Keywords

Introduction

The increasing internationalization and globalization of HE, as well as the influence of neo-liberal ideas, as the New Public Management (NPM) practice, strongly disseminated by international organizations, such as the Organisation for the Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the European Union (EU) (Amaral and Neave 2009; Ball 2016; Raaper 2016), provide a framework for analyzing possible similarities in different national contexts. In turn, national and cultural specifics and traditions might be considered powerful factors explaining differences in the Portuguese, Brazilian, and Finnish HE systems, more specifically with respect to policy design, policy implementation, and national outcomes.

By comparing different cultures, systems, and institutional practices, through the same methods of data collection and analysis for each country, this chapter provides an overview of the main policies and practices in terms of HE governance and management in these countries.

Portugal and Finland are examples of European countries that have embarked on changes eased up by an international context that supported reform, e.g., assessments from international organizations such as the OECD and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), and the EU modernization agendas for European HE. Moreover, both HE systems are similar enough to allow comparisons since both have a binary organization. Nevertheless, and when comparing with Brazil, a still developing nation, the economic status and international positioning of these three countries, differs. Brazil is the largest country in both South America and Latin America, with over 207 million people in 2017—207,660,929 people according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE 2017).

These countries provide a significant and fruitful study because despite their historical, geographical, cultural, and economic contrasts they have recently undertaken HE legislative reforms with some commonalities. This makes the comparison more focused and the cases relevant, sparking our interest in trying to understand how and why these countries have possibly developed similar paths in terms of HE governance and management.

Additionally, and/or consequently, while searching for the main drivers of change in these HE systems, consideration can be given to whether HE reforms in these countries can be labeled as part of the NPM framework, or whether they overlap with other change movements linked to international developments and/or globalization, i.e., the idea of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). In fact, this is very much in line with Maassen and Cloete (2006) who argue that most nation-states are going through a transformation process that is strongly affected by global trends and pressures, which form an important basis for national public sector reforms with respect to HE. Of interest here is the fact that—apparently—globalization theories or trends do not seem to target HE directly. As Slaughter and Leslie (1997) refer, globalization highlights the potential of political economic changes occurring across countries, changing also the way HE stakeholders and complex environments relate with business (Maassen and Cloete 2006; Slaughter and Leslie 1997).

The following sections provide the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that sustain our research interest, as well as an overview of the Portuguese, Finnish, and Brazilian HE systems and the methodology used to pursue our findings. The chapter ends with some reflections on the topic.

Literature Review—Higher Education Institutions’ Governance and Management

In certain types of organizations, i.e., loosely coupled organizations (Weick 1976), professional bureaucracies (Mintzberg 1979), and open systems that interact actively with their environments (Birnbaum 1988), the governance of HE and HEIs has been gaining increased attention within the public sector.

Globalization and internationalization (and Europeanization) are powerful mechanisms in spreading concepts and ideas (Enders 2004), which have been underlying political convergence in HE and, therefore, governance and management practices. Nevertheless, convergence is not only an outcome of the growing internationalization of HE: this neglects the importance of local factors and actors (Santos 2004). According to Santos (2004), the true meaning of the globalization process is, first of all, local in nature. In parallel, HEIs are also characterized by specific cultural features inherited from the past, which shape the way they respond to current challenges (Vaira 2004). Moreover, as the Portuguese, Brazilian, and Finnish cases exemplify, legitimization from international agencies has been important in implementing neo-liberal HE policies (Kallo 2009; Kauko and Diogo 2011). The OECD has thus a powerful role in putting forward the notion of NPM through the promotion of neo-liberalism (Amaral and Neave 2009). In this sense, Santos (2004) highlights the relation between globalization and neo-liberalism, by remembering the principles defended by neo-liberal governments, which led to a shift from government to governance: open markets, free trade, decreased state intervention in the economy, as well as reduction of public spending in the public sector in general, deregulation of markets, and a strong emphasis on the use of private sector mechanisms to regulate public institutions, considered inefficient, unproductive, and socially wasteful, accompanied by control and evaluation mechanisms to assess institutions’ and actors’ performance and outcomes (Pollitt et al. 2007). Governance is thus a vehicle for comparison, mutual learning, and theoretical inspiration as it crosscuts different sectors of society (Kersbergen and Waarden 2004).

