Conclusion

Universities can perhaps more accurately be characterized as being “normal public service organizations”; they are “normalized” in the sense that they now look more or less like any organization delivering a public service in a Western European country like Denmark. Performance contracts were introduced, and they were first billed as being about “liberation management” and supporting performance management known within New Public Management (NPM). The big lure of NPM was always that public organizations would be set free, manage their own affairs, and compete in a marketplace for customers and resources. Universities seem to have lost that special ingredient that sets them apart from all other types of organizations delivering public services. Many of the researchers in the empirical material were ignorant of the possibilities of getting rewarded by the universities for their performance. Performance contracts tied the universities to the state, and the governance of universities by the state is intact.