European Journal of Education, Vol. 33, No.

3, 1998

299

Justifying the Evaluative State: New Public Management ideals in higher education

IVAR BLEIKLIE

Introduction In recent years, the higher education systems in a number of countries in Western Europe have undergone a process of global change. In Norway, it has two main characteristics: a strong rise in student numbers and a comprehensive reform effort. The reforms were conceived before, and partially in parallel with, an increase in student numbers unanticipated by politicians. In the debate that was triggered by the reforms, both the questions of what the universities are supposed to do and how they ought to be governed have been central. In relation to higher research-based education the development demonstrates that higher educational institutions are not only in the process of having their main function redefined. The State is also redefining its function in relation to higher education. The changes referred to here took place at several levels. Considering the scope of university tasks, the key word is growth. If we consider the relations with the environment and its intemal organisation, the keywords are integration, formalisation and standardisation. These fundamental changes are seen here in the context of the rise of the Evaluative State (Neave, 1988, p. 7). The implications of New Public Management ideas in public administration have been contested. Introducing these ideas in a public university system should make an apt case for the exploration of the potential and limitations of New Public Management as a universal approach to management reform. In higher education, where institutional autonomy and academic freedom are fundamental values, the compatibility between the rationale of the reform policies and the substantive field in which they are supposed to operate is posed more acutely than in most other policy fields. In this article, I shall discuss the introduction of New Public Management as the ideological foundation of the Evaluative State within the Norwegian university in an historical perspective. I shall position those ideas in three different contexts: the normative ideals surrounding university activity, the organisational ideals related to university governance and, finally, the recent reform in Norway. Most arguments in favour of public involvement in university afiFairs can be located along a dimension provided by two extremes constituted by the culture argument and the utilitarian argument. The former argues that scientific activity is an emancipating force in the development of open societies. The latter emphasises that universities provide society with qualified labour and research products that
0141-8211/98/030299-18 1998, European Institute of Education and Social Policy, Paris

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contribute to national economic growth. It is widely held that university policy has been moving from the cultural argument towards the utilitarian argument (Neave, 1992; Readings, 1996; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Our analysis is based on the view that changes taking place at the level of nadonal educational policy are unavoidable, fundamental and ambiguous. The unavoidable is a consequence of growth in student numbers and demand for research. It suggests that, even without conscious attempts at changing the universides as organisations, the sheer magnitude of their tasks would lead to sweeping changes in the ways they solve them. The fundamental character of the changes lies in the relationship between universities and their environment to State and society, which has changed through processes of integradon. On the one hand, this has resulted in new organisational forms specifically designed for applied research, educational services and cooperation with private industry and, on the other, in national political reforms such as new university legislation, integration into management by objective style planning systems and the reorganisation of research councils. The ambiguity of the changes stems from the fact that both the universities and the political objectives formulated for their future role and activity are complex, diverse and (apparendy) inconsistent. One cannot safely assume that greater emphasis on the utilitarian argument will necessarily lead to factory-like universities adapted to the mass production of candidates or to an increase in 'applied' research at the expense of 'basic' research. How current reforms affect such basic questions as the freedom, quality and productivity of university research and education is subject to a range of diverse, partly contradictory ideas. I shall now ask how public reform policies in the field of higher education may be understood in the light of changes in the normative conceptions of public policies in the field, as epitomised by New Public Management ideas. First, some theories about the modem university's tasks and organisational structure and the part public authorities are supposed to play in relation to the university as a knowledge producing and knowledge transferring institution are discussed. The discussion is based on the notion that the 'normative space' of university policy may be defined along two dimensions. The first is delimited by the extremes of the university as a cultural value or a utilitarian value. The second is defined by the extremes of institutional autonomy and heteronomy. The three theoretical positions of idealism, functionalism and rationalism combine those ideals in different ways. They form the basis of different organisational ideals. Second, a typology of such organisational ideals underpinning the discussion about the contemporary universities is presented. The implications arising from the 'space of social action' defined by these ideals have for the functions of the university and its relationship to public authorities are explored. I make a distinction between three different models of action for university policy. They are dependent on how far universities
are defined as government agencies, cultural institutions or corporate enterprises. From

this point of departure, I shall look briefly at the specific development of Norwegian university policy. The thesis is that the corporate enterprise definidon of the university is gaining ground, not by replacing the other ones, but by incorporating them. The final topic is the role of the State vis-d-vis the universities and the specific reforms that make up current university policy. Some implications of the reforms of the Evaluative State and finally some of the tensions and dilemmas they represent will be examined.

