Current global drivers have challenged higher education and increased institution-wide top-down managed reforms, including curriculum reforms. As academics are vital in curriculum development, listening to their voices is essential for understanding actors' experiences of curriculum change processes in top-down managed reforms. The present study…

In educational organizations, the teaching staff has traditionally had a lot of influence on the content of their work and the pedagogy. Within the last two decades, changes in educational organizations can be defined as the shift from this administrative loose coupling toward tight, more managerial coupling. This study utilizes a qualitatively…

This study explores how early childhood education and basic education teachers develop and develop innovations within the decentralised educational system of Finland. The comprehensive dataset of 20 field interviews provides a range of insights into teachers' goals, principles, inspirations and experiences when working with a variety of…

School autonomy has been and continues to be one of the most important education reform strategies around the world despite ambiguity about its theoretical and empirical effects on students learning. We use international data from PISA to test three country-level factors that might account for inconsistent results in prior literature: (1) the…

The impact of stakeholders in the development of academic disciplines in higher education is a somewhat infrequently addressed topic in research. This article describes an institutional change and legitimacy formation process from a dialectical perspective by analysing organisational interpretations of and strategic responses to external pressures…

As governments and international organisations have pressured universities to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of tertiary education, universities have started to highlight graduate employability as a key driver and measure of university outcomes. This paper contributes to the underutilised "processual" employability studies by…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges of low hierarchy and self-organised structures for employees' learning and competency development at work. In the past decade, interest in employees' and organisations' self-directedness has increased. Self-organised structures are perceived as better able to answer to the quickly…

Purpose: This study examines the social organizational structure of one early childhood education (ECE) center in Finland and the relationship between this structure and the roles and the responsibilities of the members of the organization. Design/methodology/approach: The research is a qualitative case study with ethnographic features. Its…

This study examines academic staff's perceptions of a university-wide, top-down curriculum reform in terms of the management of the reform, the support provided by the university's administration, and the utilisation of the university's guidelines. Differences between faculties are also scrutinised. The study was conducted at a multidisciplinary…

This article contributes to the current discussions on academic teacher identity in universities. In the managerial university and in the context of expanding HE, teaching has become a more complex, more problematised and more managed activity. This article approaches identity as identification on different levels of academic work and asks: What…

As higher education quality assurance in many countries in Europe has become a mature activity, some agencies carrying out external quality assurance are developing beyond their core tasks and missions. The current study identifies new tasks taken up within quality assurance agencies and analyses the drivers behind such development. Based on an…

In the past few centuries, an accelerating process of legalization and classification have moulded the diverse range of earlier institutions into a limited number of isomorphic organizational forms. Today, institutions of higher education, with their roots in the corporate forms of medieval universities, can also have the legal status of, for…

The purpose of this study is to compare education and inspection systems and to reveal their similarities and differences in terms of structuring and functioning. Thus, it is aimed to make suggestions about education supervision in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus by determining its current state. In the study, the educational supervision…

For the last two decades, Finnish universities have faced the implementation of new systems of control and undergone dramatic changes that have worsened academic working conditions -- such as corporatisation and budget cuts. This article explores Finnish academics' experiences of university reforms with a special focus on the consequences it has…

The administrative systems of universities attest to a shift towards more managerial forms of leadership. This article outlines how strategic management was introduced in Finland in the 2000s and how this led to a significant de-democratisation of the university organisations, despite academic communities' resistance and explicit preference for…