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PurposeThis article studies the tensions between universities' accountability and autonomy in response to the demands of public steering mechanisms coordinating higher education institutions.Design/methodology/approachDemonstrating the tension between accountability and autonomy, the impact and relevance of public steering mechanisms coordinating higher education are studied via a survey with selected representative Finnish universities. The response rate was an exceptionally high 94%. In addition to the statistical analysis of the survey, open-ended questions were also analyzed to give a more in-depth understanding of the findings. The study uses paradox theory and institutional complexity as its theoretical lenses.FindingsThe empirical analysis of this study shows a considerable gap between the experienced impact and the experienced relevance of the steering mechanisms in higher education. The authors’ further analysis of the open-ended data shows that indicator-based funding allocation has undermined the perceived university autonomy. The authors highlight the paradoxical tensions of university autonomy and higher education institutions' steering mechanisms' requirement for accountability. Finding an acceptable balance between accountability and institutional autonomy plays an important role in designing higher education policies.Originality/valueThe authors found that even if a steering mechanism is experienced as impactful, it is not necessarily considered relevant. One of the key aspects in understanding the reasons behind this mismatch is related to university autonomy. Most impactful steering mechanisms become considered less relevant because they also endanger institutional autonomy. In this sense, it could be expected that steering mechanisms should better balance accountability and autonomy.

PurposeEmploying institutional logic and institutional work as its theoretical framework, this study analyzes scholars' reactions to performance measurement systems in academia.Design/methodology/approachLarge datasets were collected over time, combining both quantitative and qualitative elements. The data were gathered from a two-wave survey in 2010 (966 respondents) and 2015 (672 respondents), conducted among scholars performing teaching- and research-oriented tasks in three Finnish universities.FindingsThe analysis showed statistically significant changes over time in the ways that the respondents were positioned in three major groups influenced by different institutional logics. This study contributes to the international debate on institutional change in universities by showing that in Finnish universities, emerging business logics and existing professional logics can co-exist and be blended among a growing group of academics. The analysis of qualitative open-ended answers suggests that performance measurement systems have led to changes in institutional logic, which have influenced the scholars participating in institutional work at the microlevel in academia.Social implicationsWhile most scholars remain critical of performance measurement systems in universities, the fact that many academics are adapting to performance measurement systems highlights significant changes that are generally occurring in academia.Originality/valueWhile most extant studies have focused on field- and organizational-level analyses, this study focuses on understanding how the adoption of performance measurement systems affects institutional logic and institutional work at the microlevel. Moreover, the study's cross-sectional research setting increases society's understanding of institutional evolution in academia.

The academic career stories and trajectories of PhD holders have been widely studied in the context of economic austerity and an oversupply of doctors. However, few studies have investigated career building among ex-academics and how a doctoral degree and university work might affect their career possibilities outside academia. This paper explores the trajectories of ex-academics: PhDs with university work experience who have left academia to pursue non-academic careers. Based on 40 qualitative interviews with ex-academics, their employers and senior university leaders, the study employs a narrative approach to construct five career stories: the Theoretical Endangered Nerd, the Practical Geek, the Chic Hybrid, the Pristine Novice and the Odd Elite. This varied picture of career sensemaking provides new insights into career building among ex-academics.

Service integration has become essential way of the production of customer friendly and cost-effective municipal services. Recently, there has been also endeavors to extend service integration from social and health sectors to the education sector. This study pursues to increase the general understanding of the expanded service integration and to develop a framework that can be used in evaluating its nature and depth. The empirical data of the study comes from a survey targeted to the leaders in the health, social and education sectors. The focus is on child and family services. While on the general level the analysis indicates a deepening integration of services, the historical boundaries between the different sectors make the service integration difficult. The managers from the health and social sectors hold a more positive view of the current situation compared to their colleagues in education, which reflects longer experience of service integration in these sectors

