Governing Educational Research in Norway: Coercion, Cooperation or Consensus?

Educational research in Norway, over the past two decades, has benefited from massive investments in capacity, as has higher education and science generally. Simultaneously, the policy-driven restructuring of higher education and research funding have had major impact on the organizations in which educational research (ER) is produced—and the types and forms of research that are valorized. Applying the neo-institutionalist framework developed earlier (see Chapter 1), we here address the governance of ER in Norway, emphasizing especially the regulative pillar of institutions (see Scott, 2013) and focusing on coercive mechanisms (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991) applied by different actors in ER policy, both towards other state actors and the scientific community of researchers. Thus, we analyze institutionalization dynamics with particular attention to the regulative dimension, asking which coercive mechanisms have led to this transformation of higher education and educational research in this Nordic country, while keeping in mind the impact of normative and cultural-cognitive mechanisms on ER in Norway (see Zapp, Helgetun, and Powell, in press). Often viewed as a late reformer in higher education, Norwegian infrastructure for conducting ER has experienced remarkable expansion and substantial structural and paradigmatic change since the 1990s (e.g., Larsen, 2000; Bleiklie, 2009). We find policymakers’ priorities dovetailing with broad shifts in orientations, standards, and criteria with regard to scientific priorities and principles and their relevance—academic and epistemic drift (see Elzinga, 1997; Kaisersfeld, 2013)