Are national university systems becoming more alike? Long-term developments in staff composition across five countries

ABSTRACT

National university systems have traditionally been characterised by major differences in both internal structures and external conditions. However, the global rise of the knowledge economy has made external conditions of universities more similar across countries. This paper investigates to what extent this convergence has been mirrored within the universities by systematically comparing staff changes over more than a decade in five countries: The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, and Denmark. Measures of staff changes are partial but tangible indicators, which are reasonably comparable across countries and over time. The empirical analysis isolates and examines two parallel staff trends, which the higher education literature currently highlights as crucial for ongoing university transformations: Proliferation of temporary academic staff and professionalisation of administrative/managerial staff. In doing so, the analysis provides a tangible empirical basis for assessing the impact of global trends on historically distinct university systems. Staff compositions have changed in the same direction, but from different starting points and with different intensity. Staff changes have been larger in Europe than in the US, but not in ways erasing major historical differences. The directional similarity rather suggests that dissimilar universities have added a similar layer of certain types of human resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Staff composition
• organizational change
• national university systems
• convergence
• universities as organisations
• World Society Theory

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kaare Aagaard for valuable comments throughout the process of developing this manuscript and to Franziska Debes (DZHW, Germany), Hebe Gunnes (NIFU, Norway), Steven Hurlburt (AIR, US), and William Locke (CGHE, UK) for helping me retrieving and understanding the staff data of their respective home countries. I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that have improved the paper. Any remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Andreas Kjær Stage http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4385-368X

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Specifically, the lowest ranked ‘consultant’ job title (job code 1065) has over time changed from being a high-status position to being a standard administrative position. It has replaced several traditional secretary positions. The share of the lowest ranked consultants who actually hold a university degree is unknown (Gornitzka, Larsen, and Gunnes 2009, 18).

2 In 2007, a far-reaching merger process reduced the number of universities from twelve to eight and transferred twelve out of fifteen Government Research Institutes (GRIs) to the remaining eight universities (Aagaard, Hansen, and Rasmussen 2016). Contrary to a previous article using data since 1999 (Stage and Aagaard 2019), this paper includes the absorbed universities prior to the merge for which data are only available since 2002. The GRIs are not included until gaining university status during the mergers.

3 Two types of positions (section manager and one of the lowest consultant positions) have been moved from the higher administrative category to the clerical category. Furthermore, the administrative staff in the university libraries have been excluded from the sample. Gornitzka and colleagues stress that figures prior to 1999 cannot be directly compared to those after (Gornitzka, Larsen, and Gunnes 2009, 18, 28).