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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A Shift Towards Academic Capitalism in Finland

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Academic capitalism is currently a widely studied topic amongst higher education scholars, especially in the United States. This paper demonstrates that the theory of academic capitalism also provides a fruitful perspective for analysing the restructuring of Finnish higher education since the 1990s, although with reservations. It will be argued that many reforms in Finnish universities since the 1990s, and especially in the early 2000s, have integrated Finnish universities more tightly with the new knowledge-based economy. As some recent empirical studies indicate, activities and practices related to academic capitalism remain, however, unevenly distributed among different disciplines, and workers in Finnish universities tend to experience increasingly contradictory demands.