‘I am done with that now.’ Sense of alienations in Finnish academia

ABSTRACT

Commercialization and commodification of higher education has been subjected to wide critique in academic literature. The relative privilege of academic professions seems to be on the decline, as universities are subjected to increasing competitive pressures – pressures which these institutions pass on to academics. Academics experience a loss of control over their own working conditions, with high intrinsic motivation and goals being imprinted by extrinsic ones. Looking at these recent developments through the lens of alienation theory, it is possible to argue that academics feel a deep sense of disempowerment, which is counterproductive not only for academic work, but also traditional academic identities. This theoretical approach is discussed in the context of a Finnish university merger – the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Tampere (UTA) merging into Tampere University (2019) – which shows experiences of being extraneously controlled, leading to experiences of disengagement and alienation. The causes of alienation are typically placed on the level of higher education policy and higher education institutions, but are not uniform, which is why the plural form – alienations – is considered more apt.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• Finland
• higher education policy
• university merger

Introduction

The operational logics of higher education have changed to emphasize a more corporate mode of governance and, in the case of public universities, a more accountable use of public resources. The stewardship of these resources is often located at the level of education ministries or higher education institutions (HEIs), but on the practical level it is up to the academics to realize the return on investment. The organizational mission of public universities is undercut by new priorities, such as market competitiveness (Fleming 2021, 38). The public university cannot help but adopt a more corporate approach (Wright and Shore 2017) to its activities, casting academics more as employees rather than autonomous, self-guided academic professionals. The social relations of academic work become increasingly characterized as relations of exchange.

This has arguably led to a loss of control over academics’ working conditions and increasing conflicts between the vocational aspect of working in higher education, and the more purely utilitarian view of higher education emphasizing outputs (graduates to the labor market or commodifiable innovations). This contradiction that leads to disassociation and disaffection can be described, in a word, as alienation (Harvie 2000; Hall 2018b; Oleksiyenko 2018). While changes in how public universities operate have progressed far in the Anglophone world (US, UK, Australia and New Zealand), other higher education systems, such as those in the Nordics, previously relatively sheltered from market logic by the welfare state, are still in the process of moving in this direction (Kuusela et al. 2021; Välimaa 2011).

Guided by extant alienation research – mostly focused on the Anglophone context – this article proposes a novel approach of applying alienation theory to a specific case study in the Nordic context: a Finnish university merger. Despite a relative resurgence of academic interest (e.g. Skotnicki and Nielsen 2021; Øversveen 2021), alienation theory has not so far been applied to the context of Finnish higher education.¹ In this article alienation is approached as a process that rises out of intensifying academic capitalism (Münch 2020; Cantwell and Kauppinen 2014; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004), but which becomes more visible in moments of ruptures with the status quo, when academics are subjected to organizational or policy reforms that directly influence to conditions of their work, but which they feel they have little influence over.

This article explores how the concept of alienation (Marx 2007 [1961]; Sayers 2011) emerges as a dimension in the articulated experiences of academic staff of a Finnish university merger. Previous data has already shown that Finnish academics feel growing dissatisfaction of academics not only with their universities and their management (Kuusela 2020), but also a disconnect with their own identities as academics (Ylijoki and Ursin 2013). The article draws on interview data from the merger of the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Tampere (UTA) into the new Tampere University in 2019. In the interviews with professors, teachers, and researchers, conducted during the first operational year of the new university, academic staff tries to make sense of the merger, and how it has affected their perception of their work and themselves and what power structures determine the conditions of their work. The merger posed itself as a challenge to academics’ agency and coping mechanisms under conditions that many of them experienced as alienating.

The article proceeds by briefly reviewing extant research on alienation theory to outline its persistence as a critical approach and its applicability to higher education (HE) more specifically. Next, we will offer a contextual overview of Finnish higher education in relation to higher education research literature to discuss how the processes of alienation can be considered to be developing alongside processes of gradual reform of Finnish HE into a more competition-oriented system. We argue that by closely analyzing the experiences of academics, processes of alienations in the plural can be located in the data.

A brief overview of academic alienation

Alienation theory in its most known form stems from Karl Marx’s early writings, in particular from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 2007 [1961]), where alienation takes a powerful role in explaining fundamental human dissatisfaction at work under capitalism. The key, according to Marx, is to understand how labor under capitalism labor becomes forced, coerced, or even dehumanizing. Workers become commodities within the production process, much like the products they themselves produce; workers are alienated from the fruits of their labor, their own part in the labor process, from other workers, and finally within themselves (Marx 2007 [1961], pp. 72–74; Hall 2018a, 98). Human capital in engaged in endemic competition, which also makes workers responsible for the economic viability of not only their place of employment, but for their own, encouraging them to see themselves as extensions of capital, and thus leading to alienation from the self (Swain 2012, 54, 69; see also Mészáros 2005 [1970]). In a capitalist society social relations are characterized as simple relations of exchange.

