This paper demonstrates that while ideals of close linkages between research and teaching are widely embraced in research-oriented universities, a practice of division of labour between teaching-oriented and research-oriented staff persists. In an investigation of how the research-teaching nexus is managed at three Swedish universities, we identify a perceived misalignment between institutional incentives for individual academic staff and the needs of teaching. Under pressure from such tensions, managers are forced to deploy pragmatic strategies for the staffing of undergraduate education tasks. This includes allowing research needs and agendas to take priority over teaching needs. While managers seek to secure the participation of senior researchers in education, they often actively prefer to delegate the bulk of teaching activities to less research-active staff. Such strategies seem to reinforce existing patterns of division of labour among academic staff.

This paper investigates the accountability mechanisms introduced in the universities in the Nordic countries by building on a typology of accountability types. By utilizing survey data, it analyses how academics experience the changes in accountability mechanisms, and how they perceive the impact of these changes on their performance. The analysis shows that especially political/bureaucratic and managerial accountability demands have been strengthened. This development has fostered debates on how to measure academic performance. Some academics, more in Denmark than in the other countries, have experienced the development as a sign of mistrust.

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Based on data from interviews conducted with 14 academic managers at two Swedish universities, this article investigates the consequences of the increasing prevalence of performance measurement in the higher education sector. The study contributes to the discussion of how performance measurement impacts academic work, focusing specifically on its influence on how meaning is created and recreated by academic managers. By applying the sensemaking perspective, as proposed by Weick ([1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications]), the article explores seven properties of the sensemaking process. The study results demonstrate the influence of metrics on the process by which managers give meaning to academic work. Performance measures are interpreted by academic managers as important in acquiring resources, supporting decisionmaking, and enhancing organisational legitimacy. They also reinforce social scripts of competition and success, although they are often understood as being unable to indicate scientific quality. The consequence for sensemaking in teaching and research activities is that measurable performance is understood to be increasingly important. However, a notable finding from the study is that the managers are aware of how metrics promote specific forms of academic work and often attempt to balance these incentives by acknowledging the values and priorities that these metrics are unable to assess. This finding highlights the important role of academic managers as they counteract some of the pressure caused by various performance measures. ARTICLE HISTORYsector warrants closer scrutiny of its consequences. In this article, we explore how the academic workplace at Swedish universities is affected by the increasing use of performance measures in evaluation and assessment. We are particularly interested in the ways in which performance measurement influences how academic work is understood within the organisation, as this is likely to have decisive consequences.The diffusion of performance measures in the higher education sector is related to a number of interconnected developments, some of which are common throughout public administration in general. These include the technological developments refining the performance measures, as well as the increasing demand for and accessibility of these metrics (Gläser and Laudel 2007;Leydesdorff, Wouters, and Bornmann 2016). It also includes a political development that emphasises closer scrutiny of organisational performance (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004), which, in turn, finds specific expression in the higher education sector (Askling 2012, 57-58;Hicks 2012). It has been claimed that these changes have given rise to an audit or evaluation society, in which ever more systems are established to control organisational action, and procedures and predictability are prioritised over values that do not conform easily to standardised measures (Dahler-Larsen 2012; Power 1997).Despite the numerous valuable ways in which performance measures may be utilis...