This study aimed to investigate common features and ways of understanding quality culture (QC) within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nordic countries. While the concept of QC is commonly accepted and often used, its meaning is not always clear. This paper focuses on how Nordic universities frame QC in their internal documentation. The…

This paper contributes to the theoretical debate over a global upsurge in higher education (HE) regionalisms which pursue different region-building processes and create policy spaces beyond national boundaries. Focusing on the Nordic countries, the paper studies parallel processes of intra-Nordic and European HE and research cooperation. Although…

This article studies the salience of internal university stakeholders in collaborative degree programmes from the perspective of the sustainability of such programmes. In terms of academics and administrators involved in Finnish-Russian collaborative degrees, the article explores what contributes to their salience, and their effects on the…

This paper discusses Finnish-Russian relations from the perspective of cooperation in higher education, and particularly Finnish-Russian double degree programmes prior to 2022. It asks how internal stakeholders, in double degree programmes perceived the role of their cooperation from the point of view of interstate relations, and how cooperation…

This paper focuses on the interplay of European and national higher education policy in implementing a joint degree Erasmus Mundus programme on institutional level. We utilise the stakeholder approach to highlight and contrast the differing internationalisation rationales. Specifically, we analyse how the impact of external stakeholders (European…

To face the challenges demanded by a changing and uncertain world, it is essential for students to develop generic competences during their studies. However, recent research shows worrying results concerning the development of generic competences among higher education students. This quantitative study explores students' experiences of the…

Critical thinking, a complex set of cognitive skills, and the ability to communicate one's thoughts are vital in successful studying for new higher education students. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of socioeconomic background and prior academic performance on new students' critical thinking and writing. The participants were 1006…

We provide an integrative review of research on gender and academic careers conducted in the Nordic countries from 2003-2018. We investigate the nature and content of contemporary Nordic research and critically examine the methodological and theoretical approaches authors have used. We read, categorised, and analysed 74 articles retrieved from Web…

This paper explores the legitimation of Finnish education export (EE) activities linked to higher education institutions. As a small non-English speaking country with only recent involvement in the EE market, Finland provides an underexplored context to consider the legitimation of overseas, fee-based educational services from the perspective of…

This study examines academic staff's perceptions of a university-wide, top-down curriculum reform in terms of the management of the reform, the support provided by the university's administration, and the utilisation of the university's guidelines. Differences between faculties are also scrutinised. The study was conducted at a multidisciplinary…

Interdisciplinarity has become one of the catchwords in current higher education and science policies, with the underlying rationale being that scientific breakthroughs and solutions to today's global challenges require collaboration across scientific fields. However, several empirical studies have shown that interdisciplinary promises are not…

The role of universities in knowledge production has changed. Although most higher learning still takes place in universities, knowledge is increasingly produced in collaborative networks comprising partners from different sectors (Välimaa, Papatsiba, and Hoffman, 2016. "Higher Education in Networked Knowledge Societies." In…

This paper analyses the phenomena of co-existence of competing moral principles in a university merger. In doing so, the paper builds on Boltanski and Thévenot's theoretical framework of orders of worth to account for the ways in which different social actors, both inside and outside academia, actively engage in justification work to solve…

In this article, we analyse reforms of academic quality assurance in light of organizational theory using the case example of Finnish higher education. Our purpose is to shed light on the processes behind repeated reforms and the motivation to continuously modify quality models that have only been in use for a relatively short period of time. In…

Globalisation has transformed the field of higher education by increasing flows of mobile students. This has had significant repercussions not only for countries that take advantage of the expansion of exports of English-medium programmes but also for countries that have not risen to prominent positions in the global education market, such as…