Marx later distanced from the concept of alienation in his writing, but this is not to say alienation disappeared from his later works; it rather assumed the less essentialist position of commodity fetishism (Musto 2010). Alienation theory has later featured also in the works of the Frankfurt School, as societal alienation was discussed for example in the Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm,² but also later in Paulo Freire’s work on the emancipatory potential of education (De Lissovoy 2018). Although notable post-Marxists like Louis Althusser (Althusser 2005 [1965]) argued that the concept of alienation in its Marxist sense was too fungible to offer any real basis for scientific analysis, Musto (2010) has argued, that much of the dissatisfaction arose from trying to create a quantitative analytical framework for measuring individual experiences. However, as Kalekin-Fishman and Lauren (2015) note, the concept of alienation persisted as a critical approach towards capitalist societies. Modern critical theorists understand the term’s complicated origins and its oftentimes off handed use but maintain that the concept has still useful potential (Williamson and Cullingford 1997; Hall 2018b).

Rather than looking at alienation as something that can be measured, as a set of variables in a quantitative analysis , the potential of alienation theory is in serving as a lens, through which we can make critical observations of what higher education and academic work has become. As academic work is drawn in closer to the paradigm of competing knowledge-economies (Jessop, Fairclough, and Wodak 2008), academic capitalism (Cantwell and Kauppinen 2014) exerts more and more power over the social relations surrounding academic work. While academic capitalism treats academia as a market, it is at best an imperfect one, leading to expectations (and discourse) of market meritocracy and efficiency (Münch 2020), while practical developments have been linked to the casualization, proletarianization and deprofessionalization of academic labor (McCarthy, Song, and Jayasuriya 2017; Faucher 2014; Loveday 2018), to destructive administrative models (Oleksiyenko 2018; Brandist 2017), to the enclosure of public commons (Harvie 2000; Hall 2018a), to neoliberal academic subjectivities (De Lissovoy 2018; Cannizzo 2018; Lorenz 2012) and increasing ill-being in academic professions (Fleming 2021; Loveday 2018).

Subjected to managerial control, the neoliberal academic is engaged in social relations of exchange, rather than any collective activity, even within their own institution (McCarthy, Song, and Jayasuriya 2017). Centralized management practices are experienced as unresponsive and proceeding with an air of authoritarian inevitability (Fleming 2021; Grönblom and Willner 2013). Subjected to competitiveness discourse on the level of HE policy and ‘strategic management’ on the institutional level, academics have less control over their work and working conditions than before. As a result, academics are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile their intrinsic, even vocational motivations with imposed, extrinsic incentives and changes (Hall 2018b, 49). Managerial practice seeks to impose an extrinsic motivation as an intrinsic one: Silva (2017, 380) argues, that an alienated mind is susceptible to the ideology of the dominant class. Managerialism, then is not a symptom of alienation, but rather its driver, as it disconnects academics – to an extent – from the autonomy of their work. Confirming international findings (Cannizzo 2018; Oleksiyenko 2018), extant research also in Finland has shown that young, early-career researchers (ECRs) are most vulnerable to new, neoliberal subjectivities (Brunila and Hannukainen 2017; Ylijoki and Henriksson 2017).

Critical organization scholar Mats Alvesson (2014) has argued, that managerialist discourse often constructs elaborate imaginaries of positivity, stressing excellence or other abstract positive traits, that are rarely explicated later. This creates a dialectic mismatch between the lived experience of the organization on one hand, and the flowery discourse the organization’s management produces on the other. Universities, Alvesson argues, become particularly problematic fields of empty discourse, because academics tend to have a high degree of literacy when it comes to spotting discursive vacuity – or outright bullshit (Spicer 2018). Managerialist discourse that emphasizes there are no problems, when academics experience grave problems regardless, can become a discursive driver of alienation, as it emphasizes the disconnect between the academic and their institution.

Following Williamson and Cullingford (1997, 271), this article defines alienation as a dynamic process – rather than a state – which runs parallel to academic capitalism. Alienation as a process becomes characterized as having a deficient relationship with the world, which people no longer recognize as their own making (Jaeggi 2014). This is also where the divergent developments of academic capitalism might give reason to look at alienations as a plurality with common features.³ Despite this extensive background, alienation research has received surprisingly little attention in the Nordics, particularly in the field of HE.

