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Between the years of 1965 and the late 1990s higher education in a number of West European countries, including England, Norway and Sweden, went through a period of unprecedented growth, both in terms of its scope and its comprehensiveness. The purpose of the first edition of this book was to render a social science analysis of this period. The second edition brings the analysis up to date and includes developments until the end of 2004. Our aim is to develop an understanding of the changes that the higher education system has undergone in the last 40 years, what these changes mean in terms of the relationship between knowledge and political power, and the perspectives the observed developments raise for the future ‘education society’.

Before entering on the analysis of change processes in higher education between 1965 and 2005 we shall describe common features and contrasts in higher education policies and systems in the three countries as they existed at the starting point (T1) of our study. We shall also note the periodisation of each country’s reform as these have been documented in our three national reports. In spite of the complexities and variations that such periodisation may involve we will analyse similarities and differences in the changes in national policies and systems within the time-span of our study and interpret them in terms of sources of change. We shall in particular focus on the extent to which political actors have been able to formulate preferences and impose change or, alternatively, the extent to which policy changes are the product of evolutionary processes of change in social structures.

The analysis of higher education policy change in this chapter seeks to combine two perspectives. A number of theoretical approaches to the study of public policy share a common and popular assumption: policy change is the outcome of changing preferences among political actors. According to such , policy change is the outcome of changing preferences in actors or changing power constellations between actors with different preferences (Ostrom 1990). Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) advocate another version of an actor’s perspective and emphasise that policy change is normally caused by external system events such as changes in economic and political conditions that affect actors’ belief systems. An alternative to an actor’s perspective is a that emphasises how underlying norms and values shape policy change. This perspective explains policy change as an outcome of shifting values or constellations of values (Skocpol 1992; March and Olsen 1989). Such shifts may in turn be caused either by the internal dynamics of and problems within political institutions or by external events that causes internal disruptions.

In this chapter, we take up the implications of those aspects of policy that can be interpreted as theories of the state and of the university and their role in society.

The starting point for our three national projects was the evident changes in the role of the state promoted by national governments. As major public institutions, universities can be considered either as sub-systems of the state or as independent institutions that nevertheless are strongly affected by the nature of the state. A primary task is therefore to locate universities among the range of public institutions, and to assess how they can be related, if sometimes uncertainly, to a continuum of views about the appropriate role of the state. Therefore, much of our analysis in this book considers whether, if the discretion allowed to universities and the academics who constitute their working base has been increasingly circumscribed, the central tasks of universities (i.e. research and teaching-learning) remain the domain of the prime practitioners, rather than the governing structures.

Governments have changed their relationships to the institutions and formulated new kinds of expectations on institutional governance, management and leadership (see Chapter 3). As was discussed in Chapter 4, various buffer organisations have been established to link governments with institutions. Thus, both government and buffer organisations are framing the space of action for the institutions, both normatively and more directly through changing the nature of regulatory control. This may mean either a tightening or loosening of central control.

We will in this chapter discuss the consequences of the policy changes for the academic profession in the three countries. An important starting point is to analyse the differences in its constitution in the three countries. We can also ask whether the notion of ‘academic profession’ is a viable one. Hence the weight is given to analyses of integrative and disintegrative forces of the profession in this chapter. The main focus is what sort of common markers and points of identification are constructed within the profession and what relations may weaken the strength of such common points of identification. The first part of the chapter sketches the historical constitution of the academic professions in each of the three countries leading to the eve of the reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. The second part of the chapter presents the main lines of reform policies with reference to the conditions of the academic profession in each country. A closer look at certain effects of the reform policies is taken in the third part of the chapter in which we discuss changes concerning hierarchisation within the profession, divides between disciplines and becoming an academic.In many ways the academic professions in England, Sweden and Norway may be said not to be fully professionalised. In the literature on professions it is usually emphasised that in order to be useful as a concept, there should be some characteristic that distinguishes a ‘profession’ as an occupational group from other closely related groups. There must be some sort of cohesion between the members of the group. Usually groups such the Anglo- American professions of doctors and lawyers serve as master templates for what to look for: common educational background, autonomy in professional questions, protection through certification, a strong professional association and a common occupational ethos (Abbot 1988; Erichsen 1997; Johnson 1982; Parsons 1939; Torgersen 1994; Wilensky 1964).

Our central concern in this chapter is to examine the implications of policy change for academics in England, Norway and Sweden in our chosen period. We thus seek to extend our analysis to encompass the individual actors in the basic units of higher education institutions, who create and recreate the experience of higher education and its contribution to societies in their working lives. How far did academic values, self perceptions and modes of working shift in the face of the political and institutional transformations that we have described? In short, how far did policy change permeate academic identities?

Throughout our book we have sought to identify patterns of change and responses to change across differences of national histories, institutions and cultures in which higher education has accumulated different configurations of meaning and purpose. We have seen in the previous chapter how these differences informed and shaped the academic profession in our three countries over time. The national histories of higher education had resulted in different divisions of labour, different understanding of roles and different self images on the part of academics. Academics were working in systems of quite different scales. In England, the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London universities continued to dominate for most of the 20th century. However, stratification was embedded in the whole system and the inter-institutional differences of resource and reputation were taken for granted by academics (Halsey 1992). In both Sweden and Norway, there were strong assumptions of interinstitutional equality, as far as the universities were concerned. The different political responses in the three countries to the idea of ‘the knowledge society’, as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, may in part be explained by long-standing differences of belief as to the contribution of advanced knowledge to national goals and differences in the value accorded intellectuals.

In this chapter, we summarise the main points made in the book, discuss the main change outcomes that were discernible at T2 and consider the sources of change and continuity, As an example of major change, we seek to interpret changes in overall structure. Finally, we note how our studies reflect on some modes of generalisation to be found in current higher education studies.