Purpose This purpose of this study is to understand how the spread of audit culture and the related public sector reforms have affected Finnish universities’ organization principles, performance measurement (PM) criteria and ultimately their reason for being. Design/methodology/approach Applying extensive qualitative data by combining interview data with document materials, this study takes a longitudinal perspective toward the changing Finnish higher education field. Findings The analysis suggests the reforms have altered universities’ administrative structures, planning and control systems, coordination mechanisms and the role of staff units, as well as the allocation of power and thus challenged their reason for being. Power has become concentrated into the hands of formal managers, while operational core professionals have been distanced from decision making. Efficiency in terms of financial and performance indicators has become a coordinating principle of university organizations, and PM practices are used to steer the work of professionals. Because of the reforms, universities have moved away from the ideal type of professional bureaucracy and begun resembling the new, emerging ideal type of competitive bureaucracy. Originality/value This study builds on rich, real-life, longitudinal empirical material and details a chronological description of the changes in Finland’s university sector. Moreover, it illustrates how the spread of audit culture and the related legislative changes have transformed the ideal type of university organization and challenged universities’ reason for being. These changes entail significant consequences regarding universities as organizations and their role in society.

This study examines the link between employee engagement and internal branding. It seeks to understand which antecedent factors healthcare professionals consider important for employee engagement and what kinds of implications this engagement-related information may have for internal branding. The study reviews the literature on employee engagement and internal branding and presents a conceptualisation of the linkage between the two concepts. The empirical portion content analyses more than 1200 answers to open questions to examine employee engagement in the case organisation, a large private healthcare organisation in Finland. The findings suggest the following eight antecedent factors to be particularly important for healthcare professionals’ employee engagement: organisational culture, reward, working environment, training, HR practices, reputation and values, communication, and physical environment. Based on the empirical and theoretical analyses, it can be said that the antecedent factors of employee engagement and elements of internal branding can be considered two sides of the same coin.

The extant literature has identified five problems related to public sector organisations and their reputation management: politics, consistency, charisma, uniqueness and excellence. This study examines whether and how the problems of reputation management occur in public higher education by collecting qualitative data from 40 interviews. The study sheds light on the perceptions of a group that has been largely neglected in previous studies: namely, doctorates who have exited academia, or ex-academics. In addition to ex-academics, interviewees also included their employers and university leadership. The analysis follows a thematic qualitative approach with an abductive logic. The study provides empirical evidence of the content of the problems in higher education and discusses recent related transformations in higher education. The findings show that, in terms of reputation management, the most challenging matters appear to be knowledge transfer and the applicability of research to practice. These challenges are cross-cutting and apparent from different angles across all five problems of reputation management. This study contributes to the academic literature on reputation management in the public sector by applying prior conceptual categorizations and employing a comprehensive set of empirical data with a fresh perspective. The study presents implications for higher education policy makers and managers and emphasises the need for university management to minimise the duality between different types of workers, as this duality threatens university reputations in general and consistency in particular.

This chapter deals with the results-based management implemented in Finnish universities as a part of the neo-liberal managerial idea of a “corporate university.” Analyzing the entire chain of control – from the government level (planning) to the university level (performance management) before finally addressing the personnel level (perceptions of control) – the chapter acknowledges the conflicting views of different stakeholders and the potential for confrontation concerning the different goals as reflected by performance measurement. The key findings of the chapter indicate that the chain of control does not function as planned – that the perceptions and intentions of control among stakeholders differ dramatically. peerReviewed

This paper reviews academic journal articles and scholarly books focusing on organizational creativity and constructs a schematic representation of the antecedents of organizational creativity, i.e. of the associated drivers and barriers. The literature on organizational creativity is reviewed using a traditional review technique. The focus is especially on more recent developments of the discourse, and therefore this work can be labeled as a state-of-the-art review. The review shows that drivers have clearly been studied more extensively than barriers. It was also recognized that the predominant approach among organizational creativity scholars is to dichotomize the factors influencing organizational creativity, more specifically to discuss the antecedents of creativity mostly from the viewpoint of drivers. In some cases, the antecedents are discussed from the perspective of barriers, but only rarely has it been recognized that the very same factor may either enhance or inhibit creativity. In this paper, such factors are called ‘either-or factors’. The paper suggests that the organizational creativity discourse should acknowledge that it is not enough to understand what enhances organizational creativity but also which kind of issues inhibit it and, especially, which factors may work either against or toward creativity under different circumstances. The review suggests that the majority of factors are most likely either-or by nature, although it has been overlooked in the discourse due to the dichotomizing tendency.