The Finnish higher education context and the Tampere merger

The Finnish higher education context has changed rapidly after the law redefining the relationship of public universities⁴ and the state, following the implementation of the Universities Act of 2009, which changed universities into public corporations or administratively private foundations. Finnish universities have started to integrate themselves more to the global market of higher education, having been previously relatively sheltered by the state-centered institutional orientation of the welfare state (Antikainen 2010; Ahlqvist and Moisio 2014). Stepping onto the globalized markets led by its (technology-driven) export-industry, Finland proceeded with higher education policies that would safeguard Finland’s position in the global competition of knowledge economies (Nokkala 2008; Poutanen 2022).⁵ To this end, Finnish universities would need to become more flexible and strategically competent in responding to market demands, whether it came to teaching employable skills to graduates entering the labor market or to innovations that universities were expected to produce together with business and industry interests (see Poutanen et al. 2020 for a review). The reforms in higher education were pushed through with arguments of competitiveness and concerns over falling behind in the global competition of knowledge economies (Tirronen and Nokkala 2009), even if the voiced concerns of Finland having already fallen behind (e.g. Tjeldvoll 2008), were also contested (Kivinen and Hedman 2016).

Since Finnish universities are all public and dependent of public funds, this gave the Ministry of Education considerable power to reorganize the HE sector and its operational logics, seeking to emulate a more corporate university model for public universities (Kuusela et al. 2021; Välimaa 2011). Many of the reforms have emphasized external professionalism instead of academic self-governance: especially in the new ‘foundation universities’ academic managers would no longer be elected to positions of leadership by the academic community, nor would they be accountable, in any real sense of the word, to that community (Kohtamäki 2019). The Ministry of Education stated in its policy documents, that democratic representation within the decision-making bodies of the university, was determined a risk for necessary ‘strategic renewal’ (OPM 2007, 43). Finnish HE policy emphasized excellence and competitiveness (comparable to German discourse as described by Münch (2020), but in so doing it also created a discourse of grandiosity, that put its goals, for example in the context of the merger of the Aalto University in 2009, as the creation of a ‘Nordic MIT’ (Tienari, Aula and Aarrevaara 2016). Grandiose discourse seeped into the way HE policy and institutional reforms were presented and started to diverge from the experiences of the academic community (Poutanen et al. 2020; Alvesson 2014). Despite flowery discourse of excellence, many Finnish academics find themselves disempowered: they are free to pursue their own research, but under increasing supervision.

The funding model has become increasingly based on performance – the Finnish HE system is one of the most performance-driven systems in the world (Hansen et al. 2019, 563). The new logic brought with it increasing pressure to deliver results at an accelerated pace (Valkeasuo and Holopainen 2019). As a result, Finnish academics have felt that their capacity to influence their work has decreased (Jauhiainen et al. 2014). Disconnect between the university leadership and the rank and file of the academic community has also been recorded in internal wellbeing surveys as the lowest score of all the metrics (Kuusela 2020); over 60% of respondents stated that their opinions directed at decision-makers do not matter (Tapanila, Siivonen, and Filander 2020).⁶ These findings are comparable to UK academics reacting very negatively to managerialist governance modes (Erickson, Hanna, and Walker 2021) and arguably speak of a narrowing sense of professional autonomy.

Based on extant research, Finnish academics have reacted negatively to these reforms (e.g. Brunila and Hannukainen 2017; Nikkola and Tervasmäki 2020) and feel torn between the previous administrative system, which meant collegial peer representation in decision-making, and the new system, which invites academics to surrender their collective administrative responsibilities to centralized, corporate decision-making practices (Tapanila, Siivonen, and Filander 2020). Uncertainty and unpredictability keep academics constantly off-balance, and administrative decisions are often experienced as ‘surprises’, typically unpleasant ones (Nikkola and Tervasmäki 2020). These conditions are conducive to increased dissatisfaction – and potential motors for processes of alienation.

Finally, university mergers have been used in Finland as a policy tool to drive through structural reforms by decreasing the number of universities (Nokkala and Välimaa 2017; Välimaa 2011; Tirronen and Nokkala 2009). This was also the case with the merger of the University of Tampere (UTA) with the Technical University of Tampere (TUT); the objective was to create a larger, and thus more competitive, university (OKM 2016a). Although the merger was publicized as the universities’ own initiative, the Ministry presided over the merger, tying a part of their funding to a successful merger (OKM 2016b). As in the Aalto case, the Tampere merger process was showered with discourse of great promise, but given how contested the process became, it seemed evident that this discourse did not match up to academics’ experiences.

The Tampere university merger was the result of a determined political and administrative project, with both political, business and industry stakeholders asserting their claim over the new university (Poutanen et al. 2020). Academics were largely aware that the initiative for the merger did not originate from either academic community – in fact there was a great deal of apprehension in both communities as the merger process gained momentum of inevitability. The merger process seemed to follow the blueprint established by the merger of the Aalto university (see Granqvist and Gustafsson 2016). The Ministry of Education and business and industry interests were also the main catalysts behind the Aalto merger (Aula and Siltaoja 2021).

