From Collegial Organization to Strategic Management of Resources

Introduction

Norway has changed from a poor underdeveloped country to a rich country with a well-functioning welfare state in the last 100 years. The success of Norwegian society is not based on the wealth and riches of some, but on the labor of the whole population, women as well as men. The mobilization and education of the mass of people, an “educational revolution”, characterizes Norwegian history (Slagstad, 2000). Together with a social democratic ideology of equality, this has resulted in an egalitarian society with relatively small income differences (Barth & Moene, 2012).

A central element has been a publicly funded universal education system that is free of charge and open for all. This has resulted in an equality-oriented organization of Norwegian universities where the main body of teachers—professors and associate professors—has the same duties and responsibilities and the same time allotted for teaching and research. The higher education system has expanded in the last decades to meet the qualification needs of a new generation and has been an important part of the democratic project of educating the whole population. Meeting the increased demand for higher education, has, however, resulted in tighter budgets, less funding per student, and more results-based funding (Stensaker, 2006).

Internationalization and the expanding European Union (EU) have made higher education a political issue for the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and resulted in recommendations to mainstream higher education (the Bologna process) regarding how to organize and fund the universities to make them more competitive in a European “knowledge market.” These recommendations have introduced principles in our higher education that are in conflict with the democratic mass university. OECD has proposed that the universities should manage their resources more strategically to foster excellence in research and increase quality in education “to be prepared for the challenges of the future.”

In this line of thought, universities are organizations that can be managed to reach stated goals, and the actions of managers or leaders can accomplish this. The universities are, however, institutions based on the expert knowledge of professionals who are supposed to be the best in their fields. The knowledge of the university is therefore not located at the top of the university hierarchy, but in the departments where knowledge is developed, and can thus hardly be “managed” from above (Sørhaug, 2004). Universities can, however, be given good conditions to develop. We have seen two different strategies in Norway to increase excellence in research: One is the establishment of temporary interdisciplinary centers of excellence, and the other the introduction of performance-based research funding (Hicks, 2012; Sivertsen, 2009). Both strategies have been met with approval by the academic community because they match the interests of staff for time to and funding for research.

In this article, I look into some of the consequences of the OECD-recommended strategies that have been implemented in a large Norwegian university, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). NTNU is the result of a merger between the national technical university and a general university in Trondheim. It was the first university in Norway to introduce principles of “professional” management and has also successfully adjusted to the changes in the state funding of the universities.

Being in a period of transition where founding fathers and senior professors in sociology had retired or were about to retire in the near future, my department was facing a period of major renewal. Inspired by institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005) and a member of the sociology staff, my point of departure was the experience that recent recruitment processes resulted in the nomination of candidates who were not qualified or able to teach our program in sociology. Candidates who were nominated by the scientific evaluation committees (among many qualified) tended increasingly to be young with a publication record of many international publications, including those in prestigious journals. Their knowledge of sociology, however, was often narrow and confined to their special field or their (especially quantitative) method of choice. Foreign scholars were also likely to be nominated, having published in international journals (i.e., in English). Hardly any of our successful PhD students from the last decades were nominated, although many of them had several years of research experience, taught central courses in our sociology program, and/or developed relevant topics in other institutions of higher education. In a situation where we desperately needed to recruit qualified staff to teach our courses, the nominees were often not able to do so. In some cases, they were nominated with the argument that they would be candidates for special grants for excellence in research, and therefore not expected to carry a normal teaching load. My question is how and why we ended up in this situation.

Background

New Public Management (NPM) is part of a general trend of neoliberal economic thought that spread rapidly across the Western world in an attempt to slow down or reverse government growth by reducing the public sector in favor of private or quasi-private services and make services more effective through competition between providers. Hood (1991) has described NPM as a marriage of opposites. One partner was new institutional economics built on public choice, principal-agent theory, and transaction cost theory. The other was the latest set of waves of business type managerialism with the notion of professional management expertise as portable and more decisive than professional expertise. NPM’s managerialism (Clarke & Newman, 1997) sees managers as central for the results of the organization. Their role is to be entrepreneurs, and they should be given the power and freedom to manage to meet the targets of the organization (du Gay, 2007). The proposed managerialism therefore requires high discretionary power to achieve results. Furthermore, better organizational performance is to be tracked by active measurement of performance and adjustment of organizational outputs.

