Universities, as public organisations, exemplify three competing institutional logics regarding governance. First, the state wields considerable control over universities through a Weberian bureaucratic logic. Second, university managers have been granted increased autonomy under a neoliberal, managerial logic. Third, a traditional academic logic involves a high degree of self-regulation and peer control. The country-specific ways in which this balance has been achieved come under pressure in times of crisis, such as the pandemic. In this article, we explore how the challenge of managing an unprecedented crisis has affected higher education systems and institutions and how the balance between the three logics has developed before, during and after the crisis. To this end, we adopt a comparative approach and analyse four different European higher education systems: Denmark, France, Portugal and Germany. The analysis reveals that paths of governance that weaken the academic logic were reinforced during the pandemic as university leadership reacted to the crisis by enacting top-down decision-making processes.

Legislation in the 1970s, 1990s and 2003 made major changes to the status and operations of Danish universities and the role they should play in creating different imaginaries of Denmark and its place in the world. In the education literature, ‘institutional autonomy’ is key indicator of shifts in the idea and role of the university but this was not always the term used in Denmark. Instead, key terms are the ‘self-steering’ university, the ‘self-owning’ university, ‘aim and frame’ steering and ‘commando-way’ steering. The Danish words are explored ethnographically, and ‘autonomy’ is used as an analytical, not an emic, term. Whereas institutional autonomy literally means self-legislating, the analysis starts from the premise that it is never absolute: it always involves a negotiated relationship between the university and government, and these negotiations are influenced by how ‘the university’ is constituted at different times. This article focuses on changes to the legal construction of the university, its relation to government, internal organisation and leadership in different reforms. Each period will explore the ways in which the university was (or was not) ‘autonomous’, and why each new status was thought suitable for the role universities were to pay in the realisation of different visions of Denmark’s future.

In this paper, we consider, from critical perspectives, the ways in which research assessment governs the production of academic knowledge and can contribute to epistemic injustices. This issue is examined through a fieldwork study in 2018 of the implications of the Danish Bibliometric Indicator for research in a humanities department of a research-intensive Danish university. We draw on Connell'sSouthern Theoryin conjunction with Bourdieu's work on language and power to show how humanities research in the Danish language is pushed onto the periphery of global disciplinary fields. The paper highlights that regimes of governance such as bibliometric research assessment affect not only what is published and where but also what is recognised as scientific or academic language. Such regimes can contribute significantly to the generation and reproduction of epistemic injustices through limitations on how, and by whom, legitimate knowledge is defined, produced and promulgated. We argue that it is time to recognise this as the colonisation of research.

This article analyses the process of reforming the governance of Danish universities, from an anthropological perspective. Observers saw that the assemblage of steering concepts, tools and mechanisms in the 2003 Danish university law could be articulated in two contrary ways: one would make the university into a power force with ideas that exceeded the government's imagining of the future; the other turned the university into a tightly steered service provider, quick to respond to changes in political priorities. Initially, the government took the first approach in promoting the internationalisation of research and education. Its strategy provided a framework of opportunities that university leaders and academics used voluntarily to fulfil their own visions for their institution or discipline. In 2018, the government's priority suddenly shifted to de-internationalisation of Danish higher education. To achieve this, it rearticulated the same steering concepts, tools and mechanisms to impose cuts to English-medium courses through commando-style steering, and academics and students were disenfranchised. The internationalisation strategy first mobilised the capacities of the university as a power force. When the government decided to de-internationalise, it turned the same steering assemblage into a chain of command that made the university respond quickly to a changed political priority.