In recent times, performance measurement (PM) and individual performance evaluation have become everyday activities in the higher education sector and the previously collegial university management...

In this study, we analysed stakeholders’ organizational role expectations for nurses. We defined organizational role expectations as a set of informal expectations in behavioural patterns and formal expectations in work tasks related to a certain position in the organization. A qualitative study was conducted, and content analysis was applied to 150 articles published in a Finnish nursing trade journal. We identified five general organizational role expectations of patients and their relatives, physicians and other healthcare professionals, the work community, the nursing association, and legislators in our analysis: “the alongside stroller,” “the patients’ advocate,” “the reliable colleague and team member,” “the expert and skills developer,” and “the organizational underdog.” This study explores these nursing roles and links stakeholder perspective to the organizational role expectations in professional services.

Higher education has been subject to substantial reforms as new forms of performance management are implemented in universities across the world. Extant research suggests that in many cases performance management systems have disrupted academic life. We complement this literature with an extensive mixed methods study of how the performance management system is understood by academics across universities and departments in Finland at a time when new management principles and practices are being forcefully introduced. While our survey results enabled us to map the generally critical and negative view that Finnish scholars have of performance management, the qualitative inquiry allowed us to disentangle how and why our respondents resent the ways and means of measuring their work, the assumptions that underlie the measurement, and the university ideal on which the performance management system is rooted. Most significantly, we highlight how the proliferation of performance management can be seen as a catalyst for changing the very ethos of what it is to be an academic and to do academic work.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the way in which the factors influencing a transformation towards or away from modularity, according to general modular systems theory, appear in the context of health services, and the extent to which the special characteristics of health services might support or prevent its application. Design/methodology/approach – The arguments constructed in the study are based on the theme of modularity, reflected against the special characteristics of health services identified in the context of health economics. Findings – The results include 11 proposition pairs that direct health services both towards and away from modularity. Research limitations/implications – Health services are highly heterogeneous in nature and the authors illustrate this with a wide range of examples from elderly care as the authors discuss the application of modularity in this context. Nevertheless, the authors recognise that modularity might suit some health services better than others. The findings provide potentially important information to health service managers and providers, enabling them to understand how modularity would benefit health service provision and where contradictions are to be expected. Originality/value – This study contributes to the discourse on service modularity in general, and complements the literature on modularity with reference to both public and private health services.

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to explore the potential positive effects of the design of a physical organisational environment on the emergence of an organisational culture conducive to organisational creativity.Design/methodology/approach– The study is based on an in-depth, longitudinal case study, the aim being to enhance understanding of how a change in physical space, including location, spatial organisation and architectonic details, supports cultural change.Findings– It is suggested that physical space plays an implicit yet significant role in the emergence of a culture conducive to organisational creativity. It appears from the case analysis that there are three aspects of culture in particular, equality, openness and collectivity, that may be positively affected by the design of an organisation’s physical environment.Practical implications– The careful choice, planning and design of an organisation’s physical location, layout and style can advance the appearance of an organisational culture conducive to creativity.Originality/value– The paper describes a longitudinal study comparing a case organisation before and after a change in its physical environment. The longitudinal data illustrates how a change in the spatial environment contributes to the emergence of a culture conducive to organisational creativity.

During the last decade, the number of municipal enterprises in Finland has almost tripled. This paper attempts to understand the phenomenon related to the recent mushrooming of municipal enterprises. This is done by three empirical case analyses of university hospital laboratories. In two of the three case organisations, there is very little indication that any strategy or other rational reasoning would explain the adoption of municipal enterprise form, and the analysis suggests that institutional isomorphism plays an essential role in the adoption of the municipal enterprise form. Moreover, there are signs that the search for the ‘Third Way’ of some local politicians, especially in the case of some early mover organisations, like the third case organisation of this study, might have triggered the development which has led to the bandwagon effect. The popularity of New Public Management (NPM) and the promises of the NPM mantra, suggesting, e.g. efficiency, cost-effectiveness and more flexible management, ...