In HE, neo-liberal influences can be summarized by three interrelated and interdependent technologies or components: market, management, and performance (Ball 2016). These technologies were translated in new institutional management and governance models in such a way that the governance of HEIs became an international issue (Reed and Meek 2002).

Market technology is translated as increasing competition, rational choice, and exogenous and endogenous modes of privatization that may happen simultaneously. Endogenous privatization introduces the market into the public sector, through choice and competition, creating a direct relationship between consumer preferences and institutional well-being, with the purpose to make public service organizations more business-like (Ball 2016, p. 1049). In turn, exogenous privatization brings new providers into the educational service delivery market (e.g., consultancy services). In England, for example, Ball (2016, p. 1049) comments that the debate is not who shall provide state schooling, but whether these providers should be able to profit directly from such a provision. These privatizations, together with the other policy components (management and performance), symbolize much of the neo-liberal “ modernization” of the state, what other scholars have called the “hollowing out of the state” (Bovens et al. 2002; Hooghe and Marks 2001; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011), characterized by an increased use of contracting-out (Ball 2016).

Management is associated with new power relations, social connections, and less democratic and less caring attitudes, something that Ball (2016, p. 1049) calls “methods for reculturing educational organisations.” These technologies of reform do not impose behavior; they coerce professionals to do things differently, creating new roles, opportunities, values, discourses, vocabularies, and ideas that, when not enthusiastically accepted, position professionals as unprofessional or irrational or archaic (Ball 2016, p. 1049). This is intimately linked with the concept of performativity (performance management), which relates with accountability agendas and with the new order of doing things, through measurement and comparison techniques. Under performativity technology, “professionalism becomes defined in terms of skills and competences, which have the potential for being measured, and rewarded, rather than a form of reflection, a relationship between principles and judgment” (Ball 2016, p. 1050).

Based on the study of Shore and Wright (1999), Ball illustrates this twisted idea of performativity by explaining that performance and productivity are seen as “resources” that must constantly be audited so that they can be enhanced. This increasing emphasis on visibility, measurement, and standardization also evidences a shift in the relations of power between the government and academia. In fact, by transforming professional daily activities and routines, neo-liberalism and NPM have become normative models, “(…) signalling a profound shift in how we think about the role of public administrators, the nature of the profession, and how and why we do what we do” (Denhardt and Denhardt 2000, p. 550). In parallel, one faces the consequences of all these changes in terms of personal and professional relationships, namely a constant increase in anxiety, insecurity, and precarious working conditions. Performativity—as well as these neo-liberal components—are vehicles for changing what in reality educational work is (Ball 2016).

Bearing this in mind, it is worth asking how different HE systems around the globe have shifted the governance and management of their HEIs, while trying to understand factors explaining the differences and similarities between them. To answer this, one needs to consider each country’s historical and cultural contexts.

Higher Education in Portugal, Finland, and Brazil

The last 40 years represents a period of development and consolidation of the Portuguese HE system. Before the democratic revolution of 1974, the Portuguese HE system remained almost unchanged. The military coup of 1974 allowed great transformations to be made in the system, also sponsored by attempts to establish a welfare state in Portugal. These processes impacted on the massification and democratization of the Portuguese HE system (Amaral and Teixeira 2000). In 1973, the Veiga Simão Reform, combined with the support of international organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD, created a binary system and promoted the emergence of new universities in other regions of the country, besides Coimbra, Lisbon, and Porto. A few years later, in the 1980s, the private sector was established, allowing for system massification and democratization. By this time, governing structures were defined according to democratic values and rules, with HEIs adopting a collegial model with strong participation of academics and students in the decision-making processes (Bruckmann and Carvalho 2014).

