Rankings and their limits: the role of global university rankings in university mergers in Finland

ABSTRACT Studies of global university rankings often assume that rankings as Anglo-American policy scripts have an increasing influence resulting in a convergence of policies and practices, or that the ideas of rankings continue to diverge into national types. In this article, we take a middle ground by arguing that when an idea of ranking is grounded in a particular place, it takes on hybrid forms because of individual agency and of national and local contingencies that are found at that place. A key concept is “a frictional translation”, by which we refer to more than one way in which capable actors can interpret and translate the idea of ranking within a given geographical and organizational context. We use university mergers in Finland as an example of the translation process, in which global university rankings are interpreted through nationally and locally specific assemblages of institutional forms that support, resist or hybridize them.


Introduction
Global university rankings and university mergers both represent a prominent policy tool to respond to increasing competitive pressures generated by the global and neoliberal practices in higher education (HE).Some of those who are interested in globalization and neoliberalization of HE policy and institutions have claimed that, in face of the tendency towards convergence, many HE systems around the world have focused on searching for best practices, or policy copying, through which they have been strongly influenced by Anglo-American standards and ideologies such as accountability, efficiency, economism and elitism (Deem et al., 2008;Lo, 2011;Erkkilä, 2013).There is no denying that at a general level global, or Anglo-American, policy scripts have led to uniformity and conformity in the agendas which favor excellence in HE, and rankings and mergers as manifestations of that excellence discourse (Olsen & Maassen, 2007;Aula & Tienari, 2011;Erkkilä, 2014;Pinheiro et al., 2016a).On the other hand, there are also those who have aptly pointed out that there are many varieties and interpretations of globalization and neoliberalization of HE, and that these processes are historically and geographically contingent (Dakowska, 2013;Elken et al., 2017;Erkkilä & Piiroinen, 2018).In other words, there is no all-embracing binary division between the hegemonic Anglo-American perspective on global and neoliberal practices and marginal "other" perspectives, but that both can be occupied simultaneously, are co-constitutive through hybridization and are shaped by complex and dynamic power-relations.
In this paper, we focus on the diverse patterns and forms of different merger and ranking practices, which are structured around the notions of specific rationality or interweaved rationalities.On a global level, as a response to increasing competition and a need for better competitiveness, mergers have been used as strategic tools by governments and/or universities to enhance the productivity, quality and effectiveness of HE systems and institutions (for more references see Harman & Harman, 2008;Pinheiro et al., 2016a).In some cases, economies of scale and rationalization have been complemented with other rationalities, driven by attractiveness, status and visibility in the global market of HE (for more references see Aula & Tienari, 2011;Pinheiro et al., 2016a).In Finland, for example, the rise of global university rankings as a manifestation of this phenomenon has been one reason behind mergers.
Hence, this paper aims to contribute to a stream of research that examines how the meaning of university rankings and mergers is changed, transformed and translated when it is taken up in particular geographical, temporal and organizational contexts.We enquire into the transformation and translation process in Finland which, perhaps because of its traditional "shielding" state strategy in terms of neoliberal globalization (Ahlqvist & Moisio, 2014, p. 23), provides an interesting context for studying the geographical specificity of university rankings and mergers.By shielding state strategy, we mean the political rationality of equality that was pivotal in the building of the Nordic welfare state in Finland after the Second World War and that has been challenged by the new political rationality of (global) excellence during the past thirty years or so.This means that Finland, like the other Nordic countries (Elken et al., 2016), can be said to have ambiguous characteristics with respect to globalization and neoliberalization.Thus, it could be argued that Finnish HE forms a tense environment, with plural moral grounds on which different interpretations of global pressures can be based.
Empirically, we focus on the changing meanings of university rankings in Finland from the early 1990s to the present day.Our perspective covers both macro (HE policy) and micro (organizational) levels.The key questions investigated here are as follows: (1) how were university rankings debated in public and described in the official national level HE documents, and (2) what was the role of the rankings during and after the merger of the new University of Eastern Finland (UEF)?We see the geographically "peripheral" UEF as a fruitful example of the "rankings game" (Corley & Gioia, 2000) in which universities around the world engage in order to achieve and maintain their place among the "world-class universities" (Altbach, 2003;Waeraas & Solbakk, 2009).We compare the UEF briefly with another merger project, the Aalto University, which, according to many studies (Aula & Tienari, 2011;Kivistö & Tirronen, 2012;Tienari et al., 2016), was a flagship project in Finland and its "world-class" reputation-building was often interpreted as "American" (Aula, 2015, p. 68).This remark encourages us to scrutinize whether there was any sort of incompatibility between the two moral political rationalities (Nordic equality and Anglo-American excellence) and thus a different way to define the concept of a world-class university in the UEF.
By doing this, our paper aims to fill a gap in previous research, in which there is little indication of moral factors, value judgements and justification practices of actors involved in merger and/or ranking processes.Unlike many studies relying on theories of coercive institutional pressures, we highlight the importance of action and human agency through which actors can draw on elements from any moral orders and apply them strategically to serve their needs in negotiations dealing with disagreements over what is a justified or legitimate course of action.To contextualize our paper, we start by introducing the theoretical approach needed for our empirical study.

