Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective: (53 Higher Education Dynamics)

This book examines the transformative power and the limitations of one of Europe’s most significant university reforms from an ethnographic and historical perspective. It incorporates voices positioned across university and policy-making hierarchies in its analysis of how Danish universities have been transformed. To do this, the book continually juxtaposes two meanings of ‘enactment’: a top-down view based on laws and institutional power, and a bottom-up view of multiple actors shaping their institution in day-to-day life and in actively contested changes.  By conceiving of the university as ‘enacted’ in both ways at once, the book explores how and why the university comes to be imagined and instantiated in new ways. The book traces the arguments for reform through a two-decade long, dynamic struggle between international forums and national industrial, political and academic interests over the definition of the university. It discusses which ideas finally became dominant and how this happened. It looks at government reforms from 2003 onwards, and, by means of notable ‘telling moments’, explains how the governance and management of the university were transformed. It examines how academics found room to manoeuvre between contesting discourses that affect their identity and work. Finally, it shows how students engaged with new versions of historical debates about their participation in shaping their own education, their institution and society.

Table of Contents:
Part I Introduction and Approach.- 1. Introduction: An Ethnography of University Reform; Susan Wright .- 2. Enactment of the University - Issues and Concepts; Susan Wright.- Part II Imagining and Enacting a Reformed University.- 3. University Reform: International Policy Making through a Danish Prism; Susan Wright.- 4. Contested Narratives of University Reform; Susan Wright and Jakob Williams Ørberg.- 5. Steering Change – Negotiations of Autonomy and Accountability in the Self-owning University; Jakob Williams Ørberg and Susan Wright.- Part III University Governance and Management.- 6. Governing the Post-Bureaucratic University; Stephen Carney.- 7. Leading the Post-Bureaucratic University; Stephen Carney.- Part IV Academics’ Strategic Space for Manoeuvre.- 8. Changing University Discourses, Changing Spaces for Academics – Reconfiguring External Conditions for Being an Academic Subject; John Benedicto Krejsler.- 9. Academic Subjectivities at Stake –Different University Contexts, Different Responses to Reform; John Benedicto Krejsler.- Part V Enactment of Students.- 10. Capitalism, Political Participation and the Student as a Revolutionary Figure; Gritt B. Nielsen.- 11. Students at the Centre - as Co-owners, Consumers, Investors?; Gritt B. Nielsen.- Part VI Conclusion.- 12. Conclusion: Enactment and Transformation of the University; Susan Wright.