University governance in Austria, Finland and Scotland: possible implications from digitalization and Covid-19

Abstract

Immediate and structural measures to counter the COVID-19 pandemic in education embed more or less into ongoing approaches towards digitalization. They also reflect within Cyber-Democracy and Cyber-Development. This contribution reflects on recent debates on digitalization and the future of education and work. First, it points to an analytic approach towards organizational dispositions to internalize impulses from these debates. Here, the broader background of polity in a sense of different types of Welfare States comes in, represented by Austria, Finland and Scotland. Additionally, we perceive the case of Austrian universities in distance learning and embed elements of a current meta-study into this chapter’s framework. From this perspective, cross-connections to Quadruple Helix and Quintuple Helix innovation systems might occur. Second, it presents the current student capacity utilization in Austrian (proposed as an Esping-Andersen, 1990, type of conservative-corporatist welfare state), Finnish (a social-democratic) and Scottish (a liberal welfare state) universities. What could be the consequences from these debates for university autonomy themes, operationalized as academic, financial, organizational and staffing autonomy, which occur in the university acts of the three countries? Is there a theme towards which the following analysis is biased? Finally, addressing these questions, there is no intention to re-cross-connect the themes.