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The Normative Space of University Policy

301

Social science literature about universities has been dominated by two theoretical traditions: by German idealist philosophy and American functionalism (Trow & Nybom, 1991; Rothblatt & Wittrock, 1993) [1]. A third tradition, that I shall call rationalism, has a somewhat more peripheral role, but no less important to higher educational policy making. These traditions provide clearly distinguishable and altemative perspectives on what should be the object and scope of public policies and on how they should be implemented.

Idealism

The idealist tradition focuses on Berlin University in the early 19th century. It emphasises academic fi'eedom, i.e. institutional autonomy supposed to guarantee
Lehrfreiheit, Lemfreiheit und Freiheit der Wissenschaft and the unity of science and

teaching as the key elements of the 'idea of the university'. These were considered the fundamental ideal characteristics of the modem university (Ben-David & Zloczower, 1991; von Humboldt, 1991; Pelikan, 1992) [2]. Here, it is commonplace to take the historic ideal as a point of departure and then show how universities have developed up to the present as measured against these characteristics. The Nation-State played an important, but relatively clearly circumscribed part in university affairs, as outlined by the reforms introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt at Berlin University. Their main purpose was to safeguard and guarantee institutional autonomy and the search for knowledge 'for the sake of knowledge itself. These values were not only threatened by forces from outside the university. The Nation-State was also supposed to protect against threats from within. This protective function was primarily exercised through state control over professorial appointments as a means of containing intemal power struggles between professors. The fundamental message in this literature is pessimistic. Universities are threatened by ominous forces or already in decline as a consequence of their effects (Bloom, 1987; London, 1993). Literature in this tradition is often criticised for failing to deal analytically with the relationship between the university as an idea and as an actual institution in a specific state and phase of its development. The assumption of steady decline tends therefore to be a foregone conclusion. Analyses of how universities functioned at the time of von Humboldt or how widespread the principles he represented really were in early 19th century Germany are rare. Analyses that deal critically with the relationship between such organisational principles as institutional autonomy, individual freedom and scientific activity are also scarce. Von Humboldt's ideas were far from commonly accepted, either in Germany, or at Berlin University. Fichte, Rector of Berlin University, often mentioned together with von Humboldt as its creator, held a view quite different from, and far less liberal than von Humboldt (Forland, 1994). Joseph Ben-David (1991, p. 131) argued on the other hand that many older, smaller German universities which hovered on the verge of dissolution were revitalised by copying the reforms at Berlin University against the wishes of the Berlin reformers themselves who sought to secure for their university a unique position as the German elite university. The prominence of German universities grew out of the ensuing development of a decentralised and competitive university system, rather than as a result of the

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Humboldtian reforms per se. Ben-David also noted that the position of Berlin University vis-d-vis the State was far more precarious, tense and ambiguous than later idolising accounts may indicate. Precisely because of these problems, it became a political strategy of the university to preserve institutional autonomy by creating a sacred and esoteric image of itself (Ben-David, 1991, pp. 131-137).
Functionalism

The funcdonalist tradition is a product of American mid-20th century sociology, with Talcott Parson's attempt to position the American university as a social institution within his structural-functional conceptual framework and Joseph Ben-David's many comparative studies of higher educational and research systems as the most prominent examples (Ben-David, 1968; 1971; 1991; Parsons & Platt, 1973). Within this perspecdve, the university is regarded as part of the cultural subsystem of society, catering to certain cultural needs. The specific organisational forms of universities depend on how society's need for cultural functions are expressed. This opens up the possibility that universities in societies characterised by different degrees of social differentiation may be organised in different ways. Hence, there is no one ideal way to organise a university [3]. Yet the works of prominent contributors to this tradition, like Ben-David, carry a clear normative message: The openness and competitiveness of the American university system made its research universities the leading ones in the world in the second half of the 20th century. These two characteristics became elevated to necessary conditions for a good university system. The shortcomings of systems in countries like Germany, the UK, France and the Soviet Union were explained in terms of the absence of one or both of these characteristics (Ben-David, 1991). Functionalism contributed to the legitimacy enjoyed by the American university system after the Second World War, particularly compared to German universides, which it had not previously enjoyed (Wittrock, 1993) [4]. Ideally, the State should serve as a guarantee and a protector according to the functionalist perspective too. But its role is less clearly defined, less explicitly related to specific organisational principles envisaged by idealist philosophy and more attuned to facilitate and support the fulfilment of specific functions (Ben-David, 1968; 1971). Public authorities may formulate goals, provide the resources and prepare the ground for an entrepreneurial system. Beyond these basic activides, however, it is more convenient, also from a utilitarian point of view, to leave disciplinary development to itself [5]. The basic message of this perspective is optimistic. Changes in the universities' organisation are regarded as natural and desirable because the increasing degree of structural differentiation in society indicates the appropriateness of a continuous adaptation to changing and more complex social needs. Burton Clark's studies of the American university system provide a classic example. His concepts of 'the master-matrix organization' and 'the researchteaching nexus' focus on the need to organise certain vital functions, primarily the linking of research with teaching within graduate education, in different ways under varying structural conditions (Ben-David, 1991, p. 127; Clark, 1983; 1991). A common characteristic of these two perspectives is that both are based on certain explicit or implicit organisational ideals. The idealist tradition is historically related to the German chair-faculty system with its individualistic form of work