Theoretical framework: a frictional translation of clashing worlds
Our study of university rankings and mergers adopts a perspective that has not yet been applied sufficiently to studies of HE by drawing on theoretical approaches from theories of Scandinavian institutionalism and French pragmatic sociology in order to understand organizational practices and responses in different contexts.Both approaches have paid serious attention to practice and agency.However, whereas Scandinavian institutionalism has studied how actors react to institutional pressures and adapt and translate them to different contexts through sense-making and modification of competing ideas (Boxenbaum & Strandgaard Pedersen, 2009), French pragmatic sociology provides a situated and relational framework for analyzing how actors negotiate and justify actions through competing or complementary "moral orders" (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).As we elaborate further in the following, we have identified two "worlds", i.e., transnational cultural trends, within HE causing changes in the field.These worlds, existing in a state of mutual tension, are characterized by a coexisting plurality of moral orders, and they are implemented in or translated into specific geographic and organizational settings by different actors who in turn wield influence upward towards the field of HE (see Figure 1).
Both university mergers and rankings denote an active production of polity for a penetration of market rationalities to the practices of the university itself.In this rationalization, which we call the world of excellence, the university itself must interpret and construct itself in market terms.In the world of excellence, there are two "orders of worth" (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), that is, higher common principles that portray the degree of legitimacy of certain norms and values in academia and define appropriate forms of conduct: market worth and the worth of fame.This means that universities operating in the world of excellence are driven by the desire or need for competitiveness (market worth) as well as for gaining popularity and recognition among the significant others (the worth of fame or prestige).
In the Nordic countries, however, universities have not passively complied with the neoliberal, or Anglo-American, world of excellence (Elken et al., 2016(Elken et al., , 2017)).This is not surprising, given the historical fact that a pure (neoliberal) market can never exist on its own because of internal contradictory impulses (Polaney, 1944).In the Nordic countries, a welfare state form that evolved rather quickly from the 1950s onwards and culminated in the 1980s represented a response to the impossibility of a pure market economy, and this institutionalized structure still remains today to some extent, creating social and geographical limits to the world of excellence.The Nordic welfare state form scaled the university around the "national" as the primary scale of social life, academic activities and HE development policies.The welfarist policies were articulated in the name of national consensus and integrity, and they can be understood as an alternative to intensive (inter)national competition manifested by university mergers and rankings.Hence, the Nordic welfare state form represents the world of equality, of which the higher common principles are civic worth and domestic worth.In civic worth, individual or organizational success is subordinated to the common good, and worthy things are mutually agreed conventions.In domestic worth, the priority of actors is to preserve the national HE system to which they belong.
The world of equality resists, hybridizes, or in some cases counters the world of excellence with alternative agendas.This "friction" (Tsing, 2005) is not to deny the power of the world of excellence.Instead, it refers to the translation process by which a given idea, such as a merger or rankings, is implemented and reworked in a new geographical and/or organizational context (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996;Tsing, 2005).As frictional translation occurs, there is more than one way in which capable actors can interpret and translate an idea within a given spatio-temporal context.By capable actors we are referring to critical-moral agents (academics, administrators, politicians, civil servants, businessmen etc.) who can interpret the given situation and make different situationbased value judgements.Consequently, the meaning of mergers or rankings may become different in different times and places.

