Claims of fundamental changes in the organizational model of universities have been widespread during the latest decades. To empirically assess the character and extent of organizational change is, however, not straightforward. This article contributes with partial, but also very tangible evidence of long-term organizational changes at Danish universities by analyzing detailed data on staff composition and salary distributions. The article shows that Danish universities indeed have undergone significant transformations, but that the full extent of these changes only becomes visible when a fine-grained analytical approach is employed. On the academic side of the organizations, relatively low-wage temporary positions have boomed at the expense of more expensive permanent ones. On the administrative side, specialized and highly educated administrative staff has surged substantially, while less expensive positions such as clerks, technicians, and service staff conversely have diminished in relative terms. Hence, while the analysis supports the overall claims in the literature, it also adds important nuances to the dominant narratives of organizational change.

This is the accepted manuscript (post-print version) of the article.Contentwise, the post-print version is identical to the final published version, but there may be differences in typography and layout. How to cite this publication Please cite the final published version:Stage, A. K. (2020). Are national university systems becoming more alike? Long-term developments in staff composition across five countries.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Danish university sector has been one of the most intensely reformed in Europe. In parallel, the staff composition of Danish Universities has also changed more than the corresponding compositions in other Western countries. But how direct is the link between the policy reforms and the staff changes? While we expect national policy reforms to have influence on organizational change in universities, we also know that the content and impact of policies are often shaped and modified by global trends as well as local path dependencies. To shed light on this question, this article examines the impact of four major reforms on the staff composition of Danish universities by interpreting long-term staff data at multiple levels. Contrary to the notions of change resistance and path dependency, the empirical analysis suggests that a consistent string of policy reforms has had a profound impact on the Danish universities. However, the analysis also shows that the links between national reforms and actual changes are seldom immediate and straightforward and that the local, national, and global levels interact. In doing so they often appear to reinforce the influence of each other.

The article analyses changes in university managerial roles in the wake of a range of reforms, most notably a radical Danish management reform in 2003, using institutional work as the theoretical framework. Both qualitative and quantitative data is drawn upon, the former consisting of interviews with academics and managers on all levels and the latter in the form of payroll data for all Danish university employees. By combining these data in a mixed methods study, the analysis reveals how managerial roles have changed slowly, steadily, and substantially in the years since the reforms, resulting in extensive change. The article hereby questions the resilience of universities as organisational incarnations of a traditional collegial template.

For decades, public research funding systems have operated with the dual objectives of fostering research excellence on the one side and research contributing to innovation and growth on the other. These two objectives have to a large extent been pursued and institutionalized separately. Recently, a third objective has become increasingly prominent: to orient public research towards societal challenges through missions. This paper stresses that a precondition for achieving this new objective is successful coordination across the whole value chain of research and a more integrated and holistic approach to the design and implementation of funding policies. So far, limited attention has been paid to the risk that such coordination may be in conflict with dominant rationales underlying the current design of funding systems. In this study, we examine the challenges associated with the institutionalization of this emerging objective from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. The theoretical analysis builds on historical institutionalism and argues that a partial conversion of the funding system as a whole is necessary for the new rationale to succeed. The empirical analysis focuses on two different national settings, the Danish and the Norwegian, and highlights challenges and tensions experienced by funding bodies responsible for operationalizing mission-driven research funding instruments, based on interviews with experts and key funding actors. We conclude that the key institutions in both national systems are attempting to adjust to the increasing political focus on missions through layering rather than processes of conversion, which we argue is necessary for funding organizations to successfully implement mission-driven policies. Finally, implications for the success of mission-driven policies are discussed.