Institutional autonomy, managerialism and the conditions for academic freedom in Swedish higher education

Puaca focuses on how university management practices have been altered by New Public Management principles, and how changes in higher education affect the prerequisites for university management to perform their work, as well as how it affects their self-image. Contemporary universities are increasingly using business strategies, including measuring quality in economic outputs and using different forms of evaluations that are subject to market-based principles. Based on a principle of competition such a development has contributed to widespread institutional and financial autonomy and a change in the organization of HEIs that results in reduced professional autonomy and freedom in academic work for both researchers and teachers. This means that questions about how education and research are to be conducted are increasingly being shifted from the realm of professional and collegial responsibility to the responsibility of management and are now being processed by various administrative bodies. Puaca argues that human resource departments and administrators now act as effective agents, both implementing and policing the new managerialism, thus providing important mechanisms by which traditional autonomies over teaching and research are subverted.