Like other OECD member countries, namely Portugal, Finnish universities were elitist institutions until the mid-1900s when there were only universities in Turku and Helsinki. However, the system expanded rapidly during the 1960s, a process related to, and as a result of, a welfare state agenda supported by the major political parties (Välimaa 2001, 2004). In fact, the ideal of equal educational opportunities for all citizens regardless of their gender, socioeconomic status, or location was one of the structural principles of the development of Finnish HE from the 1960s to present day (Välimaa 2001, 2004).

Also similar to the situation in Portugal was the creation of a binary system in the mid-1990s through the establishment of polytechnics—a process also catalyzed by the OECD (Kauko and Diogo 2011), although with different nuances due to the specificities of the traditional manner of Finnish policy design and implementation (Diogo 2016). Overall, Finland has also been active in putting forward and disseminating the ideas emanating from international bodies (Kallo 2009).

Portugal embraced NPM ideology and practice throughout the 1990s and 2000s. These managerialist trends were implemented due to pressures to change the way knowledge, training, and education were provided: difficulties facing the bureaucratic-professional model to manage a mass HE system; a decrease in number of students coupled with economic stringency; changes in regulation strategies and state control; and neo-liberal policies developed by the government elected in 2002 (Carvalho and Santiago 2015; Santiago and Carvalho 2004).

As Finnish HE opened up to wider cohorts from the 1970s onward, managerial reforms were also introduced in the system, aimed at making it more efficient (Salminen 2003), although later than in Portugal and Brazil (during the 1990s). As such, during the mid-1980s, Finland established a steering model—management by results—based on performance negotiations between universities and the Finnish Ministry of HE (OKM). Gradually, Finnish universities were given increased autonomy through Law 645/1997 (26th July), and in 2006, also as part of NPM efforts, a structural development program was introduced aimed at dropping the number of Finnish HEIs over a 10–15-year period. At present, Finland has 14 universities and 24 polytechnics, recently renamed as UAS—universities of applied sciences (OKM 2016).

At present, the education system in Portugal is regulated by the Education System Act of 1986 (Law 46/86), but over the years there have been amendments to it resulting in significant changes, namely the autonomy given to vocational and private HEIs and that the degree system was redefined, adopting the three study cycles model according to the Bologna Process (Law 115/97 and Law 49/05, respectively). The system is composed of both university and polytechnic subsystems, with a total of 40 public institutions (14 universities, 1 public university institute, 5 police and military institutes, and 20 polytechnics) and 94 private institutions (38 within the university subsystem and 56 within the polytechnic subsystem) (DGES 2016).

Since 2007, Portuguese HEIs have been undergoing a major reform process, very much based on OECD recommendations (Diogo 2016). The most noticeable changes were introduced by Law 62/2007 (RJIES), which became the new legal framework for HEIs, allowing their leaders to choose between two different institutional models: foundational and public institute. In parallel, new government and management structures were implemented (Bruckmann 2017).

Similar to what happened in Portugal, the OECD published a HE country review in 2009. Supported by this report, Finland went through legislative changes, resulting in the New Universities Act (Law 558/2009), aimed to further extend the autonomy of universities (OKM 2013). The Law came into force in 2010 and, although not all of the suggestions made by OECD were implemented, the OECD (2009, p. 108) defined Finnish universities as non-profit corporations or foundations under private law. In 2014, the OKM drafted similar legislation for the non-university sector: Law 932/2014 defines the Universities of Applied Sciences Act.

Briefly, the last two decades correspond to a period in which Portuguese HE has undergone the most significant changes with respect to system structure, programmatic offers, visibility within the international arena, and in the way HEIs organize their internal governing bodies. The system acquired new dimensions and audiences; it was regionalized, and the number of women attending HEIs grew rapidly (Almeida and Vieira 2012). It is fair to say that Portugal caught up with its fellow European countries through a very rapid transformation of its HE system. Nevertheless, and in a quite different manner to Finland, where universities and university degrees still retain high social prestige (Välimaa 2001), in Portugal, the value of a university degree has depreciated (Almeida and Vieira 2012, p. 155).

