Mats Benner

Professor

Beyond Neoliberalized Research : From Auditing to reflexive Governance

Författare

Mats Benner

Redaktör

Mats Benner
Mikael Holmqvist

Summary, in English

For many years, universities represented the ultimate outpost for professional autonomy in Western democracies. Despite little insight into the professional practices of scholars or administrators, governments provided the academic profession with extensive discretion, including the freedom to regulate qualifications for positions, terms for promotion, quality standards, goals, performance indicators and financial budgets. This freedom has become increasingly conditioned and strained during recent decades. Governments have commissioned universities to act like corporations to compete for funding, questioned established goals and performance indicators and enforced new market-based ideas in new governance models. These ideas, commonly described as “New Public Management,” include reforms to promote “academic excellence”, relevance of research outputs to policy-makers and practitioners, and high numbers of graduated students. In all, this has challenged the professional autonomy that previously was taken for granted and resulted in a changing professional practice at universities, largely inspired by a business ethos. Increasingly, however, governments have started to investigate alternative governance and leadership models, providing increased autonomy to the local levels and building on the intrinsic motivation of publicly employed professionals. This chapter describes and discusses Swedish experiences from a new approach to quality enhancement at universities, aiming to reduce the need for external control and strengthen the academic profession, while at the same time meeting external expectations with regard to transparency and performance. In its ideal form, the approach exemplifies, we argue, a shift from a top-down approach to quality assessment, to a trust-based bottom-up process, building on the judgement of academic professionals themselves.

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