This “package” (Hood, 1991) was inspired by neoliberal thought and introduced internationally by right-wing governments. The United States and the United Kingdom were forerunners, followed by New Zealand and Australia, whereas Norway and the Nordic countries were lagging far behind (Christensen & Lægreid, 1998). Social democratic parties in the Nordic countries defended their democratic welfare state and criticized Margaret Thatcher’s privatization of public services and dismantling of the state. Although the OECD (2003) acknowledged that the Nordic incremental and consensus-oriented model of governance based on egalitarian values, high level of trust, solidarity, and a large public sector had been successful, they suggested that this model should be abandoned “to prepare for the future.” Their recipe was to separate the regulatory role of the state from its role as owner and deregulate state monopolies to make competition the main goal and thereby improve performance, efficiency and effectiveness of public spending (Christensen & Lægreid, 2007). A reason given by the OECD for the introduction of autonomous agencies was that managerial autonomy and accountability for results would improve performance (OECD, 2002).

A right-wing minority Norwegian government proposed in 2001 the policy advocated by OECD. After a struggle over the question of privatization or state control, a compromise was made with the social democrats that preserved the governing role of the state. It is not surprising that the right-wing government actively pursued the policy advocated by OECD, but more so that the social democrats accepted the devolution of responsibility for public services to independent agencies and competition among these to increase efficiency in line with NPM’s economic principles. Having a long tradition of governing the country in a socially and economically responsible way, the position of the social democratic party can, however, be understood as a pragmatic attitude among the social democrats toward the choice of forms of governance according to what serves the objectives of the government (Hermansen, 2004). The broad political acceptance of NPM-inspired reforms in the Norwegian educational system indicates that NPM ideas of good governance have become the norm in public government in Norway.

According to ideas based on the logic of principal-agent theory, the state had to separate its roles as regulator and actor in the market and govern indirectly, at arm’s length, to make competition and market-like mechanisms effective. The result of the political compromise was therefore that public services, including the universities, were increasingly “set free” to govern themselves.

From Collegial Leadership to Managerial Hierarchy

The introduction of NPM’s managerialism changed the management system of the university when control over the universities was delegated from the state to the university board. The new and more professional board appointed by the Ministry of Education was based on the principle of stakeholder organization (Bleiklie & Kogan, 2007) with representatives from society, in our case, mainly industry and business, in addition to students and staff. Since 2005, academic staff has been in the minority on NTNU’s board, and student representatives have used their power as stakeholders (users or customers of the university) in alliance with the representatives from business and industry to overrule academic staff in the question of democratic governance with the argument that more control from management would discipline staff to provide good quality education.

The board decides how to govern the institution, and our university was the first in Norway to introduce appointed managers rather than elected ones. The other “old” universities still elect their rectors, deans, and chairs of department although they are under pressure by the current right-wing government to professionalize management. Important arguments in the discussion about academic leadership has been that strong and more professional institutional leadership is needed to promote quality in research and teaching as well as the assumption that higher education institutions cannot afford the traditional collegial academic leadership (Askling & Stensaker, 2002). Appointed managers would in this view be better suited for the new and more strategic role that NPM’s managerialism prescribes (Clarke & Newman, 1997).

Since 2005, the rector of NTNU has been appointed by the board rather than elected, and deans of faculty appointed by the rector. Since 2013, the chairs of department are no longer to be elected by the staff, but appointed by the deans of faculty. Thereby, the traditional university democracy in Norwegian universities where academic leaders were chosen by their peers was dismantled in NTNU. This has turned the university system on its head, changing it from a collegial system where the decisions about research and study programs were taken by academics who had been selected on the basis of their scientific qualifications, turning it into an hierarchical organization where the line of command goes from the board and the rector through the deans to the chairs of department. The piecemeal introduction of the changes of governance has made these changes less apparent for the academic community, but the result is that now, the board makes the strategic choices, and rector, deans, and chairs of departments are appointed to ensure that the strategies are implemented locally.

