Social and Economic Sustainability Tensions in the Finnish University System – Perspectives from two University Managements and the Ministry of Education and Culture

Abstract

Universities have been, and still are, the leading institutions of knowledge production. Global competition has reached to the higher education sector and the talk of the new social contract between higher education and societies has been on the table since 1980’s. In Finland the Universities Act reform was enacted in 2009 starting a broader societal conversation of the role, meaning and mission of the university institution.

Lately Finnish higher education sector has gone through a rough path. Substantial cuts have been performed in the budget of universities since 2015 and although small compensatory investments have been made, the direction of public funding in higher education appears to be declining and aligning the global trend of increasing marketization of the higher education system. Besides being crucial assets to nation-states and companies, information and knowledge are needed in order to find pathways towards more sustainable practices. In the times of the current planetary crisis, a well functioning, sustainable university system is more important than ever.

This thesis focuses to study the social and economic sustainability tensions in the Finnish university system and seeks answer to the question: ”What kind of social and economic sustainability tensions exist in the Finnish university system?”. The theory of the thesis is based on the integrative framework by Hahn et al. (2015), which was developed to study the tensions in the field of corporate sustainability. Recognizing the tensions and contradictions help organizations to see a broader spectrum of possible strategies in order to strive for more sustainable ways of operating.

This study follows the qualitative research tradition, the ontology of the study is social constructionism and subjectivism, and the methodology is phenomenology. The empirical part of this study consists of 11 semi-structured interviews of the management of two Finnish universities and of the senior officials of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland working with higher education policy.

The contribution of this thesis is, first of all, to view Finnish higher education through the emergent modern corporate sustainability lens uniting the perspectives of sustainability studies, political science, higher education studies and management studies in the theoretical framework. Secondly, this thesis provides three management perspectives from different, opposite sides of the Finnish university system and thirdly, forms a systemic perspective of the Finnish university system and its’ social and economic tensions. Based on the findings, there are eleven sustainability tensions in the Finnish university system. The most strongly perceived tensions according to this study were the tensions regarding pressure on the ‘public purse’ and pressures for societal impact and interaction.