In a similar movement, over the last two decades, Brazil adopted a reformist legal framework, which directs financial resources that should be applied in public HE, to private HEIs (Dias Sobrinho 2010). In fact, since 1968, at the time of the second university reform, under the influence of the military regime, it was already possible to observe the influence of neo-liberal values. Such a reform was imposed and already marks the subordination of the country to neo-liberal dictates. By choosing the European model of university organization rather than the American, Brazil ended up with the professorship and adopted the departmental system; teaching careers began to be based on scientific production and the evolution of academic degrees (Valentim and Evangelista 2013).

The year 1995 was characterized by the publication of the Master Plan for State Reform with the objective of improving efficiency in public services (Bresser-Pereira 2008). In 1996, the new Law on the Guidelines and Bases of Education (LDB), together with the National Education Plan (NED), already represented a third reform of HE, marked by the establishment of new guidelines for the evaluation and regulation of HE, brought about by the change in the role of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), due to the association between production and postgraduate valorization rather than the indissociability of the teaching–research–extension triad (Valentim and Evangelista 2013).

It is also important to note that, although the LDB can be considered a milestone for Brazilian HE, this legislation strongly benefited large private HEIs that became autonomous in terms of the creation of courses and numbers of vacancies, without being submitted to rigid legal controls (Ribeiro 2011).

The reform that intended to transform Brazilian public universities into social organizations did not go any further due to criticisms of privatization (Bresser-Pereira 2008), but the philosophy of NPM and the desire to change public HEIs became the basis of the accreditation policy of postgraduate courses evaluated by CAPES (Magro et al. 2013). This managerial vision was already in place with pressures for Brazilian federal universities to meet the demands of society and Federal Government, namely, to reduce unemployment, poverty, and to improve technological development. Despite this, it was observed that “(…) surreptitiously the university culture was permeated with the ideals of productivity, thanks to the creation of mechanisms that the LDB created” (Ésther and Melo 2008, p. 252).

Another important legacy of NPM in Brazilian HEIs is the demand for professionalization of leadership in public administration. Thus, the responsibility of the results achieved by public HEIs was greatly associated with the managerial capacity of rectors, pro-rectors, center directors, deans, course coordinators, and directors of administrative units (Gomes et al. 2013). In this sense, it can be observed that professors are being pressured to assume a more managerial style, define strategic elements, manage people and financial resources, and exercise leadership (Barbosa 2015).

With the change of government in 2003, there was an increase in the transference of investments to public HEIs, conditioned to compliance with rules imposed by the Federal Government. Since then, public HEIs have had to plan and map actions carried out, as well as measure results achieved (Pascuci et al. 2016). This means that the Federal Government itself imposes public demands to ensure that HEIs adapt, and therefore continue to receive financial investments, applying in this way, pressures on HEIs to adopt new forms of action, strongly directed by values of business administration private partnerships, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and competition (Valentim and Evangelista 2013).

The NPM brought to Brazilian public HE concerns about evaluative procedures, most notably in the drive for improved results by means of inciting competition—something that happened mainly as a result of the creation and dissemination of rankings among universities, professors, and researchers, sponsored by the Ministry of Education (Magro et al. 2013).

Methodology and Methods

This chapter aims to compare the perceived changes in governance and management of HEIs and their impact on academics in three countries: Brazil, Finland, and Portugal. Data analysis relies on a qualitative intercultural approach, empirically based on a total of 70 interviews conducted in public HEIs in the three countries (14 interviews in Brazil, 28 in Finland, and 28 in Portugal) to top and middle academic managers as well as academics (with no management duties) and external members, following the same interview guidelines, based on the theoretical background. Interviews in Brazil were carried out in federal universities and institutes all over the country, some of them were completed via Skype. The reason there were fewer interviews in Brazil compared with Portugal and Finland is linked to the country’s size and its specificities. In both Portugal and Finland the sample includes interviewees from both polytechnic and university subsystems.