The article focuses on the effects of management-by-results from the perspective of the work motivation of university employees. The study is based on extensive survey data among employees at Finnish universities. According to the results, performance measurement is based on quantitative rather than qualitative measures, and the current management-by-results system has a negative effect on work motivation among experts. The motivation to engage in creative, knowledge-intensive work, such as the work carried out at universities, is typically intrinsic. In the light of the empirical findings of the study it seems that management-by-results is in conflict with intrinsic motivation and the very essence of the expert work undertaken in universities.

During the last century, a whole new ‘industry’ legitimized its locus as more books and articles in more and more magazines and journals offered more ‘new’ concepts and frameworks for the efficient...

In this article, we explore the self‐oriented rather than socially‐oriented reasons why a doctoral dissertation in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is written. We base our article on Yuri M. Lotman’s idea on autocommunication which we use as tool in analysing a group interview conducted with six doctoral students studying in the field of CSR. We suggest that autocommunicational aspects might play a much more important role in rationalized Western culture and science than is often realized, and our main thesis is that one essential reason for writing a doctoral dissertation in the field of CSR might be to communicate with oneself and that this even might contain a therapeutic dimension. Implications for students, supervisors and future research are discussed at the end of the article.

Corporations today have been engineered by CEOs and other business advocates to look increasingly green and responsible. However, alarming cases such as Enron, Parmalat and Worldcom bear witness that a belief in corporate goodness is still nothing other than naive. Although many scholars seemingly recognize this, they still avoid touching on the most sensitive and problematic issues, the taboos. As a consequence, discussion of important though problematic topics is often stifled. The article identifies three ‘grand’ taboos of CSR discourse and explicitly raises them for discussion. They are the taboos of amoral business, continuous economic growth, and the political nature of CSR. It is suggested that CSR can only be as advanced as its taboos. The critical potential of the field remains underdeveloped as a consequence of the taboos, and in many cases the CSR discourse merely produces alluring but empty rhetoric about sustainability and responsible business.

This paper analyses the themes of rationality and legitimation in the discourse of sustainable development. We start by constructing ideal types of interpretation of sustainable development (weak and strong) and rationality (value rationality and instrumental rationality) as conceptual and theoretical ‘tools’ for our further analysis. We then discuss the role of and analyze the construction of rationality and legitimation in the sustainable development discourse. We explore the ways in which rationality and legitimation are constructed to support one's own interpretation, and, on the other hand, how the rationality and legitimacy of the opposing interpretations are nullified. We then discuss the basis of prudent decision-making, and the possibilities and problems that are bound up in the concept of sustainable development. The paper concludes by stating that when it comes to sustainable development neither societal decision-making nor the actions based on it is currently prudent. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

In this article, the authors analyze some of the developments and weaknesses in organizational environmental studies and make an effort to evaluate the field's current status, role, and future prospects. During recent years, the field of management and organizational studies has witnessed environmental research gaining a secure foothold, especially in quantitative terms. It is questionable, however, whether it is actually organizational environmental studies that has arrived or whether the discourse is in fact only a minor annex or a slight modification of the same old themes in management and organizational studies. This is because of the fact that it is still too early to say that organizations and natural-environment-related research would have been able to develop its own theory base and legitimate posture in relation to the management and organizational studies.

In this paper, we take a critical perspective on the phenomenon known as Sustainable Foreign Direct Investments (SFDIs). With the pulp and paper sector in Latin America as an illustrative example, we examine how the behaviour of firms is constrained by societal norms and how the greenness and sense of responsibility is constructed within SFDIs. Because of the lack of generally approved metrics for defining SFDIs and the ambiguity of the concept of sustainability, we argue that there are seldom rational arguments for far-going optimism, as far as SFDIs are concerned. We find that greenness and responsibility manifest themselves to no greater extent in SFDIs than in other business contexts. We suggest that the most important and urgent task is to increase the transparency of Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) and to continue to develop international standards and to metrics that could be used to reliably determine the sustainability of these investments.