Movers and Shakers: Do Academics Control Their Own Work?
This chapter deals with stakeholders and academics as stakeholders. We examine responses to several questions from the EUROAC/CAP survey and seek to establish whether or not European responding nations fit into any obvious blocs. Academics’ perceptions of
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Movers and Shakers: Do Academics Control Their Own Work? Timo Aarrevaara and Ian R. Dobson
8.1
Introduction
Higher education governance is an ever-changing phenomenon, most commonly driven by so-called reforms promoted by governments. Governments, after all, are the principal providers of funding for most higher education institutions in most if not all European countries. European universities find themselves in a situation in which there used to be a tacit separation between them and the state, so the new situation is that universities are moving rapidly towards using market mechanisms, including seeking to establish a diversified funding base and having to react to the opinions of a much wider range of stakeholders. At the same time, universities are searching to tighten their focus to improve the profile they present to society and trying to find an appropriate balance between their teaching, research and other responsibilities. As universities undergo these changes, it is leading to an expansion in the number of stakeholder groups, some of which might wish to have an expanded role in the internal governance of universities. With new stakeholders coming in to the picture, it is not surprising that ‘traditional’ stakeholders of the university community such as students and members of the academic profession have views that are critical of university reforms and changes in governance structures. In addition, even if ‘stakeholders’ are dealt with as though they represent a homogenous group (or set of groups), in reality, the various discipline-based areas within the university have their own stakeholders. For instance, the humanities, arts and social sciences receive less policy attention
T. Aarrevaara (*) • I.R. Dobson Higher Education Governance and Management Unit, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] U. Teichler and E.A. Höhle (eds.), The Work Situation of the Academic Profession in Europe: Findings of a Survey in Twelve Countries, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 8, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5977-0_8, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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and funding for commercialisation than their counterparts in the hard sciences (Benneworth and Jongbloed 2010). In engineering, stakeholders are more often invited to discuss goals and objectives of the field and clarify the goals and objectives of research (Jesiek et al. 2009). Perhaps dealing solely with the national or regional government through its ministries or other bodies is preferable to having to appease the new stakeholders. In this chapter, we consider the attitudes of academic staff, based predominantly on responses to certain questions in the ‘Changing Academic Profession’ (CAP) survey, conducted in various countries around the world between 2007 and 2010 as well as five European countries that joined in the course of the EUROAC project. So, responses from academics in 12 European
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