Data and method

The interviews were conducted as part of a research project that evaluated the attitudes of university staff towards university democracy. The interviewees were selected based on survey data to equally represent staff from both former universities, various career stages. Additionally, based on the survey, respondents were selected to represent diverse views on university democracy, which had become a key dimension of the merger contestations. The respondents were selected, and the interviews were conducted by a research assistant and transliterated externally, fully anonymously, and analyzed using Atlas.ti collectively by a research group studying the university merger and its outcomes.⁷ Rather than looking for specific keywords, the interviews were read and encoded as a whole. The collective process was utilized to find consensus in encoding responses. Each interview was identified with a number and the signifier ‘P’ for professor and ‘T’ for other staff (teachers, researchers, support staff). Additionally, the former university (UTA/TUT) of the respondent was added. The anonymity of respondents was considered a necessity, given the uncertainty surrounding the merger, to allow the respondents to speak openly. More background data on the respondents is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Interviewee details.

Professors	Age bracket	Started work at UTA/TUT
P1	55–59	UTA/2012
P2	45–49	UTA/2006
P3	40–44	UTA/2002
P4	40–44	UTA/2002
P5	50–54	TUT/2000
P6	45–49	TUT/2004
P7	50–54	TUT/1999
P8	35–39	TUT/2001
P9	40–44	UTA/2016
P10	65+	UTA/2001
P11	55–59	TUT/2014
P12	35–39	TUT/2018
P13	55–59	TUT/1990
P14	60–64	UTA/1989
P15	55–59	TUT/2000
P16	40–44	TUT/2007
P17	50–54	TUT/2002
P18	55–59	UTA/1998
Researcher/teaching staff	Age bracket	Started work at UTA/TUT
T1	45–49	UTA/1997
T2	30–34	UTA/2015
T3	25–29	UTA/2013
T4	40–44	UTA/2006
T5	55–58	UTA/1990
T6	35–39	TUT/2006
T7	55–59	UTA/2009
T8	50–54	TUT/1991
T9	45–49	TUT/1998
T10	45–49	UTA/1999
T11	40–44	UTA/2013
T12	45–49	TUT/2015
T13	50–54	TUT/1998
T14	35–39	TUT/2018
T15	40–44	UTA/2006
T16	60–64	UTA/1982
T17	n/a	TUT/2003
T18	55–59	UTA/2016
T19	45–49	TUT/2017
T20	55–59	TUT/1993
T21	30–34	TUT/2014
T22	40–44	TUT/2010
T23	40–44	UTA/2010
T24	55–59	UTA/2012
T25	65+	TUT/1974
T26	30–34	UTA/2013
T27	55–59	UTA/2002
T28	40–44	TUT/2001
T29	45–49	TUT/2004
T30	50–54	TUT/1997
T31	60–64	UTA/1999
T32	25–29	UTA/2017
T33	50–54	UTA/1994
T34	60–64	UTA/-
T35	50–54	UTA/1997

The semi-structured interviews included open questions, which asked why, in their mind, the merger happened, how they felt about it and how they felt about the future of the new university. Alienation was not something that was explicitly brought up by the interviewer; experiences of alienation from the university were rather unprompted, and thus more meaningful to pursue. Elements, that were linked to alienation, were experiences of powerlessness, frustration and anxiety (Hall 2018b, pp. 161–162), of being subjected to externally dictated priorities, increasing feelings of ill-being and disconnect between organizational discourse and personal experience (see Jaeggi 2014). Particular focus was placed on what party the respondents felt was causing their disempowerment over their own working conditions – the capacity to influence the merger process. Tracking the locus of these experiences of alienation was necessary to get a sense of what, exactly, academics felt alienated from. Direct quotes from the interview data have been translated from their original Finnish into English by the author.

In the following sections, the interview data is explored further to 1) describe how HE policy as an outside influence challenges academic autonomy, 2) discuss how the merger process created new centralized power structures that were considered to be disempowering and 3) identify negative affects – emotions, feelings, sensations – that link to alienation. Across all three categories, we also discuss academics’ coping mechanisms and their interplay with potential alienation processes.

Policy alienation: external authority limits academic autonomy

The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) was seen as the key catalyst of the merger, as a part of HE policy: “this is all part of a longer continuum [of HE policy] ever since the Universities Act [of 2009] (T16/UTA). This continuum was often identified as promoting competitive academic capitalism explicitly (P14/UTA). One respondent remarked, how the previous civic mission of the university protected it from becoming a ‘promotional company for [Finnish] exports’ (T14/TUT). Another argued that the Act had allowed reconceptualization of academic autonomy from academics to the institutional level (T16/UTA). Some academics were also acutely aware of the MEC wielding the power of the purse over both public universities. While some academics might have agreed with the general premise of why the merger needed to happen – enhanced competitiveness, the economies of scale in securing funding, more integrated with business and industry partners – they took issue with how the new university was pushed into being and their lack of input in the process. In the eyes of some respondents, the Ministry of Education practically rammed the merger through. Recognizing the international trend of HE policy reform, one professor referred to ‘terrible examples’ of poor academic management in UK universities, ‘of [managers] completely alienated from reality, who makew long-term decision without knowing what they’re doing’ (P18/UTA).

