The bureaucratisation of the university: The case of Denmark

Abstract

The literature on ‘academic capitalism’ and the ‘entrepreneurial university’ has paid little attention to the role and function of bureaucracy or has considered it something different from the New Public Management (NPM) that has accompanied neoliberal reforms in higher education over the last decades. Following a brief account of the theory and history of bureaucracy, the article examines the institutional, intellectual, pedagogic, and psychic repercussions of the NPM that was introduced in Danish universities in 2003, and turned them into what has been often called ‘knowledge companies’ (vidensvirksomheder). As a result of these reforms, the paper shows, academicians have been transformed into competitive entrepreneurial clerks, striving for assignments and resources, bound by contracts, thoroughly surveilled for their productivity and performance through special software, and entangled in a web of bureaucratic relations which has removed all spaces of logos that distinguish a university, according to its European tradition.

Keywords:

• University
• academic autonomy
• bureaucracy
• New Public Management
• Denmark

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stavros Moutsios

Stavros Moutsios is an Associate Professor of International Comparative Education Policy, at Aarhus University, School of Education (DPU). He did his PhD at the University of London, Institute of Education, and he has worked at the Universities of Thessaloniki, and, as research fellow, at the universities of Auckland, and Berlin. His main research interests and publications are in comparative education theory and transnational education policy, including university reform.