0000000000424915
AUTHOR
Johan Söderlind
Does It Really Matter? Assessing the Performance Effects of Changes in Leadership and Management Structures in Nordic Higher Education
AbstractUniversities are public organisations, which operate in a highly institutionalised environment. They are heavily dependent on public resources. As such, universities are susceptible to shifts in governance arrangements but are also far from being passive recipients of reform agendas. They face demands from multiple internal constituencies (academics, administrators, students, managers) and from a variety of external stakeholders. This chapter explores the interplay between governance arrangements resulting from policy shifts and university dynamics. It sets the stage for the book, asking the following research questions: (1) what characterises changes in governance regimes in Nordic…
National Performance-Based Research Funding Systems : Constructing Local Perceptions of Research?
AbstractIn recent years, performance-based research funding systems (PRFSs) have been introduced in all of the Nordic countries. In this chapter, we compare these systems and explore how their introduction is reflected within universities. Through interviews with academics, managers and administrators, we study how the performance measures of these systems are used at the university level and how that affects research activities. The results indicate that the introduction of PRFSs at the national level have had significant effects at the institutional level. The PRFSs contribute to the institutionalisation and consolidation of research metrics as the main way to describe research performanc…
Strategy as Dialogue and Engagement
AbstractThis chapter illuminates two critical aspects underpinning university life in the Nordic countries, namely, who gets involved with strategic processes and to what extent these processes affect behaviour across the organisation. Participation in strategy work was found to be unstable, which in turn further weakens the legitimacy of the strategy. The comparative data also show that some academic staff are not involved in the strategy process at all, and hence do not relate their daily tasks to the goals and/or values expressed in the strategy. The importance of strategies appears to lie in recognising the relevant problems, values, and normative postures, including the excellence and …
Nordic Higher Education in Flux: System Evolution and Reform Trajectories
AbstractThis chapter provides a brief description of how the four national systems included in this study—Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—are currently organised and structured. In doing so, it illuminates several specific features such as the types and sizes of the institutions, enrolment patterns, performance measures, and funding. In addition, the chapter gives a snapshot of how higher education systems have evolved historically by shedding light on policy dynamics from the late 1990s to 2013, the baseline period for the FINNUT comparative study, the research project that provides the basis for this edited volume. This is followed by a section describing the aim, methods, theoretica…
External Research Funding and Authority Relations
AbstractThis chapter analyses how the increasing external research project funding has affected the authority over research for managers and researchers in Nordic universities. Drawing on both the qualitative and quantitative data from the FINNUT project, the chapter uses institutional theory to investigate how authority relations between managers and researcher unfold by focusing on the themes content, time, and people. For researchers, the increasing external funding has resulted in some reduction of the authority over research. However, researchers do employ a range of defence mechanisms in order to protect their research freedom. For managers, the results are ambiguous since, on the one…