Conclusion: Enactment and Transformation of the University

Abstract

This chapter draws together the analysis developed over the preceding chapters and highlights the repertoire of theoretical concepts that have not only been developed for this study but that also contribute to higher education studies and to the ethnography or anthropology of policy. The book’s central concept of enactment has been used in a dual sense – both the passing of the 2003 University Law and subsequent amendments and the ways students, academics and managers have shaped the universities in their daily working lives. By holding these top-down and bottom-up ideas of enactment in tension, the book opened up an analytical space in which to study how the university was not just reformed, but transformed. By treating the university not as an a priori entity but as a process of continually organising around contested concepts, negotiable procedures and unstable boundaries, the book shows how extensively and quickly Danish universities have been transformed, but without the changes seeming predetermined or inevitable. The first section shows how contestation over concepts and practices set out in law – openness, autonomy and freedom – have involved numerous actors in many sites. At ‘moments of enactment’ a certain meaning of a keyword was established as dominant, translated into practice and planted like a ‘stake in the ground’ around which everyday academic life revolved for a while. A succession of ‘moments of enactment’ have gradually but extensively transformed the governance of the university. The second section shows how, under a shared ethnographic umbrella, the book has developed a rich array of concepts for theorising how policy makers, managers, academics and students were actively engaged in enacting the university. Key concepts are ‘articulation and partial wholes’, ‘heroic individuals’, ‘strategic spaces for manoeuvre’ and ‘figures in friction’. The third section positions the researchers within the ethnography, and explains how their reflexive politics was also involved in enacting the university. The final section takes the concept of ‘reflexive epistemic politics’ further to consider how an ‘epistemic community’ was mobilised to reform universities to act as drivers of competitiveness in a global knowledge economy. Now pressing problems of inequality, population movements, radical politics and climate collapse demand that universities reconsider their roles in processes of social, political and economic change. The chapter ends by pointing to the reflexive politics that policy makers, managers, academics and students are beginning to engage in to reconceptualise universities in such a world.