ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the spatiality of neoliberal governmental rationality. It focuses on space-related practices of neoliberal governance in the context of higher education. Neoliberalism has inspired a frenzy of university reforms in different regional settings during the past decade (see Wright and Rabo 2010). The recent reforms of the Finnish university system are analysed as an illustration of the forms that these trends take in a concrete setting. Thus an analysis of the changing role of Finnish universities enables us to examine how neoliberalism as a ‘migratory system of practices’ interacts with ‘local’ assemblages (for neoliberalism’s links with the free market world view, see Chapter 5). On a more general level, the chapter can be read as a contribution to the study of convergence and divergence in global and regional politics.