The change from being elected representatives of the staff to managers appointed to govern the faculties and departments in the direction decided by the board offers managers new subject positions (Thomas & Davies, 2005) and constructs new management identities (du Gay, 2007) where they are expected to be proactive and develop strategies of their own for their department to contribute to the strategic goals of the university and the financing of their department.

Method

To answer this question, I was inspired by a previous study of how performance management changed employment relations in knowledge work (Håpnes & Rasmussen, 2011; Rasmussen & Håpnes, 2012) and Karin Widerberg’s (2014) analysis of the experiences of a professor’s work in a university department to re-read Dorothy Smith (2005) on institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography is a manner of enquiry starting from the embodied position of the knower (Smith, 2005). It starts with the issues and concerns of the people who are the focus of enquiry to explore from below how the institutional order that governs them is put together. According to Smith (2005) “(t)he institutional ethnographer works from the social in people’s experience to discover its presence and organisation in their lives and to explicate or map that organisation beyond the local of the everyday” (p. 11). The aim is to extend the knowledge of how these everyday lives and worlds are embedded in and organized by relations that transcend them, relations that coordinate what we do and others do elsewhere and elsewhen (Griffith & Smith, 2014). Central concepts in this endeavor are texts and ruling relations. Texts enter into and organize people’s actions, making it possible to extend ethnographic studies into the translocal to explore the relations that rule as objectified consciousness and organization (Griffith & Smith, 2014).

Although starting from below and my position as faculty in sociology, I do not start from a position of the powerless or disadvantaged in the university system (Lund, 2012), but from the position of a professor with management experience and responsibilities, located in a department with a strong collegial and democratic tradition and a tradition of freedom of research. My position is that of an actor in the processes of the acceptance or active implementation of the changes in the universities from the 1990s. I have in the previous sections traced the changing criteria for recruitment by exploring the restructuring of our university and the way in which our department has met the changes. The restructuring changed the governance of the university, introducing measurement of performance and strategic management. I use my own experience as a participant on the board of the university in the periods 1996 to 1999 and 1999 to 2001 when the first changes were discussed and introduced, and from the management of our department (in 2005-2007 and at present) as well as general staff experience, discussions, and meetings over the last 10 years when the new structure found its shape and took effect in our university, NTNU.

The texts that I am following to unravel the ruling relations (Smith, 1990) that influence or decide the recruitment in our department take their departure from the experience of recent recruitment processes. These processes are analyzed using the reports from the evaluation committees, staff reactions, and our discussions and efforts to design processes for recruiting more suitable candidates.

I describe the processes of recruitment that made me and my colleagues realize that the rules of the game had changed and that new considerations dominated the recruitment policy. I follow two threads to understand how an autonomous and democratic department in a main Norwegian university full of critical scholars seemingly lost their power over faculty recruitment without even realizing it. The data collection covers the period of two different chairs of department as well as two rectors and two deans.

Recruiting the Best Candidates?

The first process in 2011-2012 took place when, after several years of ban on hiring, our department was allowed to recruit faculty to replace retired founding fathers. Our first priority was someone who could teach sociological theory for master students, but also had experience with empirical research. Because university positions are attractive in Norway, there were many applicants, both national and international, which made us consider hiring two candidates. An evaluation committee of senior sociologists from Norwegian universities did a thorough job of evaluating the candidates looking at their total production and judging its contribution to sociological theory, nominating the best qualified for the position, three men and three women. Following normal procedures, a committee with student participation made a pedagogical evaluation based on trial lectures. The candidates were also invited to present themselves and their research for the staff. To decide which candidates to hire, the chair of department and head of administration interviewed the candidates. The interview was a new element introduced in the new management structure. The process in this case followed normal procedures, except for the interview by management, and staff members sat in on the candidates’ presentations and trial lectures.

