ABSTRACT
The Danish government responded by passing a law in 2003 which claimed to be 'setting universities free'. Danish universities were taken out of the state bureaucracy and given the legal status of 'self-owning institutions'. Parliament allots a budget for a whole service area, such as education or research, and has the ministry decide how to fund the required outputs and activities in the individual institutions. These principles have influenced Danish state organizations since the early 1980s, and here we will briefly dwell on two aspects that have been important in the assemblage of mechanisms to steer universities brought about by the 2003 reform. Anders Fogh Jensen, 2007, in his PhD thesis about the neo-liberal project in Denmark has argued similarly: whereas in the disciplinary society, the government's project was to form the individuals and institutions that would contribute to governance by exercising freedom, the post-disciplinary, control society organizes itself around the output and performance of specific activities.
