Changes, improvements and innovations in university organisations regularly end up in sluggish processes and get stuck 'somewhere' in the organisation. It is argued that cooperation and mutual influencing of work processes between academic and professional employees of different departments can have a positive effect on these innovations. Because…

It has been argued that universities are changing into becoming more professional as organizations, and this paper investigates this claim by exploring the emergence and tasks of communication departments in modern universities. Examination of universities in six Baltic and Nordic countries shows that communication departments are working closely…

Reforms and changing ideas about what higher education institutions are and should be have put pressure on academic identity. The present paper explores the way academics in Danish universities make sense of their changing circumstances, and how this affects their perceptions of their organization, their leaders and of themselves. The study…

Academic values and norms have as a consequence of the wave of European higher education reforms been put under pressure by the increasing expectations and demands of flexibility, entrepreneurialism and accountability. This article examines how these changes affect identity construction processes at department head level in the case of Danish…

"The modernizing machine" codes individual bodies, things, and symbols with images from New Public Management, neo-liberal, and Knowledge Economy discourses. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of machines, this article explores how "the modernizing machine" produces neo-liberal modernization of the public sector. Taking…