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and its scholarly basis in humanist disciplines. This does not preclude, of course, the possibility that an idealist perspective may be linked with other forms and systems of higher education sharing certain fundamental values such as the search for knowledge for its own sake, institutional autonomy and freedom of leaming, teaching and research. Pelikan (1992) represents this perspective within the American tradidon and underlines its indebtedness both to English and German ancestors Qohn Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt, respectively). The functionalist tradition may make differences between university systems intelligible and reasonable in the light of the function they perform in different societies. Yet it is often presumed that the openness and competitiveness of the American system and its egalitarian departments, collective style of work and scholarly emphasis on sciences together form the real conditions of its success. These two different national traditionsthe British and the Germanhave formed the basis of different concepts of the role public authorities should play in university affairs. In the first, the role of the State is to guarantee the freedom and institutional autonomy of scholarly activities. This opens the possibility for the State to interfere directly, regulating university acdvities, provided the purpose is to safeguard the freedom of research. In the second, the role of the State is primarily to stimulate research within a diversified system of institutions that varies considerably both with respect to formal ownership arrangements and disciplinary profiles. Within this system, the tolerance for direct interference is very low [6]. Still, the State's financial influence through research funding may be significant [7]. Finally, both perspectives give radically different justifications for the maintenance of a university system which provides a sanctuary for free research within autonomous institutions. The idealist tradition emphasises that the search for knowledge through free research and teaching has an independent cultural value which cannot be reduced to anything beyond itself. The functionalist tradition as presented by Ben-David (1991) has a more utilitarian strain. Accordingly, the justification for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is that it gives rise to a higher quality of research which, in turn, will yield more applicable results than problem-oriented applied research.
Rationalism

A third perspective, often commented upon, but seldom used for analytical purposes in academic analyses of higher educational policy. Given the interest of public authorities in controlling and exploiting research for applied purposes and also the large-scale experiments that took place in certain areas (e.g. military technology and space technology in the US) or through comprehensive reforms of entire educational systems (e.g. the comprehensive Swedish higher education reform known as 'U68' introduced in the 1970s), surprisingly few attempts have been made to provide a fundamental, theoretical justification of centralised management aiming at the systematic exploitation of society's resources in order to meet social and economic needs. John D. Bemal (1969) is regarded as the person who furnished the classical justification for planned management of research and university education which Elzinga (1993) calls radical rationalism. In Bemal's view, the necessary tension between routine, which usually characterises applied and problem-oriented research, and spontaneity as an innate quality of all genuine research becomes problematic in an individualist capitalist system. It may be solved given adequate socio-political conditions. Bemal's position is based on a

