Competitive knowledge-economies driving new logics in higher education – reflections from a Finnish university merger

Figures & data

Table 1. Tampere University Faculty structure

Faculty	Contains (previous university)
Built Environment (BEN)	Architecture (TUT), Civil engineering (TUT)
Education and Culture (EDU)	Education sciences (UTA), Teacher training school (UTA), Language center (UTA & TUT)
Engineering and Natural Sciences (ENS)	Automation technology and mechanical engineering (TUT), Physics (TUT), Materials science and environmental engineering (TUT)
Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC)	Communication sciences (UTA), Computing sciences (UTA & TUT), Electrical engineering, Language studies (UTA)
Management and Business (MAB)	Administrative studies (UTA), Business studies (UTA), Industrial engineering and management (TUT), Information and Knowledge Management (TUT), Politics (UTA)
Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology (MET)
Social Sciences (SOC)	Health sciences (UTA & TUT), History, philosophy and literary Studies (UTA), Social research (UTA), Welfare sciences (UTA)

Table 2. Discursive categories

Types of discourse
Macro	Meso	Micro (translated quotes)
Legitimizing the merger	Inevitable change of globalized competition	‘Let me put it like this: we can’t afford to slacken the pace at all. It’s this entire competing set-up we have, and that’s just it.’ (P11)
		‘The world is changing and everything has to change with it or fall behind.’ (T22)
	Economic benefits	‘The foundation has brought in money, and that’s an important thing, because we can’t run the university with good intetions alone. We actually need the economic resources to keep it afloat.’ (T20)
		‘The competition is really tough even between [Finnish] universities, and there is only a limited amount of money available, so in that sense it makes sense to pool resources together.’ (P17)
	Survivalism	‘Let me put it like this: we can’t afford to slacken the pace at all. It’s this entire competing set-up we have, and that’s just it.’ (P11)
		‘As far as I can see we have to make some decisions to maintain our international competitiveness. It simply has to be done, it has to be made work quickly, or else we might lose something that we will have a really hard time to replace.’ (T18)
Delegitimizing the merger	Mismatch of discourse and materiality	‘So we have a vision to make our university into a “top university”, like MIT, and we put out similar strategies, without understanding the realities of this or that university. […] It’s like we have visions completely divorced from understanding what happens on the greassroots level […].’ (P12)
		‘It is so intolerable that we get new people in who are not at all interested in what we’ve done before. They’re only interested in their own visions. That is, you know, really hurtful. […]’ (T31)
	Changing the nature of academia	‘At the same time we arrive at a crisis over the philosophy of science, as we are forcibly made to take part in innovation capitalism and competition ideology […].’ (P14)
		‘It feels like [they] have misunderstood the mission of the university wrong and that we’re heading into a direction no longer guided by the internal logic of science [and replacing it with] something else, like maintaining economic competitiveness.’ (T33)
	Outside authority (MEC)	‘[…] intense international competition makes the MEC demand this and that from us, more outputs and the like.’ (P9)
		‘[…] we [the universities] were totally at odds, so the MEC had to come in and order us to merge despite any grievances.’ (P7)
	Disengagement and fatalism	‘This is pretty hard and I’ve tried to alienate myself for a long time from everything that happens at the university so I can observe it somehow outside of the university community too.’ (P9)
		‘[…] people adapt when there are no other choices.’ (T34)