Because the committee had done a thorough job of evaluating the candidates, we expected that the top candidates would be hired if they did not disqualify themselves in their trial lecture or presentation. This was, however, not the case. The final nomination for two positions was done by the chair of department, and the order of the nominated candidates was more or less turned on its head. An international candidate was appointed based on the number of (international) publications in prestigious journals and a national candidate based on relevant research and pedagogical qualifications, both women. The international candidate never formally accepted the position and left after 3 months.

The recruitment process resulted in discussions among the sociology staff. One concerned the evaluation criteria that prioritized international publications in prestigious journals over being able to teach sociology to Norwegian students. The other concerned whether the final selection of the candidate(s) should be based on the ranking of the scientific evaluation committee (and trial lecture) or decided by the chair of department, who, in this case, did not belong to the sociology staff. We challenged the principle that the authority over recruitment should follow the formal hierarchical position that allowed the chair to disregard the ranking of the scientific evaluation committee. Where the decision used to be based on the evaluation of the scientific committee, supplemented by the pedagogical committee, the process that we had experienced, showed that in the new university structure local management had attained a much stronger position and could decide who to hire, in line with NPM’s managerialism that offer managers power and freedom to manage (Clarke & Newman, 1997). Strategic concerns clearly motivated management’s priorities so that international research, international networks, and international publications were more important in management’s evaluation, but teaching needs could also be considered, as in the case of the national candidate.

The next recruitment process went under our radar at first because the announcement was decided by the chair of the department and a senior professor in charge of research activities. It was based on the argument that here was an outstanding candidate in one of NTNU’s strategic research areas that we urgently needed to recruit. This resulted in a very specific announcement tailored to the candidate’s qualifications and experience. The candidate was a successful young man who had acquired a PhD in our department and subsequently a postdoc position working on an international project. In this process, it was very clear that the motivation for the chair of department was strategic: to recruit research talents with international networks and potential to be part of international research groups and to acquire international financial support. The candidate would consequently not be expected to take on a normal teaching load.

This process raised a discussion in the sociology staff about how decisions about recruitment should be made. We demanded democratic and transparent processes and no deals with senior (male) professors to secure their disciples. Having reached an agreement that open processes would be followed in the future, we thought that we were back to normal procedures with staff discussions around recruitment and selection criteria.

That this was not so was evidenced in the next recruitment process concerning two positions, one in quantitative and one in qualitative methods. Our department offer courses in quantitative and qualitative methodology for all our study programs (sociology, political science, social studies in sports and master in media and communication). It therefore seemed a good idea to seek candidates for both types of method in one announcement. The announcement resulted in many applicants. A majority came from our own institution, which made it difficult to put together an independent evaluation committee across methods. Being in the process of changing chairs of department and in the summer vacation, the administration put together a committee that set out to work. The announcement used a standard text from the faculty of social sciences, taking into account the university’s strategy of internationalization and excellence of research. It stated that a relevant PhD was required and emphasized the relevance of the candidate’s international publications “in the last 5 years.” The importance of publications in the last 5 years was motivated by the wish to recruit young(er) candidates who were active in research rather than favoring seniors who had a long career and many years of publications, but who might not be currently as productive. As such, it had been accepted by the staff as a way to recruit young and active researchers.

These criteria were subsequently used by the committee as operationalizations of scientific quality to arrive at the nominees. Pressured for time, the work of the evaluation committee resulted in all candidates with a relevant PhD being judged as qualified, and furthermore, automatically qualified in the methods of their research, mainly their PhD project. However, as a result of the new system of financing the universities based on the production of publications, the requirements for a PhD dissertation in Norway had been changed from a monograph to a preference by the universities for three to four published articles with an introductory chapter of theoretical and methodological arguments and a concluding chapter that would bind the papers together as a coherent project. The result of this procedure was therefore that candidates who had done an article-based PhD were first qualified as having acquired a PhD, and then credited for their number of publications, including those of their PhD. The candidates who had written a monograph were only credited for their PhD which did not add to their international publications; they had no chance to be nominated. What counted, and was counted, was international publications, and they were in case of the nominees, often counted twice: first as part of the basic qualifications and then as the qualifying element.