Empirical data was complemented by document analysis to the main legal papers defining the new governance structures and management practices of Portuguese, Finnish, and Brazilian universities that entered into force after the most recent legislation was passed (Law 62/2007 for Portugal, Law 558/2009 for Finland, and Law 9.394/1996/2017 for Brazil). In this way, we ensured that the same methods of data collection and analysis were employed for each country-level analysis completed. The interviews to Portuguese and Finnish actors were conducted in 2012, whereas interviews in Brazil were completed between 2016 and 2017, always following the same guidelines and sitting within the same scope of comparison, i.e., in all three countries, similar types of actors, performing equivalent roles, were interviewed, both at the national (system) and institutional levels, even though this chapter draws mostly on the perceptions of institutional actors. Interviewees were chosen due to their expertise and level of involvement in the latest reforms of their HE systems and institutions. In turn, in each country we searched for similar, comparable HEIs. Next, pragmatic, temporal, and geographic factors drove the interviewing process—with the authors of this chapter conducted interviews in whichever of the three countries they lived in at the time of study.Footnote 1 Within each HEI the same scientific areas were selected: social sciences‚ languages and humanities (SSLH); and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Interviewees were initially approached by email. Interviews took on average 1 hour; all interviews were recorded with the consent of the interviewees and anonymity was guaranteed. Subsequently, all interviews were fully transcribed and submitted to content analysis using NVivo software. From the intersection between the theory (literature review) and the empirical data three main dimensions emerged: (1) the context that prompted change; (2) shifts in universities’ governance and management, and (3) shifts in the academic profession. However, in this chapter only the last two dimensions will be discussed since the first dimension—the context behind the changes has already been contextualized in the literature review. Interviewees were classified according to the country they work and according to the role they perform (Table 5.1).

Table 5.1 Classification of interviewees according to their country and role
Full size table

We share from Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal’s (2003, p. 426) conviction that the growing importance attributed to comparative education must be seen in the light of increasing internationalization of educational policies leading to the diffusion of global patterns.

Comparative Analysis and Discussion of the Findings

Summary of the main developments in all three HE systems allows us to evidence common trends in Portugal, Finland, and Brazil, namely the drafting of legislation that attempts to provide HEIs and their professionals with more autonomy (Carvalho and Diogo 2018).

The new legal framework for Portuguese HEIs, Law 62/2007 (RJIES), positions—for the first time in Portuguese HE history—all types of HEIs (public and private, universities and polytechnics) at the same level of autonomy and with the same requirement for quality assurance. However, public universities were given the choice to either remain as public institutes or become public foundations, operating under private law, a status that would confer them a competitive advantage in terms of enhanced financial and administrative autonomy.

A similar process of legislative change happened in Finland. The New Universities Act (Yliopistolaki 558/2009) replaced the Universities Act of 1997 and extended the autonomy of universities by giving them an independent legal personality, either as public corporations or as foundations. At the same time, in a similar way to Portuguese RJIES, Finnish universities’ management and decision-making systems will also be reformed.

Also driven by an ambition to improve the efficiency and independence of public HEIs, Brazil, in 1996, went through the third reform of HE via a LDB (LDB, Law 9.394 of 20th December) together with the NED. The focus of this law was not so much to change the legal status of HEIs, but mostly the relationships between the government, HEIs, and society. For example, regarding government interference, Brazilian respondents felt that there should be policies that would promote greater integration of HEIs with markets and society; more participation of various actors, especially universities in the formulation of public policies; and that universities should be given the autonomy that the LDB advocates. The following citation exemplifies these perceptions:

What I realize so far is that the institutions are just waiting and receiving these policies. I have not yet been able to see a very active participation in this formulation. Our institution, for example, only receives and executes what comes from the MEC. I don’t see much participation, neither do I hear about this participation. (BTM)

On the other hand, interviewees felt that the current imposition of certain norms and programs was not feasible, like those related to the expansion of the HE system, which disregard the organizational conditions of each HEI and the social context in which they operate. The data indicate that the Government should interfere less in the pedagogical autonomy of HEIs.

