicators like scientific performance or reputation, ranking lists can be considered as a mechanism for highlighting and even creating…

Higher Education Research in Finland - What's going on?

What is going on in Higher Education Research in Finland? What is being researched right now?  What might the tertiary education look like in 10 years? What are, and could be, the emerging  research questions and methodologies of today and tomorrow?  nonPeerReviewed

Muuttuvat akateemiset urat : työurat yliopistoissa -hankkeen loppuraportti

Hanke ”Työurat yliopistoissa” toteutettiin 2015–2016 ja sen aikana tarkasteltiin suomalaisten yliopistojen urarakenteita, niiden muuttumista ja toimivuutta sekä poliittista kontekstia, määräaikaisia työsuhteita ja vastavuoroista sitoutumista akateemisilla urilla, yliopistojen rekrytointeja sekä akateemisten urien polarisoitumista. Hankkeen tulokset julkaistaan tutkimusartikkeleina, tässä loppuraportissa on kuvattu tulokset tiivistetysti. Työurat yliopistoissa -hanke antoi alustan, jonka avulla eri hankkeissa kerättyjä aineistoja voitiin kutoa yhteen ja siten laajentaa alkuperäistä tutkimusasetelmaa. Akateemiset urat ovat luonteeltaan hyvin vuorovaikutuksellisia. Yksilöt tekevät uran, mutta …

Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom in the Nordic Context — Similarities and Differences

Owing to their common history, similarities in language and culture, long traditions in political collaboration and the shared Nordic societal model, an assumption is often made that the operational and regulatory context of universities is similar in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In this article, we examine the relationship between the Nordic higher education institutions and their specific governments. The interpretation of institutional autonomy and academic freedom in the Nordic countries is discussed with support from recently collected empirical data, Nordic university legislation and the topical research literature. We describe the differenc…

Discourse analysis in higher education research : Theory and method

Equal access to the top? Measuring selection into finnish academia

In this article, we draw a parallel between equality of opportunity in educational transitions and equality of opportunity in academic careers. In both cases, many methodological problems can be ameliorated by the use of longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data. We illustrate this point by using Finnish full-population register data to follow the educational and academic careers of the 1964–1966 birth cohorts from birth to the present day. We show how the Finnish professoriate is highly selected both in terms of parental background and in terms of gender. Individuals of different backgrounds differ greatly in the likelihood of completing different educational and academic transitions, …

Institutional perspectives in transition : research groups’ profiles and embeddedness in organisational and national context

Research into differentiation and profiling of knowledge producing institutions through the lenses of institutional logics and field embeddedness have proliferated in recent years. By discussing this process in the context of research groups, as those basic units in which knowledge production epistemically and practically takes place, this article offers a contribution to the theoretical discussion on organisational differentiation. Based on a small-N comparative case study of research groups operating in different national and organisational contexts on a single, highly competitive and interdisciplinary applied sciences field, nanosciences, the article proposes research group profiles as h…

Working outside academia? : perceptions of early-career, fixed-term researchers on changing careers

This article examines the perceptions of early-career, fixed-term researchers in Finnish universities towards changing careers. It maps out the reasons this group has considered the change and where they see themselves in five years. As a theoretical framework, a synthesisation of variables related to career change, created by Ryan, Healy, and Sullivan [2012. “Oh, Won’t You Stay? Predictors of Faculty Intent to Leave a Public University.” Higher Education 63: 421–437.], was used. The results show that the most common reasons for early-career researchers to change careers are job-security related stress, job-related dissatisfaction, and salary. Over half of the respondents would like to work…

Higher Education

Fifty years ago, higher education globally had started to change radically in terms of the proportion of young people enrolled in the system as well as society's expectations for what this would deliver. From the outset, Higher Education has featured research interrogating various aspects of inequality in higher education, including institutions and staff as well as students. This article offers an overview of that work. Our analysis is structured around three levels at which major questions on this topic have been framed and investigated. The macro level focuses on national systems and looks at widening participation, especially the increase in access to higher education for young people. …

Ranking Lists and European Framework Programmes

The operational context for higher education institutions has become increasingly competitive: universities have to compete on national and international markets for students, staff, funding and prestige. The emergence of various markets, market mechanisms and competition in higher education have become a well-established and much discussed fact, and have shaped the dynamics of the higher education arena (Enders & Jongbloed 2007; Texeira et al. 2004) In a global competition of knowledge societies, higher education institutions have been vested with the task of economic and social change, and are expected to contribute to the competitiveness of nationstates as well as their local communities.