In addition to the Ministry, the emphasis of business and industry interests, logics and discourse was recognized early in the process. This critique was often voiced by staff of the former University of Tampere, rather than the technical university, which had had a relatively long history of business collaborations in technical and natural sciences. The interests of the Ministry of Education and other external stakeholders were considered to be completely in line: from the perspective of the academics, the Ministry was operationalizing what business and industry stakeholders wanted out of the new university. In essence, the merger was driven by logics considered external to the university, or at least external to the motivations of many of the academics themselves. The experience of losing control over the merger process at an early stage troubled some respondents, because it also meant they had lost control over their institutional identity, which was now determined by others. Fleming’s (2021, 40) claim that ‘many feel like overworked subcontractors rather than public educators’ was also echoed by one of the respondents (T16/UTA).

And yet, it should be noted, that the reform was also legitimized through discourse making the university more accountable for the responsible use of public funds effectively to maximize the return on investment of public funding funneled into the university (Timo, Dobson, and Elander 2009, 12; Tjeldvoll 2008). It also meant that academics had to cede ground to external actors. Based on their responses, some academics had internalized fiscal accountability: ‘we must be accountable for our performance somehow, damn it. We need to be accountable for doing sensible things, when spending public money’ (P3/UTA, see also: T16/UTA; T24/UTA; T31/UTA).

Finally, the inevitability of the merger process was intensified by constantly rushing things, forcing academics to react to what they experienced as unduly rushed and chaotic change-proposals (T3/UTA; T33/UTA); ‘suddenly we received new demands from the top that had been not budgeted for in terms of time, and for which there was no time to prepare … the schedule, in my mind, was senseless’ (T35/UTA). The sense of accelerating academia is palpable, with respondents protesting that ‘reforms like this shouldn’t be rushed’ (P18/UTA). The interviewees’ experiences of a persistent rush that adds to unpredictability and chaos emphasizes how little control they can exert over their work.

Institutional alienation: centralized power structures

In organizational processes, which, from the perspective of the affected staff, cannot be influenced, it is understandable that staff feels disempowerment at the face of authoritarian, projected inevitability (see also Alvesson and Spicer 2016).⁸ Corporatization of higher education tends to lead to centralized power structures, that inevitably reduce agency further down the line. This is a marked difference from previous models of Finnish university governance (Kuusela et al. 2021). Experiences of disempowerment were more prevalent among the former staff of the University of Tampere, suggesting disempowerment was either not experienced equally among the staff of the merged institutions, or that TUT staff did not articulate these experiences, when not asked directly.

Staying fully informed of a complicated university merger process demands committing personal resources, which are already engaged in actual academic work. This additional burden, given the low likelihood of being able to make a difference, was considered excessive by many respondents. A simple lack of time was an oft-quoted reason for disengaging from the merger process and focusing on their own jobs. While one professor readily admitted to being ‘irresponsible in the sense of not caring [about the merger]’ (P12/TUT), another admitted to feeling ‘ashamed’ for being so passive in the merger process (P10/UTA).

The margins of resources that academics had to draw on seem thin: ‘everyone is constantly rushing things, and everyone is overburdened as it is’ (T20/TUT). There is little time to spare for responsibilities not directly related to one’s research or teaching tasks. Anything related to the merger thus appeared difficult to understand, and a probable time-sink for anyone involved – especially for younger academics (ECRs) who needed to focus on developing their own careers. The need and asserted right of especially younger academics to focus on their own jobs – implicitly ignoring administrative or managerial activities – comes across in several responses. Again, the responses from the former University of Tampere suggests these academics understood they should engage and participate and were trying to articulate why they did not.

This seems to be a core coping mechanism, albeit one that follows the logic of atomized individuals following their own interest (Fleming 2021, 40–43; Docherty 2015, 23; see also Nikkola and Tervasmäki 2020, 4). Many respondents identify only with their immediate working communities, as opposed to the university as a whole. Thus, rather than forming broader resistance many academics withdrew from collective fora: one professor described that the path of collective responsibilities, compared to the path of focusing on the self, was vanishing (P4/UTA).

The merger process itself in its rigidity and inevitability can be seen to contribute to experiences of alienation, but by prompting purposeful disengagement from the university as a whole as a coping mechanism, academics arguably self-alienated from their own institution, as they withdrew to focus on their own jobs. To stop alienation from one’s work, one voluntarily alienates oneself from the university as an institution – arguably also from the university community. Dedicating time in the university as an institution seemed like a bad investment: ‘If the university isn’t interested in my opinion, then I don’t see why I should be pushing it, either’ (P2/UTA). Similarly, one professor describes the merger process as ‘frustrating, and even somewhat debilitating, considering the hundreds of hours invested … which had little to no effect’ (P4/UTA). Another professor reflected that ‘either I have become alienated from the university management, or the management has become alienated from us, or it’s mutual’ (P5/TUT).