This paper offers a new way to engage with gender, race, and class relations in academic leadership and organizations. Viewing our research materials through different images helps us to ask new questions, open up new kinds of answers and ultimately other ways of knowing gender and leadership in academia. Our approach has three connected steps. Firstly, we engage with the ruins of the three main promises upon which the contemporary university has been built: enlightenment, liberalism, and feminism, drawing on Anna Tsing's mushrooms at the end of the world and Gibson-Graham's notion of a post-capitalist economy. Secondly, we use intersectionality as a methodological lens, combining it with Karen Barad's ideas about how "matter comes to matter." We explore the intersections between four themes arising from the accounts of our participants: Reshaping the disciplinary field; gender, class, and race; traveling and mobility; and Institutional structures and policies. The third and final step engages with how some women successfully coordinate these intersecting themes to navigate their careers and achieve leadership positions within the contaminated and ruinous university environment. In doing so, we draw on the musical form of the fugue with its four themes that at different moments diverge, clash and, if successful, achieve resolution, to provide us with a way for analyzing the women's stories as "polyphony-in-action." By using this musical approach to retool intersectionality, we are able to show how some women managed to bring all four themes of their lives into symbiosis and achieve value in the ruinous academic landscape.

This chapter looks at relations between sexual arenas in a village in Iran through aspects of the social and physical space of women which are not stressed by informants. In the village of a partially settled section of Doshman Ziari division of the Mamasani tribal group it was emphasised that women were physically and conceptually excluded from the male arena of discussion and decision-making, and should observe restraint in movement and behaviour. The women's arena, no less public than the men's, was during daylight; the men's was after dark. Success in preventing a relationship from becoming one of subordination depended on the continued support of close kin. The balance between solidarity with close agnates and links with distant kin became especially important when activities of the male domain involved negotiation and co-operation between several groups of patrikin. The importance of the residence pattern for the men was seen in 1976.

AbstractSince the 1980s universities have been subjected to a seemingly continuous process of policy reforms designed to make them more economical, efficient and effective, according to yardsticks defined by governments and university managers. The pursuit of ‘excellence’, ‘international standing’ and ‘world class’ status have become key drivers of what Hazelkorn (High Educ Pol 21(2):193–215, 2008) has termed the ‘rankings arms race’ that now dominates the world of academia. These policies are changing the mission and meaning of the public university and, more profoundly, the culture of academia itself. While some authors have sought to capture and analyse these trends in terms of ‘academic capitalism’ and the ‘enterprise university model’, we suggest they might also be usefully understood theoretically as illustrations of the rise of audit culture in higher education and its effects. Drawing on ethnographic examples from the UK, Denmark and New Zealand, we ask: how are higher education institutions being reconfigured by these new disciplinary regimes of audit? How are ranking and performance indicators changing institutional behaviour and transforming academic subjectivities? What possibilities are there for alternative university futures? And what insights can anthropology offer to address these questions?

This chapter provides a historical and international context for the Danish university reform. It analyses Danish policy makers' participation in the international forums that, from the 1980s to the 2000s, were sites of debate and contestation over different ideas for university reform. First it sketches out the principal international agencies and their contrary visions for universities. Were universities to foster international exchanges of ideas, cultural understanding and world peace, or to drive the competitiveness of countries and world regions in a projected global knowledge economy? In the 1990s, Danish policy makers focused most on the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development). A detailed analysis of the OECD's report, Redefining Tertiary Education, reveals the rhetorical strategy or 'double shuffle' by which it kept both the above visions for the university in play, and the tricks and tropes of time that made the 'global knowledge economy' look like a certain future which was moving fast into the present. The chapter explores the formation of an 'epistemic community' around the OECD and the technologies of soft power by which they brought OECD reform agendas into national policy making. The Danish case study shows the intense interaction of members of this epistemic community across the Danish-OECD interface. Far from 'Denmark' and 'OECD' being discrete entities, national policy makers, who were deeply involved in creating the OECD's agenda, invited other members of the epistemic community to make recommendations about the reforms necessary for Denmark to be competitive in future. The Danish policy makers then received this as objective and authoritative advice marked with the OECD's imprimatur. The chapter shows how, in a short time, a small number of activists successfully mobilised a radical agenda of university reforms using forms of power that were 'soft' not only because they depended on networks and the spreading of advice and best practice, rather than rules and regulations, but also because they were diffuse and hard for those outside the epistemic community to grasp, let alone resist.