I think that HE public policies and academic policies, not only related to infrastructures, are little discussed and they do not take into account the regional and local realities, as it has happened in the case of the restructuring and expansion process of federal universities. (BTM)

Shifts in the Governance and Management of Universities

Portuguese and Finnish interviewees share common perceptions about the influence of international organizations (mostly the European Commission and the OECD) as stimuli to reform the way HEIs are steered. From their discourses, it is possible to advocate that shifts in HE governance modes are also aligned with European Commission communiqués urging HEIs to modernize, providing legitimacy for reform. As such, most Portuguese and Finnish interviewees look at these external pressures as leverage for drafting more entrepreneurial legislation, which would answer the challenges HEIs currently face, e.g., a progressive complexity arising from an increasingly diversified population attending HE, an increasing internationalization of the sector, and the need to ensure teaching and research quality assurance mechanisms.

Finnish counterparts reported similar perceptions with respect to the process of Europeanization in Finnish HE policies. However, the New Universities Act cannot be seen as a break with the past, but rather as having continuity with Finnish HE policy, reflecting quite accurately the way Finnish HE policy works: briefly, the main issues are discussed among main stakeholders (academia, students, unions, etc.) so that outcomes are in line with the expectations of the HE community.

We started the reform some years ago (…) following the European discussion that had already started in the mid-1990s, emphasizing universities’ institutional autonomy that ought to be increased. The key element in the initiative was that universities need to have legal personality of their own, that they can’t continue to be state accounting offices in legal terms as they were at the time. (FTM)

A different reality can be seen in Brazil (and also in the Portuguese HE arena), even though the country shares a similar desire for enhanced institutional autonomy. According to Brazilian interviewees, public policies are permeated by ideological components of the capitalist system, reflecting, for example, the influence of the groups that form the private initiative in Brazilian HE.

When you have an ideological orientation in which everything that is stable is bad, associated with the idea that everything that is private is good and advanced from the market point of view. There is an advance of private institutions as there is no interest to have a competitor who does not charge for the product and who offers a product of higher quality. So I think that there is interest in dismantling the public university, indeed! Even from the point of view of business! As has already happened in health, and with the elementary and middle schools. (BMM)

Market orientation is visible here, by means of channeling public money to finance student credit (studying in private HEIs), rather than investing in public HEIs. In addition, there is an awareness of interviewees that their peers, leaders, and politicians have already incorporated the NPM doctrine and are applying it by emulating the private sector. And, in a similar manner to Portugal and Finland, the Brazilian Ministry of Education seems to also be in the service of international organizations, such as the IMF, the Mundial Bank (WB), the WTO, and economic blocs such as the European Union, North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Andean Community of Nations; able to impose a new socioeconomic order with demands that are reflected in HE programs, projects, and institutions, with strong neo-liberal components.

At the institutional level, the move toward the three components of neo-liberalism (market, management, and performativity) is specifically seen in the shift from a collegial model of governance to a managerial one. Such a shift may lead to a loss of participation of academics and students in decision-making, combined with less democracy and more hierarchical decisions. An excessive concentration of power at the highest levels of governance and in sole proprietorship positions in HEIs, is also anticipated.

University governance has been shared by professors, other faculty staff and students in earlier times, it worked in a collegial basis. Not now anymore. (…) It’s more the decision- making: it’s much more centralized these days, so there’s very little democracy in decision- making, unless obviously you want to have it. It’s mainly up to the head of department. (FMM)

Portuguese HEIs were based on collegiality with ample participation by management and governing boards. Nowadays, power is concentrated in three governing boards, instead of the four to five they used to have (including the University Assembly, the rector, the rector’s team, the Senate, the University Assembly and the Administrative Council, and the Scientific and Pedagogical Council) to which a restricted number of representatives are elected from several university bodies that constitute it. A similar situation happens in Finland, with public universities having a board, a rector, and a university collegiate body. The reduction in number of governance bodies, and their participants, entails a twofold perspective. Because fewer people are involved, it not only accelerates decision-making processes but also prevents participation. Brazilian HEIs also faced a similar situation, where research participants noted that decision-making processes have increasingly assumed a multifaceted pattern—a blend of decision-making that takes place in traditional locations, such as the campus council, faculty/department council, and collegiate courses—where there is a mixing of rules from the IES and economistic practices, such as the adoption of a system of indicators to evaluate teaching, research, and extension, with scores determined by the campus council itself, for example. Brazilian HEIs are governed by a rector and pro-rectors, a board of trustees, and a university council.