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utilitarian and rationalist argument. The aim is to put research at the service of society and people. Unplanned research is a waste of resources. In this perspective, research and research-based education play a dual role as production factor and welfare benefit. It represents a set of ideas frequently found in public documents on higher educadon. In Norwegian higher education policy, the recommendations of the 'Ottosen' and 'Hemes' commissions are telling examples [8]. Similar ideas about research prevailed in Swedish higher education policy during the 1950s and 1960s [9]. Radonalism represents the normadve perspective underpinning current ideas about university governance as they manifest themselves in the organisational ideal of the corporate enterprise which is promoted by the Evaluative State as a general model for all its subordinate agencies. The three perspectives represent different concepts of the university and its role as an institution of research and its relationship with public authorities. The idealist and rationalist positions are polar opposites as justifications for public university policy in their emphasis on cultural and utilitarian values respectively. The functionalist perspective also stresses utilitarian values. The positions not only differ in the extent to which they espouse different values of culture and udlity. Their position on the question of institutional autonomy is the second critical criterion which disdnguish them. Whereas the idealist and functionalist positions lend support to institutional autonomy, the rationalist position, with its emphasis on societal control over vital socio-economic resources, may legitimise institutional heteronomy. The normative space, as it has been defined hitherto, provides a set of different justifications for public university policy and the normative basis for that policy. But few, if any, direct practical recommendations are made as to how universities and higher educational institutions in general ought to be designed and managed. I shall now present three different organisational ideals that have formed and still form the basis of specific political programmes and strategies for university policy making. We move from normative principles to specific historical and political organisational models which comprise more complex ideas about university affairs. Organisational Ideals The historical transformations experienced by modem universities entailed their being faced with changing expectations of the tasks they ought to concentrate on and how they ought to be organised. However, such transformations do not necessarily imply that existing expectations are replaced by new ones, e.g. that expectations of culture-supporting scholarly and scientific work are replaced by expectations of applied, useful and marketable research. Just as often, new expectations are added to existing ones. Both cultural and useful activities are expected. It is far from clear, in each case, which kind of academic activity is called for. Ideological changes, which come with the Evaluative State and its New Public Management ideals, can, accordingly, be interpreted in a number of ways. From the perspective employed here, they are processes of gradual sedimentation rather than sequential stages. To illustrate these processes one may use a typology of organisational ideals. Each ideal embodies a set of internally related notionsa 'layer' of expectations. These 'layers' originate partly in different functions which a university actually discharges, partly in different ideological interpretations of

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those functions and their relative importance. The three sets of organisational ideals represent then expectations which impart different directions for public policy, depending on which functions are emphasised and what kind of authority relationships is recommended.
The University as a Public Agency

One layer of expectations relates to the university as part of the national civil service and as implementor of public policy. The university is set within a hierarchical bureaucratic order. It makes knowledge available to higher political administrative units. Here, loyalty is the central expectation placed on a university. Its primary task is to implement state policies. The most important responsibility of the universities towards the State has traditionally been the education of properly prepared candidates for top civil service posts and the learned professions. It is primarily the State, as the financially and politically responsible authority, which expects universities to serve as public agencies. How far the State as an actor on the university policy-making arena attempts to manage universities as public agencies is likely to emerge through legislation and budgetary policy. Traditionally, political authorities have been reluctant to manage the universities in ways which may be interpreted as an infringement against the freedom of teaching and research, mainly because it would go against deeply entrenched expectations of universities as cultural institutions. The importance of universities as public agencies is evident in the Scandinavian university systems, based as they are on the traditional German university ideal. The character of Norwegian universities as degree providing institutions in which emphasis is put on certification rather than teaching of students is one manifestation of this heritage [10]. This clearly differs from teaching-oriented American universities which, in comparison, heavily emphasise the teaching process and certification somewhat lightly (Overland, 1988) [11]. Today, the public agency role is reinforced by the integration of universities into a unified system of management by objectives into a national programme system and in national enactment for higher education institutions. Its purpose is to standardise and integrate universities as part of a national higher educational system. Both measures were triggered by the Government's 1987 programme for renewal of the national civil service, based on New Public Management ideas (Forland, 1993). In this setting, rapidly increasing student numbers, as the propellant behind growth in the university sector, provided a further powerful argument for a more resolute formal structuring to handle the quantitative expansion of university activities. The controversy about fixed hours for academics, which broke out in Norwegian newspapers following the report of the Hemes commission, is symptomatic of this kind of expectation [12]. Another expression of this expectation is the continuing process of developing operative goals for higher educational institutionsone of the current main objectives of Norwegian policy makers in the area (St.prp.nr.l. 1993-94).
The University as an Autonomous Cultural Institution

The second layer of expectations relates to the university as a cultural institution. Here, the primary task is to engage in academic activity based on autonomous

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research and teaching. The notion of the university as a cultural institution is historically rooted in the Humboldt university where intemal university organisation was grounded in autonomous chairs with affiliated apprentice students. The professors as chair-holders represented the university in practice, i.e. 'the chairfaculty system' as described by Guy Neave and Gary Rhoades (1987, p. 283fi). Each small hierarchy, 'the invisible vertical collegium', was held together by informal ties between chair-holder and apprentice students. The most important expectation of the university as a collegium of chair-holders was academic quality. Each of the chair-holders asserted scholarly authority through outstanding research, by attracting talented students and by creating good research environments. The core value fostered by these expectations was academic freedom granted to professors on the basis of formal qualifications. Only the professors themselves were entitled to evaluate their own performance as a group of peers. Authority rested primarily with 'the visible and horizontal collegium' of chair-holders. Another version of the university as a cultural institution emerges in 'the disciplinary university' modelled on the modem American research university. Here, disciplines constitute relatively egalitarian communities, organised formally within disciplinary departments, with a number of professors in each department. Disciplinary departments, as they appeared in the US, established a more coherent formal framework around academic activities where authority primarily resided in the disciplinary community, especially in the field of teaching. In both cases, the role of public authorities is to secure the freedom of research and teaching by legal and financial means. In post-World War II Western Europe, disciplinary communities gradually replaced chair-holders as the main academic actors. An important element of democratisation in Scandinavian as well as British, French and West German universities during the 1970s focused on extending access of university decision making bodies to broader segments of the academic community below full professor level and students [13]. Traditionally, academics have upheld the notion of the university as an independent cultural institution. The notion has partly been bolstered by arrangements to protect universities against outside interference, i.e. institutional autonomy, and partly by arrangements supposed to secure academic (professorial or disciplinary) authority in the form of a majority on decision making bodies and recruitment procedures designed to guarantee that this authority rest on a satisfactory level of academic competence.
The University as a Corporate Enterprise

