National policies as drivers of organizational change in universities: A string of reinforcing reforms

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, the Danish university sector has been one of the most intensely reformed in Europe. In parallel, the staff composition of Danish Universities has also changed more than the corresponding compositions in other Western countries. But how direct is the link between the policy reforms and the staff changes? While we expect national policy reforms to have influence on organizational change in universities, we also know that the content and impact of policies are often shaped and modified by global trends as well as local path dependencies. To shed light on this question, this article examines the impact of four major reforms on the staff composition of Danish universities by interpreting long-term staff data at multiple levels. Contrary to the notions of change resistance and path dependency, the empirical analysis suggests that a consistent string of policy reforms has had a profound impact on the Danish universities. However, the analysis also shows that the links between national reforms and actual changes are seldom immediate and straightforward and that the local, national, and global levels interact. In doing so they often appear to reinforce the influence of each other.

Getting ahead in the social sciences: How parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement

“…Our statistically uncertain finding that gender gaps in career advancement have increased over time (Figure 1) should be understood in the context of the Danish Globalisation Strategy implemented in 2006 that aimed to double the annual PhD admission number before 2010 (Stage & Aagaard, 2020). This expansion increased the competition for academic jobs and likely deterred more women than men from applying for senior research positions.…”

Mergers between universities and governmental research organizations in the Netherlands and Denmark. Institutional platforms for agricultural transformations.

“…Another important element stipulated by the Research Commission ( 2001) was a strong expansion of PhD education (Stage & Aagaard, 2020). The PhD reform was implemented from 2004-2013 and the number of PhDs at Danish universities peaked at 5.200 FTEs in 2014.…”

Non-academic staff's part in transforming academia: as irrelevant as their label suggests?

“…Although parts of the university transformation were clearly already in motion prior to the path-breaking University Act of 2003, Danish higher education scholars agree that this reform has been the real key catalyst (Aagaard & Mejlgaard, 2012;Ejersbo et al, 2019;Hansen et al, 2019;Wright et al, 2020). The new university act and a following string of reinforcing reforms had both direct and indirect implications for task formalization, including status as self-owning entities, empowered line management, externally controlled university boards, increased funding competition, doubled PhD intake, large-scale mergers, intensified third mission responsibilities, internationalization incentives, mandatory university-ministry strategy contracts and comprehensive evaluation activity (Stage & Aagaard, 2020).…”

“…The two groups were almost equally sized up until 2004, but this changed rather quickly in favour of the academics. The lines' sudden jump and the divide's acceleration in 2007 reflects a merger of governmental research institutions into the university system, a large-scale investment in PhD students, and the institutionalization of short-term research assistants and postdocs (Stage & Aagaard, 2020).…”