In Between New Public Management and Network Governance in Austria, Finland and Scotland: Potential Conflicts in Autonomy Understandings of Governments and Universities

The political science doctoral thesis project is focussing on comparing university policies with the background of different welfare state types: Austria as a conservative-corporatist, Finland as a social democratic and Scotland as a liberal welfare state. As universities are pre-constitutional entities, it seems to be legitimate to search for fit from welfare state policy-making with the practices of university steering. Here, I will present paradigm evidence of top-down-oriented New Public Management (NPM) and bottom-up-formed Network Governance (NG) at a macro-level, i.e. governance by the state. The paradigms connect with the theme of institutional autonomy, which differentiates into an academic, a financial, an organisational and a staffing aspect. As a result, I propose the following hypothesis for the cases of Austria, Finland and Scotland: NPM is present, but not dominant in higher education (HE) policies. More likely, NPM and NG appear simultaneously within the university policies of Austria, Finland and Scotland. How do these paradigms transfer within the institutions? In this article, a concept for this transfer of action in horizontal autonomy to actors in vertical autonomy through communication and through management committees’ interplay elaborates and, additionally, hypotheses formulate. The extent of the space for alternative paradigms to join the paradigm transfer game, for example, for Epistemic Governance (EG), might be larger, the higher the regulative density of university policies is. The borders of every paradigm in university policy, however, constitute with (a) strong welfare state traditions for governance and (b) strong university traditions for steering. Conservative-corporatist welfare state tradition as in Austria shows an inclination for university policy governance to be control-oriented, whereas social democratic welfare state tradition as in Finland relies on trust in university policy formulation (and implementation). It has to remain open how the liberal welfare state of Scotland would classify.