It is possible that once previously active academics become passivized by the unresponsive power structures, they remain passive – and alienated: ‘I kind of lost my interest, and I just thought it’s up to God now, I can do nothing more’ (T26/UTA; see also T23/UTA; P3/UTA). Rather than being simply despondent, respondents expressed a desire to actively ‘not care’ what was going on at the university (T16/UTA): ‘it would be nice to appreciate my employer, but currently I can’t’ (P2/UTA). To hear academics actively disengaging from their institution should be a concern for any university leader genuinely interested in forging a commitment within the community to the university’s strategy. It should be noted that professors, likely to have a broader knowledge of and more used to being influence decision-making at the university, were not noticeably more often dissatisfied with the practicalities of the merger process than other academic staff.

Focusing on one’s own work can be interpreted as being allowed to focus on competing in the increasingly precarious academic labor market. Experiences of precarity in academia are endemic and its link to alienation is confirmed in the research literature (Faucher 2014; Hall 2018b; Oleksiyenko 2018). Somewhat confirming expectations of hesitance by ECRs to vociferously protest, only older respondents expressed they would have wanted to somehow resist the inevitable more persistently, while others admitted they rather opted to ‘keeping their position … by not attracting the wrong kind of attention’ (T18/UTA).

Responses to the changes brought on by the merger seem follow – at least to an extent – the differing histories of staff involvement between TUT and UTA. TUT had become a foundation university already in 2010, and as that administrative model was chosen also for TAU, UTA staff was more prevalently dissatisfied with the process and its outcome. A key difference in these administrative struggles is, that professional university leadership has the luxury of being able to focus solely on administrative reforms, whereas academics must find time for participating in addition to their normal duties. One might argue that this is, if not purposeful, then at least very convenient for the purpose of railroading reforms despite opposition (Fleming 2021, 56).

Affects of alienation

In keeping with a tacit understanding of academic capitalism, some respondents saw the merger as a personal opportunity, if one can ‘go with the flow’ (T22/TUT). One does not want to be branded as a troublemaker, as that puts their personal careers in jeopardy. Some academics expressed admiration for those who ‘rose to the barricades’ but also often reflected that at the end the changes would not necessarily affect them (directly) all that much (T2/UTA; T4/UTA; T10/UTA; P5/TUT; P6/TUT; P10/UTA) to rationalize explain their own disengagement. Respondents referred to underlying persistent and worsening job precarity in global and Finnish academia meeting an authoritarian merger process, which led to an atmosphere insecurity, uncertainty, and fear within their institutions. This rationalizing, in short, is driven by emotions like fear.

Others, in turn, were outright dismissive of those who called for active resistance; they made clear in their responses that they certainly didn’t identify with any ‘rebellious faction’, adopting a more ‘wait and see’ attitude (T1/UTA; T5/UTA; T18/UTA). Academics dismissive of collegial resistance framed themselves as progressives who welcomed change that would ‘shake up things’ at the university (T2/UTA). It seems that many respondents engaged in identity work, seeking to position themselves in a specific way in relation to the university (Ylijoki and Ursin 2013). Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, these sentiments were also strong in the former UTA staff, which highlights how varied the responses are.

Affects of alienation expressed in the responses also included disappointment in academic expertise being all too readily dismissed in addition to mergers obliterating all the hard organizational work that had preceded the merger. This included reverting to ways of working academics had themselves previously deemed unfeasible and changed. The deleterious effect of the merger to an organizational identity increased negative responses. What this seems to boil down to for many respondents is an acute lack of trust displayed by the management at the capacity of academics to manage themselves: ‘all I want is a few years to peace from externally dictated terms, so we could get to doing what we know best. I wish they trusted us to know what we’re doing’ (T30/TUT). Career-survivalism becomes a core coping strategy: ‘When my superior asked me in the latest review what my targets were, I simply replied “surviving”’ (T35/UTA). Others experience a distinct break with the past; their academic jobs have lost something integral to it, which has fueled high intrinsic motivation: ‘something decisive has happened, this has been the last straw. […] In the past I have, in my opinion, been flexible and sacrificed for the good the University of Tampere. But I am done with that now’ (T27/UTA).

Overall, respondents argue that the merger process has had an extremely detrimental effect on work wellbeing (T3/UTA). Those old enough look forward to exiting: ‘I’ve gone through so many university reforms by now. Now I no longer feel like this is my university, so of course I am thinking how much longer I want to stay here, especially if I can leave, hopefully alive’ (P14/UTA). Comments like this should be alarming, given the plethora of evidence of fatal ill-being (Fleming 2021, 88–89) that exists in the Anglophone higher education system, and is, to this extent, a relatively new phenomenon in the Finnish system. While this analysis does not equate ill-being with alienation, feelings of ill-being can, however, serve as another element that intensifies processes of alienation, especially when the identified causes of that ill-being are continuously left unaddressed (by the university). Disempowerment feeds into resignation and experience of one’s opinions, contribution, and even ill-being being treated relatively inconsequential. Academics’ high intrinsic motivation to act as a member of a university institution and its apparent disregard is experienced as unreciprocated commitment.⁹

If academic careers become marked by unreciprocated commitment (Fleming 2021, 19) and ‘broken promises’, unpredictability sets the process of alienation going, which is then readily intensified by particular experiences of forces beyond the control of academics dictating for example the continuation of termination of their careers (see also Nikkola and Tervasmäki 2020). Alienation thus becomes an internal process, that feeds on active managerial policy and employee reactions to it.

