What Has Changed and What Remains? Institutional Shifts in Nordic Higher Education in the 2000s

Abstract

The theme of this special issue, changes in higher education (HE) in the Nordics, might feel somewhat self-evident: by now, the adage from business, “the only constant is change”, seems to encapsulate the reality of higher education in the Nordics. As the movement from industrial welfare states to post-industrial competition states progresses in the Nordics, public universities are slowly but inexorably drawn into the sphere of national economic policy (Poutanen, 2022) as modern “factories” of knowledge production. Starting in the early 2000s, the salience of the knowledge economy paradigm meant that HE institutions (HEIs) were designated as one of the primary engines of economic growth and innovation. New stakeholders and new priorities have been added to universities’ social mission (Pinheiro et al., 2019). While structures of academic self-governance remain, and in this sense Nordic universities have yet to match their Anglophone counterparts in terms of internal and administrative reforms, special emphasis has been placed on concentrating resources, leveraging competitive dynamics, and shifting from the traditional model based on academic, collegial governance towards a more professional and managerial orientation (Geschwind et al., 2019). As elsewhere, Nordic universities are being called upon to compete globally in rankings as well as for funding and prestige alike (Geschwind and Pinheiro, 2017). Academics have been more ambiguous about these new priorities. Collaboration, rather than competition, has served as a guiding principle of academic work. At the micro level, however, academic career models are now subject to increasing competitive pressures (Pietilä and Pinheiro, 2021). Nordic academics are increasingly subject to extraneous metrics, that reflect an idea of a dfs