The last layer of expectations relates to the notion of the university as a producer of educational and research services. Grounded in a set of ideas under such labels as 'New Public Management', 'Management By Objectives' and 'Managerialism', it served as ideological justification to public administrative reforms internationally. In Norway over the last 10 to 15 years it characterised university policies, especially as from the latter half of the 1980s (Bleiklie, 1994; Keller, 1983; Olsen & Peters, 1996; Pollit, 1990) [14]. As a corporate enterprise, the university consists in a leadership and different functional (academic, technical and administrative) staff groups servicing different user groups which require the services the enterprise offers. Since the late 1980s,

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there has been a tendency to emphasise quality as a fundamental objective of the corporate enterprise, an idea apparently well attuned to more traditional notions of the cultural mission of the modem university. However, the most important expectation which the corporate enterprise confronts is efficiency related to the rapidity and cost at which it produces useful services, research and candidates to the benefit of users, be they the university's own faculty, administrators, employers of university graduates, or buyers of research. The ideology behind the university reforms of the 1980s and 1990s emphasises the importance of higher education for national economic growth. A major aim is then to raise the number of students and to produce candidates more efficiently, especially at the graduate level (Bleiklie & Hostaker, 1994). Together with the conviction that greater efficiency can be achieved by means of performance indicators, these notions imply that the administrative aspect of university governance should be strengthened to ensure a standardised and controllable treatment of the growing burden of teaching and research. The expectation of greater efficiency in producing research and candidates means that the tasks of formulating production goals, the mobilising of resources and support by incentive systems become crucial issues. In addition, the way the State has taken on the value of efficiency means that the formal apparatus through which it monitors and manages its own activity and that of its sub-units is changing in a potentially very fundamental sense. This has given rise to the concept of the Evaluative State. From a traditional ex ante regulation in the shape of established rules, practices and budget decisions, the State has moved to emphasise ex post facto control. The focus lies on performance in relation to deliberately formulated policy goals. The central idea is that if state agencies are provided with clearly formulated goals and a set of incentives and sanctions invoked in response to actual behaviour, efficiency will thereby increase. When emphasis shifts from rule production and rule adherence to goal formulation and performance control, evaluation becomes a core activity and thus changes the way the State goes about its business of governance. Reform Policy and New Public Management Recent university reform has brought in new ideas and added a new layer of expectations and pressures. This will in part lead individual institutions in new directions. In part, it will create new tensions in institutions in relation to established expectations and directions. The organisational arrangements promoted by the Evaluative State and the notion of a corporate enterprise both imply that measures are implemented which pull both in the direction of centralisation and decentralisation. Such inconsistent and conflicting tendencies make themselves felt in the intemal structure of governance as well as in relation to political authorities. On the one hand, delegation of decision making authority is stressed. In relation to state regulations and intervention, as a corporate enterprise the university ought to operate with as few limitations as possible. Internally, decisions ought to be made as closely as possible to the level at which services in practice are delivered. On the other, strong leadership is a necessity. Thus, presumed decentralisation comes with strong leadership. Both draw up organisational goals, incentive systems and a supposedly close control of performance at all levels to guarantee the organisation functions as reliably and efficiently as available resources permit.

