Mikko Poutanen’s research while affiliated with Tampere University and other places

This article explores a Finnish university merger as a disruption of academic time regimes. Previous research has shown how academic time regimes are drawn ever tighter by increasing pressures for performance, efficiency and competitiveness both on the level of higher education institutions and individual academics. On a policy level, higher education is called upon to do more, to contribute more to economic growth and competitiveness. Public higher education institutions (HEIs) are also reformed to this effect. Accelerating policy initiatives change organizational time regimes in HEIs, encroaching upon individual academic time regimes. Academics experience this as less self-determined professional time available to them and increased imposed organizational time demands, with problematic consequences to meaningful academic self-governance. Our findings add to current discussions on accelerating academia by suggesting an analytical separation of time regimes that impact academia to describe experiences of acceleration. The article draws on survey and interview data from a Finnish university merger to show how organizational changes further disrupt academic time regimes. As a result, academics experience a sense of lost control and agency over their own work, or, following Hartmut Rosa, alienation.

How has Finnish university autonomy evolved in the years after legislative reforms intended to strengthen universities' financial autonomy? We apply the ecology of games’ metaphor - not a conventional approach to study autonomy - to analyse external post-reform autonomy evaluation reports that had not previously been subjected to empirical or theoretical analysis. The findings reveal multiple, interconnected autonomy games’ involving various players and games. Notably, the specific goal of national policy aiming to increase financial autonomy did not emerge as the central focus. Instead, managerial considerations dominated, creating what may be described as the ‘master game’ in Finland’s autonomy context.

There is renewed interest in Karl Marx’s critical concept of alienation, applied to the context of higher education, to explain the growing dissatisfaction of academic labor. Academics feel that new primarily economic priorities have supplanted ideas of working for the common good. Constant competition, expressed through rankings, evaluations and funding metrics, stresses performance and output. Indicators mean more than substance. Commercialization and commodification of higher education has been subjected to wide critique, not least in the literature on increasingly transnational academic capitalism. As universities are subjected to increasing pressures to produce—graduates and innovations—these pressures are passed on to academics, who struggle to reconcile their personal motivation and the ideal of collegial and cooperative academic work with the imposed extraneous motivation of endless assessments and competition under precarity. Knowledge production in ‘academic factories’ is characterized as commodity production. As a result, the dissatisfaction and ill-being of academics is only increasing. This chapter discusses Marx’s concept of alienation as a critique of the capitalist mode of production in higher education, illustrated in dialogue between two national contexts—the UK and Finland. Finding avenues of disalienation may require a radical reimagining of the current form of academic labor.

Kirja-arvio: Suvi Salmenniemi, Affect, Alienation and Politics in Theraupetic Culture: Capitalism on the skin. Lontoo: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 222 s. Sosiologinen etnografia avaa mielenkiintoisella ja merkittävällä tavalla "terapiakulttuurin" käsitettä, johon nivoutuu myös osaksi keskustelu vieraantumisen käsitteestä ja kokemuksesta.

Korkeakoulutuksen kaupallistumisesta, ja siihen liitetyistä ongelmista on kirjoitettu viime vuosien aikana lukuisia kirjoja ja arvioita. Pääasiassa akateemikkojen itsensä kirjoittamat kirjat toistavat samankaltaista rakennetta: ongelman kuvailu on syvää ja vakuuttavaa, mutta järjestelmä jatkaa entisellään, kenties vieläkin pahempana. Ongelmanratkaisuun löytyy yhä vähemmän paukkuja. Toisinaan korkeakoulutuksen uusliberalisoinniksi tai akateemiseksi kapitalismiksi määritelty kehitys on tunnetusti pidemmällä englanninkielisessä maailmassa, mikä näkyy näiden kirjojen määrässä. Yliopistot ja yliopistolaiset ovat olleet ahtaalla jo 1990-luvulta lähtien.

Higher education policy in Finland has shifted toward academic capitalism as an extension to new demands for competitiveness placed on higher education institutions. The Finnish Ministry of Education has been involved for some time in reforming the Finnish higher education system with the aim of increasing outputs in research innovations and laying the groundwork for academic capitalism. In other words, political guidance has sought to reform research as a qualitative change, rather than commit to increasing investment. Looking at the statistical indicators of Finnish research and development, particularly in the context of Finnish universities, shows how in practice Finland has introduced ideas of academic capitalism locally by moving away from basic funding into a more competition-driven funding system. Competitive logics are filtered down from the level of national higher education policy to university level through policy tools, such as performance-based funding. Furthermore, the Finnish system shows a relatively high susceptibility to political control, which can be viewed as a challenge to substantive academic autonomy.

Policymakers have called on higher education institutions to respond more directly to the new demands of competitiveness of knowledge economies. This includes instilling competitive logics in higher education policy and management of universities. The knowledge economy paradigm is reflected in higher education reforms, such as university mergers in Finland. Competitive logics are filtered down from the level of national higher education policy to the institutional level through policy-based reforms, leading to university mergers seeking economies of scale. This logic is then finally filtered down to academics, who try to make sense of their own attitude toward it. Applying critical discourse analysis to interview data from the merger of two Finnish universities – the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Tampere (UTA) into Tampere University (2019) – academics offer legitimizing and delegitimizing responses to competitiveness claims.

Commercialization and commodification of higher education has been subjected to wide critique in academic literature. The relative privilege of academic professions seems to be on the decline, as universities are subjected to increasing competitive pressures – pressures which these institutions pass on to academics. Academics experience a loss of control over their own working conditions, with high intrinsic motivation and goals being imprinted by extrinsic ones. Looking at these recent developments through the lens of alienation theory, it is possible to argue that academics feel a deep sense of disempowerment, which is counterproductive not only for academic work, but also traditional academic identities. This theoretical approach is discussed in the context of a Finnish university merger – the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Tampere (UTA) merging into Tampere University (2019) – which shows experiences of being extraneously controlled, leading to experiences of disengagement and alienation. The causes of alienation are typically placed on the level of higher education policy and higher education institutions, but are not uniform, which is why the plural form – alienations – is considered more apt.