ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the disciplining of our two universities and focuses on their political-economic contexts. We explore how they manage and use reputation; then we investigate how NTNU and UCLA construct, interpret, and use performance metrics, observing how productivity metrics and rankings have displaced disputes about quality and reputations. What seem to be global, abstract, and universal forces are always made local through specific domestication processes that involve sense-making of neoliberal ideas and development of governance practices. We analyze the role of the two respective governments, the Norwegian, which is very much present in NTNU’s affairs and provides most of the university’s funding, and the Californian which is more absent, both in terms of policymaking and funding. As a consequence, NTNU responds to a growing number of government policies by a bureaucratizing governance. On the other hand, UCLA depends on a corporatizing governance to manage a comprehensive and complex set of revenue streams, where its reputation is a vital resource. In these efforts, UCLA uses corporate models that are drawn from the 20th century. We explain why those models are used, rather than more contemporary ones.