Allowing overwork to persist is ‘extremely irresponsible waste of the real capital of the university, its employees’ (T33/UTA). Thinly stretched resource margins leave little room for sudden problems, such as falling ill (P6/TUT). A persistent lack of support staff means more of the administrative workload, even before the merger, falls on the academic staff.¹⁰ This has turned the organization detrimental to, as opposed to facilitating, academic work. Not only is the organization or institution unresponsive, but it is also driving changes that the academics experience as detrimental to doing their actual jobs and to their wellbeing. The academics feel the university is starting to exist for itself, rather than for them. It seems that academic staff has been loyal and dedicated despite of, rather than because of, academic employers (Washburn 2005, 203). Professors, having the benefit of a longer working history, are more apt at recognizing these structural changes.

Finally, one crucial affect that mixed in with frustration with the merger process that was shared by many academics was the empty discourse of grandiose promises of a greater tomorrow, that marked the institutional communication of the merger process (Alvesson 2014). While vacuous strategic discourse is common in all universities, previous research at TUT (Nokelainen 2016) had charted the entry of this discourse to the university. As such, it is likely that more experienced former TUT staff was more experienced with dealing with empty discourse. Indeed, one professor noted that dutifully repeating vacuous discourse is not only a coping, but a survival mechanism, even if one recognizes it for what it is (P12/TUT).

Reproducing empty organizational discourse to keep one’s head down may be sensible, but arguably also profoundly alienating: many respondents were particularly critical of managerial discourse reproduced in organizational change-seminars or management communication filled with reform-discourse: ‘it is at best frustrating, and at worst infuriating, because … it’s full of absolute daftness’ (T5/UTA) and ‘infantilizing’ (T33/UTA). One professor explicitly described how organizational communication was ‘alienating from the university … I feel alienated from the image imposed on this new university’ (P9/UTA). The mismatch between discourse and lived experience intensifies alienation from institutional discourse and the institution itself.

The dialectic problem of flowery discourse was also recognized, when it was used to cover up problems with resourcing the new university: many felt that the promised benefits of the merger would fail to materialize – as they had previously in the Aalto merger. Indeed, in 2021 TAU began consolidating by announcing reductions in support staff and university buildings. Staff satisfaction has continued to plummet while the detrimental effects of support staff cuts are hotly contested.

Discussion

Alienation is experienced as a process produces the experience of being frustrated or constricted in terms of capacity of possibility (Jaeggi 2014). Alienation as a process is driven by feelings of insufficiency, fear and anxiety, disappointment, illbeing, and increased cynicism. Following Sayers (2011), alienation should not be treated a singular, universal experience. Rather, it is a series of alienating processes, to which academics react differently, depending on their own capabilities and approach to academic work. Those who lose out in the competition of academic competition experience alienation as negative consequences to the changes determining their careers and working conditions. Those who successfully game academic capitalism are regardless alienated, according to Marx’s original theory, but may not experience this negatively. Similarly, academic autonomy that is characterized by being left alone to one’s own tasks, detached from organizational responsibilities, such as collective self-governance, becomes an element intensifying alienation from the academic community (see also: Rhodes 2017). However, being absolved from organizational responsibilities also means signing away the right of determining one’s own working conditions as a collective process all the while remaining subjected to externally dictated changes.

Academia is thus filling with competing subjectivities, who have internalized neoliberal logic (Ball 2012), who confuse disempowerment with freedom. Jaeggi (2014) argues, that alienation lays bare the reality of neoliberal atomized individuality: we no longer feel like active individual subjects of the neoliberal promise, but rather objects being squeezed by merciless outside forces. While some might argue that as knowledge workers academics are hardly comparable to the alienated workers in a factory of Marx’s original theory, academics cannot exist independently from a university more than a worker could from their factory. University affiliation grants institutional legitimacy and above all access to necessary academic resources.

