The legal position of academic staff in a changing university landscape: A comparative analysis of Finland, Norway, and Sweden

Föreläsare

Melanie Hack is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. She holds a law degree from Germany and earned her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2015. Before joining UiB, she worked as a senior researcher for Scandinavia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Policy in Munich. She is a member of the management team at CENTENOL (The Center on the Europeanization of Norwegian Law), where she leads a work package on labor law. Additionally, she is the head of the LaW-BALANCE project: “Life and Work in Balance: Legal responses to working life in times of change and crisis” and work package leader within the project “Revising Work Time Flexibility Policies to Promote Work Inclusion (REFLEX)”, which is coordinated by OsloMet University in Oslo.

Niina Mäntylä works as a Professor of Public Law at the University of Vaasa, Finland and also as the Vice Dean of the School of Management. She specializes in administrative law and education law. Mäntylä has led several research projects on issues related to public power and liability in the public sector. Recently, her research has focused on academic freedom but also liability issues related to artificial intelligence. Mäntylä has held various expert positions, including serving as a member of the National Non-Discrimination and Equality Tribunal.

Henrik Wenander is Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden and currently serves as the Dean of the Faculty. His research focuses on European and international aspects of public law, especially in relation to Swedish administrative law. He publishes in English, Swedish, and German and has written on mutual recognition of administrative decisions, the constitutional position of public administration in the Nordic states, the Swedish monarchy, and Nordic legal cooperation. He is one of the editors of the peer-reviewed Swedish journal of administrative law, Förvaltningsrättslig tidskrift. From 2021 to 2023, he took part as an expert in the governmental inquiry on constitutional amendments for protecting the independence of courts in Sweden. He teaches Swedish and European public law.

Information om seminariet

The higher education system has since the 2000s changed fundamentally in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. One reason behind this is so-called managerialism as a part of NPM, which means a shift towards more managerial forms of leadership, business-oriented aspects, and neoliberal university policies.

Managerialism in all the Nordic countries conflicts with decades of collegial institutional tradition. Good labour conditions have been considered as one of the safeguards to academic freedom. Based on the comparative legal studies as method the article analyses how the position of academics has changed and how the legal systems studied have reacted to the current challenges. Is academic freedom at risk because of the changing labour conditions and what is the role of managerialism in this development? University employees’ status has started to converge to that of private sector employees. However, there is no common framework, and traditions of different legal areas affect the status of academic staff.

The development due to the strong emphasis on managerialism has been most rapid in Finland, having the strongest influence on the status of university employees. In Sweden, political ambitions to increase university institutional autonomy have been accompanied by increased control and bureaucratisation. At the same time, it is remarkable that very recent developments in Norway show a trend toward moving away from NPM principles in academia. The presentation bases on an article published in Retfærd (2024) (4) 37.

Evenemanget är öppet för alla och kräver ingen föranmälan. Deltagandet kan ske fysiskt eller digitalt via Zoom.

Bild: Henrik Wenander, Melanie Hack och Niina Mäntylä