Agenda Setting and Policy Development, Higher Education

Agenda setting is one of key concepts in the critical or interpretative approaches in the study of policy development. Developed in response to positivist paradigms, which saw policies as largely technical solutions to objectively existing problems, critical or interpretive analysis emphasises the constructed, contingent, and processual nature of policies, in particular the role of differently positioned actors in bringing specific issues to the fore (Fischer, 2003). In this sense, the use of agenda setting in the research on higher education policy is fundamentally related to the questions of political power and influence, and thus to the relationship between longer-term structural change …

Visible organisational boundaries and the invisible boundaries of the scholarly profession

The role of universities in knowledge production has changed. Although most higher learning still takes place in universities, knowledge is increasingly produced in collaborative networks comprising partners from different sectors (Välimaa, J., V. Papatsiba, and D. M. Hoffman. 2016. “Higher Education in Networked Knowledge Societies.” In Re-becoming Universities, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective. Vol. 15, edited by D. M. Hoffman and J. Välimaa, 13–39. Dordrecht: Springer). In addition, the focus of universities’ personnel policies has shifted from supporting professional inclusion and exclusion towards supporting the national d…

Towards a methodology discourse in comparative higher education

Early Career Women in Academia: An Exploration of Networking Perceptions

This chapter explores women’s networking perceptions by focusing on early career women in social sciences. Within an exploratory research design it asks how early career women define the early career stage in academia, what definitions, meanings and interpretations they give for networks and networking, how they construct the networking process and their ability to establish and/or join networks, as early career researchers and as women. Based on two group interviews with 12 participants, our findings show that early career women in academia favour networking with peers based on shared interests (organic networking). At the same time though, they challenge and step over the perceived gender…

Nuorten tutkijoiden eteneminen yliopistoissa : sattumaa vai suunnitelmallisuutta?

Challenges and trends in comparative higher education: an editorial

[Introduction] International comparative higher education research has proliferated since its institutionalization as an interdisciplinary field in the 1960s and 1970s (Jarausch 1985) and has gained special momentum in the 1990s (Teichler 1996). On the one hand, the benefits of comparative research approaches in international higher education have been repeatedly emphasized (Altbach and Kelly 1985; Teichler 1996; Rhoades 2001). These include, for example, increasing the capacity to generalize about a greater number of units under analysis, the capacity of a systematic comparison to illuminate the dynamics of a particular system better than a single-system study as well as highlighting knowl…

The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World-Class Research Universities edited by Philip G. Altbach and Jamil Salmi

National Stories, Convergent Trends and Divergent Paths: Discursive Construction of the Higher Education and Knowledge Society – Nexus in Higher Education Policy Texts of Five Knowledge Societies

Higher education policy texts construct the relationship between higher education and knowledge society. The higher education discourse in Finland, Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom and United States over the last two decades typically presents the knowledge society as either an existing fact or as a desirable development towards which countries should aspire. The convergent discourse emphasises the importance of information and communication technologies, internationalisation, globalisation, and international context for policy making; the importance of research, science and technology, but also education, learning and skills and their role in bringing about the knowledge society. At the s…

Making the case for policy : persuasiveness in higher education, science and technology policy discourse

Policy texts present problems, propose solutions to those problems and persuade multiple audiences of the legitimacy of the proposed problems and solutions. The rhetorical analysis of two decades of higher education and science and technology discourse in Finland, Germany, UK, Portugal and USA highlights the discursive elements that contribute to persuasiveness of policy, construe it as rational and logical, and create a sense of urgency in bringing it about. I argue that the analytical and hortatory registers of policy discourse foreground competitive and hierarchical relations of countries and their higher education systems. By construing certain state of affairs and courses of action as …

Reflecting on the value of vignettes in higher education research: toward a preliminary typology to guide future usage

Kicking off a Dialog on the Methodological Advancement of Comparative Higher Education Research