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Implications

This development has three typical implications. First, authority and power over university affairs are, conceptually at least, separated from disciplinary competence. All 'affected groups' are, in principle, regarded as participants with equally legitimate stakes in university affairs. All functional groups, including the professoriate, are regarded as equal interest groups who should be represented by their unions rather than by their disciplinary peers. Accordingly, mechanisms for their representation have been changed [15]. Second, leadership functions and administrative structures are strengthened both in extent and in the formal competence of administrators and their authority as decision makers. Their role seems to be strengthened as against representative bodies. They assume more and more responsibilities, not only for the day-to-day routine, but also for strategic planning, budgeting and the growing engine dedicated to evaluation in its various manifestations, such as performance monitoring, measurement and reporting. Finally, the notion of academic performance is redefined from one which emphasises its 'inherent' quality to one in which measurable quantitative aspects are prominent. Here, qualitative considerations are presumed to be implied by the performance indicators employed. Thus, academic activity is open to external scrutiny by higher administrative authorities. Disciplinary competence is thus no longer necessary to evaluate disciplinary performance. Performance indicators, such as number of candidates produced, books and articles published in respected journals, all provide simple standard information graspable by the meanest intelligence. In Norway, recent higher education legislation and the general planning system are the most important administradve instruments in this process. This heralds not only an efficiency drive, but also, in Weberian terms, a demystificadon or entzauberung of academic affairs. Academic work can be administered as any work in any service-providing agency. We are faced with an ideal that clearly indicates professionalisation and differentiation of the leadership roles and administrative fiinctions. It emphasises the separation of previously pervasive and interwoven functions of scholar, administrator and leader. It also emphasises a more comprehensive administrative responsibility and leadership which embraces planning, resource management, personnel policy, productivity measures, as well as public relations. These are functions performed by techniques which, in a formal sense, are similar in all major service-producing enterprises. Simultaneously, it attempts to incorporate both the expectations of the university as a public agency and as an independent cultural institution within the general framework of the corporate enterprise ideal.

Dilemmas

The changes wrought by reform raise new dilemmas and considerations that will shape the university in the future. They will influence both the general 'design' of the organisation and (in particular) the relationship between disciplinary and administrative authority. Some dilemmas and tensions will nevertheless remain at the centre of discussions about how higher education institutions should be organised in the years to come.

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The first of these is caused by the blurring of the distinction between corporate business-oriented functions and public agency functions. Because recent public administration reform has so clearly been based on New Public Management ideology, corporate leadership and public agency leadership are regarded as birds of a feather. This development has had an impact on university reforms. It accentuates tensions latent in university organisation in two aspects of their administration: (a) the comprehensiveness of administrative responsibility and (b) the levels at which administrative functions are executed. In the first, two archetypical administrative ideals are pitted against one another: A 'rule oriented' ideal which favours concentration on the detailed control of a limited set of formal requirements versus an 'activist ideal' identified with efficiency and quality improvement. In the second, we must bear in mind that universities are administered from various organisational levels: from government ministry, from central institutional leadership, from faculties and from individual departments. The explicit ideological message is one of decentralisation. Leadership responsibilities are taken care of at the operative level. The tensions in both these aspects point unambiguously to the fact that the goal of decentralisation is far more confiictridden and itself more ambiguous than appears at the ideological level. The delegation of authority implied is counteracted by two factors. First, an increasing number of tasks, in particular such core functions as teaching and research, become the object of greater political-administrative managerial control. Second, the power to punish and reward remains as centralised as ever. Because today this power spans a wider array of issues than heretofore, there are good reasons to believe that decentralisation has been paralleled by centralisation. The second source of tension is caused by the relationship between disciplinary and administrative authority, itself about to change. It is commonplace in academia that university administrators have gained influence at the expense of disciplinary communities. The contention is often borne out by the allegation that the number of university administrators has grown faster than the number of academics (Gomitzka, Kyvik & Larsen, 1996). The allegation is questionable (Bleiklie, 1996, p. 191). But also, it diverts attention from a far more important development, namely the transformation of administrative activity from concentrating on support functions for disciplinary communities to concentrating on planning and management. This has changed the character of the administrative apparatus. The ratio of highly trained administrators has risen sharply, a Master's degree now being a requirement for administrative positions above the level of secretary. The number of positions with leadership responsibilities has increased at all organisational levels. A more assertive and active administration may be evidence of the 'bureaucratisation' of the university. However, the administration also finds itself becoming more academic. An increasing status equality between academic and administrative staff who move within two different positional hierarchies, with partly overlapping responsibilities and diffuse authority reladonships, suggests the ground is well prepared for conflicts within and between different categories of leadership. Finally, disciplinary authority, which involves two kinds of responsibilities towards the institutions on the hand, and towards the disciplines on the otheris about to change. Traditionally, this relationship took the form of a division of labour in which questions relating to teaching were institutionally based. Disciplinary authority rested on the collective fulfilment of an obligation to ensure