Although briefly mentioned in the report, the committee did not attach much importance to whether the candidates had written or reflected about method use in their publications, or whether their methodology was well chosen and fruitful in their research. There was also no serious consideration of their experience in teaching methods courses, although staff were well aware of the importance of teaching skills in methods. It was evident that a count of international publications had been the method of selecting the nominees.

In spite of this, by following a process like the one described earlier with trial lectures, public presentations, and interviews, we were able to recruit two well-qualified candidates. The process had, however, been a shock for many of us. Seeing that well-qualified and experienced qualitative researchers who had written about methods and taught methods were not even nominated, whereas quantitative researchers with hardly any methodological reflections could be nominated simply on the basis of their having used advanced methods, demonstrated the problems of defining quality and competence as the number of international publications in the last 5 years. The evaluation of the candidates sent a strong signal to the applicants who were not nominated, that they/their qualifications were not good enough, and that they were not wanted by our university.

The new system of financing the universities based on number of publication points changed the practice of recruiting from valuing the quality of the total production of the candidates to valuing the number of (international) publications in the last 5 years. This was used to decide who were eligible for nomination and who were not. The quality of the publications of the eligible candidates was subsequently evaluated, but the works of the candidates who were not found qualified were only dealt with summarily. By applying a criterion like the number of publications in the last 5 years, evaluation committees are able to decide quantitatively (and quickly) who are worthy of selection. Thereby, applicants may be ruled out without a qualitative evaluation of their merits. The quantitative approach is especially problematic in view of the use of the “salamitactic” where research findings are sliced into “the least publishable unit” to get the highest possible number of publications out of the data (Wright, 2014, p. 325), a good example of how performance-measuring systems are perverted in use (de Bruijn, 2006).

The new practice of emphasizing (international) publications in the last 5 years means that speed of publishing becomes decisive rather than the quality and the amount over time. Thus, recent PhD students, and especially those who moved directly to a postdoc after their PhD and had been able to research and publish full-time, had the best chances to be nominated. Experienced contract researchers and teaching staff with less time to publish and a not-so-recent PhD (more than 5 years ago) would be judged less qualified according to the faculty’s standard requirements.

A Sociology for People

Borrowing Dorothy Smith’s subtitle from her book Institutional Ethnography, I will argue that the dissemination of knowledge from Norwegian sociological studies to the people of Norway is of crucial importance for the future and relevance of sociology in Norway. With a tradition of relevance for policy development and central in democratic processes of social planning and reforms, the status of sociology in Norway is dependent on our contribution to discussions about the country’s social problems and their solution. The strategic importance that is placed on international publications in recruitment processes has consequences for sociology’s contribution to national politics and culture (Hicks, 2012). If sociological research and publications are directed toward an international audience and not toward a Norwegian public, and if they no longer address Norwegian problems and political debates, sociology may be marginalized and become irrelevant nationally. To defend its position (and funding) in a situation where the political focus is increasingly on innovation and usefulness, it has to be relevant for Norwegian society and contribute to how we understand ourselves, our challenges, and opportunities.

This has two major consequences: first, that we need to continue to publish widely in Norwegian, both in academic journals and in popular journals and news media to the general public, and second, that we need to continue to address local and national problems. Whereas in the hard sciences knowledge can be thought of as global and general and applicable for all, in the social sciences, knowledge tends to be national and local in import (Mathews, 2012). If our findings are only, or mainly, published in international journals, that is, in English, we are denying knowledge of them to those who are most interested in them and could most benefit from them, a paradox in these times when “user interests” are deemed so important in other contexts.