The slow dismantling of a tradition of active collective and collegial participation among peers in institutional decision-making has exposed Finnish academics more directly to alienation processes in terms of narrowing self-governance. Market-based reforms in Nordic higher education are still relatively new. Symptoms have included increased elements of competition and market-oriented managerialism, entrepreneurial ideals, efficiency goals and performative roles (Jauhiainen et al. 2014). Academic protests have gone unheeded and have largely been ineffectual (Poutanen et al. 2020). The emphasis of academic autonomy has thus been relocated to the level of institutions, with many academics feeling that they are rather forced to adapt to top-down defined new circumstances. As the data from the Tampere University merger shows, academics are unhappy with their current disempowerment, but are left with few alternatives to actively resist it. The goals of HE policy, such as increased performance-based funding (Hansen et al. 2019), are offered to supplant personal goals of academics. Similarly, Finnish academics seem acutely aware of the fact that anyone in the highly competed academic labor market can be replaced at any time (Brunila 2019).

When experiences of Finnish academics increasingly align themselves with UK data (Erickson, Hanna, and Walker 2021: Loveday 2018), questions relating to academic alienation (Hall 2018b) become more pertinent also in the Finnish context. But this also opens opportunities for exploring potential disalienation: ‘Disalienating social practices are able to develop when employees feel ownership of their workplace and the relationships within it’ (Kociatkiewicz, Kostera, and Parker 2020, 19). Social and civic missions prioritized over market interests and academic autonomy might offer what academics feel they are lacking at their institutions (Swain 2012, 90). This calls for an active imagining of alternate academic identities and new forms of intellectuality (Hall 2018a), rather than falling back on nostalgic pining after ‘the good old days’ (Ylijoki 2005). Those memories may be deceiving, and they are already relatively distant to the new generations of early career researchers (Cannizzo 2018).

Conclusion

In this article, interview data from a Finnish university merger suggests that Finnish academics perceive interventions through HE policy reforms very negatively as challenges to academic autonomy, overburdening them with new responsibilities and forcing them to accept – if not reproduce – managerial discourse that clashes with their lived experience. Rather than coalescing into resistance, many academics react by withdrawing into their own work, rationalizing their passivity in collective action and fora, and dealing with negative feelings and emotions mostly on their own. Rather than singular process of alienation, the data shows different processes – alienations – that manifest differently: for example, many respondents resented the increase in managerial oversight in their work, but others saw it as a reasonable demand for being entrusted with public funds.

The comments offered by the interviewees also suggest that alienation does not lead to deterministic outcomes or full disengagement. Far from it, the interview data speaks of alienations in the plural, various coping strategies, that may alleviate or intensify processes of alienation (see also: Sayers 2011, 292). Based on the interview data, Finnish academics typically feel alienated from their institutions, which they feel do not treat them as autonomous professionals, but some also trace the problem further up to HE policy. As expected, professors and those with longer career experience in academia more readily identify these problems, but this does not necessarily translate into resistance. ECRs, in turn, are more moderate in their protestations.

Though dissatisfied with managerial control and excessive bureaucracy, many respondents renegotiate their institutional role as according to pragmatism – being left alone to focus on their jobs to safeguard their survival in academia. One could argue that an irresponsive management system invites academics to stop tilting at windmills and secure their own academic careers. While this makes sense from the perspective of an atomized, neoliberal individual, it also means accepting competition under the auspices of academic capitalism over unavoidably temporary security and stability as a crucial motivator. The neoliberal university invites academics to accept neoliberal subjectivities that incentivize and legitimize focusing only on what matters for one’s own job according to the stated goals and incentives. That, however, is likely to prove only a temporary salve for intensifying processes of alienation.

Acknowledgments

The research for this article has been made possible through funding from the Kone Foundation (201804358) and the Academy of Finland (325976).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [325976]; Koneen Säätiö [201804358].

Notes

1. The discussion on the potential of alienation theory to explore societal changes in Finland is limited to a general level, not higher education specifically: see Salmenniemi (2021).

2. For a historical review, see Williamson and Cullingford (1997), Musto (2010) Sayers (2011) and Kalekin-Fishman and Lauren (2015).

3. There also is growing academic literature that takes a feminist political approach to gender, alienation and reproductive work, under academic capitalism as site of analysis (e.g. Veijola and Jokinen 2018). This would be a fruitful future avenue of research by taking these elements as variables of multiple strains of (potential) alienation(s).

4. The Finnish higher education system also includes universities of applied sciences, but they are legally separated from universities. The universities of applied sciences are beyond the scope of this article.

5. For a more comprehensive review of the history of Finnish higher education, see Välimaa (2019).

6. Students are naturally also affected, but as we only interviewed staff, due to space restrictions this article discusses staff experiences only.

7. The research setting and the tensions of studying one’s own work community, following ‘at-home ethnography’, is discussed in Poutanen, Tervasmäki, and Harju (2021).

8. When the foundation universities in Finland were formed, projected inevitability was used to negate potential resistance (Granqvist and Gustafsson 2016).

9. This aspect relates to breaking the ‘psychological contract’ at work, outlined in Thompson (2003).

10. While the administrative side in Anglophone universities has grown (e.g. Fleming 2021, 51-52), in Finland the number of administrative staff has decreased, and their responsibilities delegated to academics. This is noted in the interview data.