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certain politically defined educational needs were satisfied. Research, on the other hand, was left to the individual as a member of an academic discipline. Such a clear-cut division of labour may become more fuzzy if political signals about a clearer disciplinary specialisation and division of labour between Norwegian academic institutions are serious. This will enhance the tendency of stronger politicaladministrative steering ambitions applied to the content of research already noted in connection with the allocation of basic funds to research programmes which are now about to be applied more systematically by public authorities. Conclusion The rise of the Evaluative State and the introduction of corporate management ideals seem to represent something relatively new and apparently it signals profound changes in the way public authorities understand academic activity. However, few indications suggest we shall see a development in which new sets of expectations and organisational ideals unequivocally replace their predecessors. Rather than clearly distinguishable and separate phases in the development, we are faced with different layers of expectations that gradually have been piled upon one another in keeping with the historical transformations the university has undergone. Rather than creating new institutions, we may expect old ones to alter in the sense that new tensions arise in them, while others recede. Different ideals thus assert themselves in different historical periods. And recently the emphasis has clearly shifted. Although the expectations which universities face change, they are also complex, ambiguous and partly inconsistent. Yet because unavoidable ambiguity is a generic feature of complex organisations such as universities, one cannot deduce that they unequivocally move in the direction of ever more complex expectations and models of action. If one tries to ascertain the direction contemporary university policy will follow, the apparent complexities and inconsistencies of political developments are discouraging. On the one hand, universities should be managed more firmly and effectively, as implied by the standardisation of legislation, decision making bodies and performance indicators. On the other, in the name of efficiency and flexibility, universities ought to be less centrally controlled. Each institution should make its own decisions in allocating its budgets (Bleiklie, 1996). The university's character as a 'knowledge enterprise' or as a collection of departments operating as small, independent, knowledge enterprises is emphasised. More emphasis should be put on fundamental research, high level competence and quality, with the clear conviction that strong academic leadership will contribute to achieving the goal of high quality performance. Hence, good arguments have been provided in favour of universities as public agencies, autonomous cultural institutions and marketoriented corporate enterprises. According to these expectations, they should meet the standards of loyalty, quality and efficiency. It is hard to imagine how all these expectations might be achieved simultaneously. Although expectations are diverse, they are not necessarily random. How they balance against one another depends on how incentives link with expectations and with resources. Yet it is also important to look at the dominant ideologies: how they affect the way different messages are interpreted and how the ranking of different values is determined by members of the academic community. When stable, the relationship between the expectations to the universities and the tasks

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they should fulfil is fixed with a relatively clear hierarchical order between the tasks. Periods of transition not only introduce new values. They also change the rank order of established ones. Such transitions often imply that the political game, the actors' roles and strategic positions are redefined [16]. Today, expectations are moving away from the classical definition of the university as a cultural institution. Rather, the university is a corporate enterprise in the knowledge industry, espousing efficiency as a core value, focused on consumer orientation, with personnel management as the central means through which this value is realised. The universities' role as civil service agencies is changing, rather than being weakened. Once defined as having a specific obligation to educate learned professionals, higher secondary school teachers and top bureaucrats, the university is moving towards integration within a comprehensive public higher education system where civil service responsibilities will increasingly permeate the whole range of commitments to education and research at university level. NOTES [1] Although dominant, these are far from the only theory traditions. The work of Pierre Bourdieu, based on his structural sociological approach, is the basis of one tradition (Bourdieu, 1988; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Other traditions within political science and organisation theory (Olsen, 1971a, 1971b; Premfors, 1984) and anthropology (Becher, 1989) have produced occasional outstanding contributions, but no sustained research effort. [2] Humboldt and his contemporaries were concerned with the unity between the humanistic concept of Wissenschaft and teaching. The term science, therefore, is somewhat misleading in this context. It is used in the absence of an English equivalent, but in a wider sense than is usual in the Englishspeaking world. [3] However, since more and more countries are affected by common universal processes of differentiation and modernisation, functionalists are likely to assume that different societies and their institutions will tend, in the long run, to converge and increasingly acquire structurally common characteristics. [4] In the 1920s, Abraham Flexner, a prominent American university reformer, regarded the introduction of the German university model for research and graduate education as a key element in the establishment of American research universities and the very element that made them into institutions reminiscent of 'real' universities. It was also an element that was still seriously threatened by: '... overcrowding, vagaries especially in the fields of education and sociology, and incomprehensible institutes ...', in a higher educational system that: '... catered thoughtlessly and excessively to fleeting, transient, and immediate demands ...' and offered: '... degree courses that belong in technical and vocational schools, not in a universitynot even a sound secondary school'. Later, these very same qualities, the fiexibility and the capacity to meet the many and varied needs of society, while at the same time providing graduate education and high quality research, have been quoted as the great assets of the American university system (Wittrock, 1993, p. 323f). [5] Ben-David also argued that the link between fundamental and applied research is not symmetrical, because the link from economic and technological problems to fundamental research is more predictable than from funda-