Another problem is that publishing in international journals means that we have to align our problematics and our understandings to the concerns of international journals (Mathews, 2012). Norway as one of the Nordic countries, differs considerably from continental Europe and even more so from the United Kingdom and the United States and other societies globally. Our social problems and the ways we manage them are different and therefore often not of interest for journals based in the United States and the United Kingdom. We are also often excluded in comparative (EU) research because they already have “one of those” (i.e., another Nordic country). To be funded by international grants (i.e., EU) and published in European journals (in the common foreign language English) will also entail aligning our research to EU’s policy rather than to national policy and (more critical) international questions. Instead of widening our perspective, increased international publishing might result in a streamlining of concerns, theories, and understandings that might decrease our societies’ ability to find solutions to tomorrow’s challenges.

Norwegian journals of sociology and social sciences experience a reduction in submitted contributions in spite of the need for PhD candidates to have three or four published articles in their dissertation. Some of these journals are distributed to all members of the Norwegian Association of Sociologists (Sosiologisk Tidsskrift [in Norwegian]) and Acta Sociologica (a Nordic journal, in English). They do, together with other sociological and social science journals, contribute to the common knowledge and discussions among social scientists. With increased focus on international publications, there is a danger that these platforms for sociological discussions will be replaced by field-specific (international) discussions that do not relate their findings to sociology.

We can observe this in the PhD students’ efforts to find international journals where their papers may be published. The chances are slim that they will be able to publish in general sociological journals or international leading journals in their field, and they may end up publishing their papers in journals where sociological concepts and analysis are not common and the critical review of social science contributions are lacking. We have already seen that publications in multi- or other-disciplinary journals that are of marginal interest sociologically have resulted in publications in international journals that have not been accepted in a PhD in sociology.

Paradoxically, the norm of article-based PhD may be what saves publications in Norwegian because it is difficult to publish in relevant international journals. To manage to publish enough papers for a PhD in sociology, students therefore often end up with a PhD dissertation based on a mix of national and international publications.

Conclusion

Returning to this article’s question as to how and why we ended up in a situation where the recruitment processes did not produce staff who could teach sociology, we need to understand the university reforms in Norway. In contrast to the centrally decided and radical reforms of the Danish universities (Wright, 2014), the reforms in governance of higher education in Norway were introduced piecemeal and as an opportunity to be decided by each university after they were set free from the Ministry of Education. The decision to appoint rector was taken by an NTNU board as yet still dominated by academic staff, with the support of representatives from the technology departments and the external members form business and industry. The other universities kept their elected rectors, deans, and chairs of department.

The history and tradition of NTNU as the national technological university with its close relations to Norwegian industry explain their willingness to reform in the direction of managerialism and representation on the board from industry and business. As “junior partners” and minority in NTNU, the humanities and social science departments had to adjust to their decisions. Because the growth in students was in our subjects, we were able to expand and increase our share of the budget. Result-based funding was not contested because it coincided with our values, and moreover, at the time of introduction, they favored our studies; the number of students increased, and we published in academic journals.

The changes in NTNU were also piecemeal. The rector, as before from a technology department, was consensus-oriented and followed the tradition of involving all levels in strategy processes. The effects of constructing the faculties and departments as economic actors who needed to act strategically to secure their survival were not manifest until the board decided to appoint deans of faculty, and in 2013, chairs of department. The new top-down chain of command destroyed the traditional university democracy and gave the faculty power to implement the strategies of the board over the departments that were responsible for producing the results. Governance changed from the invisible hand of result-based funding to the visible hand of implementing new strategies of recruitment for international publications and excellence in research.

The protests among sociology staff were triggered by the recruitment processes, but directed at local management. They increased when the power of the faculty threatened the department’s autonomy in questions of strategy.

When a new right-wing national government proposed concentration of the institutions of higher education where distributed university colleges around the country were to merge into large universities to make them more robust and increase their quality (excellence), the protests increased. The fusions are accompanied by appointed rectors, and at the moment, university staff are protesting and our unions are actively opposing government policy.