As in Brazil there are so many private HEIs and some of the academics who lectured in these private institutions are now lecturing in public HEIs, therefore, it is understandable that they carry with them the managerial culture acquired in their first institution (normative isomorphism). When both governance modes meet—the managerial and collegial—one can expect some tensions among decision-making participants. Those in favor of a managerial ethos criticize collegiate power for making slower decisions, and being inefficient and unnecessarily bureaucratic.

I see that the new teachers who come from the private sector (HEIs) come with the expectation that it is the manager who steers, who gives orders. And this is a kind of shocking. These teachers think that to have meetings to collectively decide things is a waste of time! One of these days, one of these teachers asked me—while we were having a meeting: “But... don’t we have a teacher responsible for this activity? He should be the one deciding on these matters! He will solve it!” (BUTmm)

For interviewees, these changes in the governance of HEIs entail an increasing professionalization of management, which happens by strengthening the power held by the rector, and also through the combination of a stronger leadership centered with deans and/or department heads and a decrease in the participation of academics in decision-making—all of them are managerialist components by excellence. Nevertheless, it is not possible to find a general consensus among Portuguese, Finnish, and Brazilian interviewees. As we have seen, this shift toward a managerialist model of governance is perceived as being more efficient, at least in terms of streamlining decision-making processes. Additionally, such emphasis on performativity and market management models are seen as natural outcomes of the increasing complexity of the actual environment in which HEIs operate:

Universities have grown and evolved. This demanded a new governance model. What’s most important for me is that we decentralized more and we have a General Council with a reasonable number of people who provide valuable contributions for seeing differently the university and its role in society. (PTM)

The discourses of interviewees signal incorporation of the neo-liberal triangle ideology and practice, especially performativity elements associated with the new order of doing things, mostly based on measurement and comparison techniques (Ball 2016) passed by strong and charismatic leaders.

Shifts in the Academic Profession

A common aspect criticized by most institutional-level respondents in these three countries was the increase of administrative and bureaucratic workload:

It’s the main complaint from the faculty: the increasing bureaucracy and workload. There are so many things that a professor and a course director is required to do. Everything needs to be computerized, we spend hours filling timesheets and everyone feels that. (PTM)

We dare to say that this is a global trend, not exclusive to the Finnish, Portuguese, or Brazilian HE systems, but a phenomenon that has been happening around the globe (Austin and Gamson 1983; Diefenbach 2009; Tight 2010).

In principle, this law should have given us good opportunities to improve our working conditions. However, people are getting more tired: one of the major working principles of the new law was to give academics more time for research and teaching and this hasn’t been accomplished. (FA)

Today, it is impossible for a teacher to dedicate himself to so many things; everything you do, needs to be in filled in a filling sheet; you must do the follow up and then present the report. (BTM)

There were several reports from Brazilian interviewees about fatigue, stress, and illness caused by efforts to combine teaching, research, and extension activities, as well as management-related activities, in the case of public HEIs. This denotes a growing emphasis on performativity activities, something commonly mentioned by post-graduation professors who need to achieve the indexes of academic productivity as defined by CAPES.