312 European Journal of Education

mental research to economically useful technological innovation. Accordingly, a technologist in search of a solution to a basic problem will more easily find the proper address where to obtain either the answer or the definitive denial of the answer than the basic scientist in search of a profitable application of his ideas (Ben-David, 1991, p. 261). It may be symptomatic that the issues related to higher education that were discussed at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 1992 all revolved around the relationship between the protection of minority rights and 'political correctness' on the one hand and academic freedom on the other. On the other hand, this skepticism towards public interference does not mean that public authorities ought not to own universities, as long as their institutional autonomy is preserved Qeffrey, 1992). This is the major source of state influence over American private research universities like Harvard, MIT and Stanford. At MIT, about 80% of the research funds are federal grants. During the 1980s, the dominance of public research funding caused concern and MIT worked hard to attract private funding in order to reduce the share of federal grants which, at the time, was 90%. After the cutbacks in public research grants in recent years, the chief concern has been how to attract additional federal grants (Professor Eugene Skolnikoff, personal communication, 22 February 1994). This is not the only philosophy that characterises the two govemment commissions, one of which made the recommendations for the educational reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the other for the reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The report of the Hemes Commission seeks to balance the different university tasks against one another and emphasises quality and openness in research. Cf. The 'Ottosen Commission's' Recommendation no. 1 about higher education. The Ministry of Church and Education (Innstilling nr. 1 'Om videreutdanning for artianere m.v.' Kirkeog undervisningsdepatementet), Oslo, 1965, p. 5, and the report of the Hemes Commission, NOU 1988; 28, p. 7. The philosophy is succinctly outlined in several of the contributions to the anthology 'University and Society' (Trow & Nybom, 1991), in particular Thorsten Nybom's interview with the Swedish educational reformer and scholar Eskil Bjorklund (pp. 173-192). See also Nybom's interview with NilsEric Svensson in Nybom (1989). The massive Swedish govemment report, U68, has a pragmatic, utilitarian and instrumentalist concept of research, emphasising that the high prestige that is usually enjoyed by theoretical research should not be the only standard by which higher education should be judged and that anyone who completed education of a certain duration should be regarded as a competent researcher (cf. SOU 1973; 2; pp. 59-64). Ben-David and Zloczower (1991) argue that, according to the Humboldtian 'idea of a university', this aspect was decisive for the 'contract' which regulated the relationship between the university and the Prussian State. Its core idea was that universities were given the right to organise their education and conduct research and scholarly activities as they pleased, provided they made sure the State's needs for qualified bureaucrats and academics were satisfied. Consider the difference at undergraduate level between the American system where students are graded by their professor and may have several papers

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

IvarBleiklie 313
graded during a course and the system still in use in the humanities and social sciences at Norwegian universities. The students usually study one subject for at least one year and are then tested in a final exam and graded by a committee of three, including a member from an outside university, none of whom may have been involved in teaching the students they grade. Cf. the debate in the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende, 1 October, 1993. The distinction between a 'chair-faculty tradition' and a 'disciplinary tradition' lies in a very complex set of relationships that may be used to distinguish features according to partly overlapping dimensions such as national traditions (German versus American) (Ben-David, 1991), social functions (elite versus mass education) (Ben-David, 1991; Clark, 1987), disciplinary 'cultures' (humanities versus sciences, applied versus fundamental research) (Snow 1964; Becher, 1989) and institutionalisation of the scholarly community (authorship versus discipline) (Larson, 1990). Pollitt distinguishes between two major phases in the history of managerialism in public services, where 'neo-Taylorism' characterised the early 1980s and 'New Public Management' with an ideological emphasis on quality and customer needs has been more prevalent as from the late 1980s (Pollitt, 1990, p. 179fE). Here, as we are dealing with reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the latter version of managerialism has dominated. Historically, this notion of representation originally arose from democratisation, in which disciplinary communities gradually replaced chair-holders as the main actors within the university during the 1970s (Clark, 1987; Daalder & Shils, 1982). The argument is strongly infiuenced by Knut Dahl Jacobsen's analysis of public administrative behaviour and the tensions between loyalty, neutrality and professional independence which have made themselves felt in various conflicts in the Norwegian central govemment administration as from the second half of the 19th century (Jacobsen, 1960).

[12] [13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

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