As accountability and pressures for more efficiency increase, HEI professionals tend to be burdened by performance negotiation systems with a high number of indicators and a higher emphasis on national and international recognition and quality assurance mechanisms:

Bureaucratic workload in the academic career is growing, largely due to the emphasis put on accountability aspects, on quality assurance mechanisms that most of the time, are not more than bureaucratic–administrative processes instead of effectively creating a quality culture. (PA)

In fact, management and performativity elements are strongly incentivized by the discourses of international organizations (e.g., the OECD), mostly visible in terms of accountability, assessment, and performance management techniques and indicators, as well as—as we have seen—shifts in the composition of governing bodies and their modus operandi.

In the case of Brazilian HEIs, there are formal information systems adopted by the federal government to account for teaching, research, and extension activities. Other forms of evaluation reported by interviewees are pedagogical planning and evaluation meetings, internal commissions of institutional evaluation, and the control carried out by external bodies, such as the Federal Audit Court, the General Union Controller (CGU), and the Federal Internal Control System. A further consequence of the increasing workload and bureaucracy visible in Brazil is the emergence of tensions between academics and administrative staff, caused by clarity over accountability. Those academics who hold management positions feel the demand for accountability and evaluation more strongly. In the same way, unanimously, the interviewees stated that in their HEIs, there are more control mechanisms being implemented in order to monitor the number of hours worked by teachers, with constant requests for information on academic production.

The emergence of “new actors” in the governance structure of universities (e.g., external stakeholders) brought new values and norms to professional cultural–cognitive frameworks. This is completely aligned with the performativity and management components that HEIs and their professionals must embody in order to be rated as excellent and successful (Ball 2003, 2016). In fact, according to Ball (2016, p. 1049), management (or managerialism) is associated with “methods for reculturing educational organisations,” e.g., new power relations and social connections, and less democratic and caring attitudes. These neo-liberal technologies tend to coerce professionals to do things differently, creating new roles, values, discourses, vocabularies, and ideas that, when not enthusiastically accepted and incorporated, label professionals as unprofessional or irrational or even archaic. In summary, it is possible to say that performativity and accountability agendas are radically undermining the professionalism of academic staff who see themselves constantly as needing to search and reach measures, targets, benchmarks, tests, tables, standards, quality levels, skills, competences, and improvements, going through audits to feed into the system to improve it (Ball 2016). Regardless of country, and despite interviewee complaints, it is possible to observe that shifts in the academic profession, framed in terms of global trends, tend to pervade HE systems around the world, more or less intensively.

Conclusions

Despite significant differences in the organization and funding of systems; governance and management of cultures; and the profiles of professionals and students, there are more similar views on the changes to governance and management, and its impact on academics, than expected. In the countries considered here, academics expressed similar views on the increased influence of a management culture within their institutions and a loss of professional autonomy. As Ball (2016) puts it, much of the weight of neo-liberal reform falls to individuals and, therefore, we must think about political responses that take proper account of this.

From our analysis, it seems that performativity and management were the most visible “neo-liberal components” in the three HE systems. This might be due to the chosen dimensions of analysis—shifts in governance modes and in the academic profession. We would probably find a different scenario if we had concentrated only on changes in the legal status of HEIs, or in the way HEIs in the countries considered relate to society. In any case, it is somewhat paradoxical that the aim to empower HEIs, by providing them with up-to-date governance styles, has ended up hindering institutional autonomy and professional staff.

It was also evidenced that there are some common factors that have eased change—both at the system and institutional levels, very much sponsored by globalization and internationalization of the sector, where neo-liberals and NPM are easily diffused through international organizations. As Santos (2004, p. 148) referred, we can conclude that “what we call globalisation is always the successful globalisation of a particular localism.” This intercultural study also showed us the power of local specificities in the success (or at least acceptance) of reform and change in HE governance. Comparing the three countries, it is challenging or risky to identify which is closer to the markets, or which is more aligned with neo-liberalism. However, it is fair to say that all three responded to international recommendations actively and incorporated the NPM credo religiously.

To conclude, it is significant to notice that the perceptions of interviewees tended to vary more according to their roles than to their country of origin. This, again, allows us to confirm the success of globalization and internationalization trends in the diffusion of neo-liberalism and the subsequent (more or less conscious) absorption of its principles by both system and institutional actors.