Materials and methods
Empirical analysis in this historical study is based on source triangulation, i.e., on the multiple data sources to develop a comprehensive understanding of the research problem.We mainly use a body of publicly available documents, minutes and memos produced by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC), economic life, UEF, other public bodies as well as national media.These archival historical sources, created at the time of the events being studied, are supplemented with 13 semistructured interviews of (then) MoEC officials, rectors, directors of administration, deans, leading academics (professors with academic prestige) and other key figures regarding the (pre/post-)merger process of the UEF and/or university rankings.The interviewees were selected by studying the written documents and through snowball sampling during the interviews.Oral sources helped to convey the essential connectedness of aspects of negotiations and decision-making processes and thus gave social practices a human face.The combination of public documents and interviews ensured multivocality, by which we refer to differences in opinion, social position, education and any other form of human identity, and to the ways different people and groups value, interpret and give meaning to university rankings and mergers.In other words, we rely on reflexivity which "draws on social constructionist assumptions to highlight subjective, multiple constructed realities" (Cunliffe, 2004, p. 414).
The documents and narratives of the UEF are treated both as widely shared, persuasive, politicoeconomic expressions that highlight the fluctuating ranking strategies of the studied university during a given period, and as descriptions that are disputed or in conflict with competing, alternative, discursive expressions.By comparing this information with the changing governmental, ministerial and industrial strategies we can learn a great deal about the changing and, more or less, conflicting notions of rankings and ranking practices.In this sense, we apply the thinking of Hazelkorn and Mihut (2021) by claiming that rankings and ranking processes are greatly shaped by and through hybrid interactions between universities' own ambitions and governmental and industrial goals.
With regard to data analysis, our approach relies on the study of history, through which we interpret the moral rationalities of different actors in the Finnish HE system."Historical method" (Tosh, 2010, pp. 141-142) helped us critically weigh divergent sources against each other and hear what was actually being said in a certain spatio-temporal context, in what "accent" and with what tone.To be more specific, we were not so much interested in rankings per se, but, rather, in using the data sources of rankings as if they were ethnographic evidence recording actors' views on the world of excellence and the world of equality (Rowlinson et al., 2014, p. 266).In the first phase of our analysis, we identified the key events in the history of the Finnish HE system regarding university mergers and rankings by analysing reports and studies conducted by the MoEC and leading business organizations as well as articles from the national media.Second, we conducted a more thorough search for and analysis of various qualitative materials, including memos, reports, strategies, plans and interview transcripts in order to arrive at a more detailed understanding of people, events, debates and tensions relevant to the UEF at different points in its history (pre-merger-merger-post-merger).During the analysis, we constantly moved back and forth between empirical sources and our theoretical framework, which served as a resource for interpretation of written and spoken material.In this way we were able to understand the different interpretations of university rankings and summarize our findings on their historical evolution in the given context.

Research context: rankings, mergers and economization of HE in Finland
The development of the Finnish HE system after World War II can be divided into three periods.In the traditional period until the 1960s, HE was a prerogative of the social elite and thus very static in nature, and social changes had little impact on it.Eventually, maturation of baby boomers born after the war, social restructuring, urbanization and the new human capital theory guided Finland, like the other Nordic countries, towards building the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s.In this period of mass university attendance, HE became an important part of social modernization.Measured by the number of students, Finnish HE grew more than threefold during this period, and new universities were established especially in the peripheral eastern and northern parts of the country.In short, HE was socialized in Finland in the same way as in many other Western countries (Välimaa, 2019).
The third, "neo-elitist", period began gradually in the 1990s, when the deep economic recession and a new "wave of globalization" shook Finnish society and the HE system and paved the way for an Anglo-American-style competition state model (Cerny, 1997), in which nation states and other political communities (including universities) seek to reform themselves on the basis of assumptions attached to the functioning of the market.As part of the change, the work life-oriented universities of applied sciences (polytechnics) were built alongside the university sector.At the turn of the millennium, there were altogether 21 universities, ten of which were multi-faculty, and 31 polytechnics in Finland.This meant that, including branch campuses and project activities financed externally, HE activities covered the whole country, i.e., they were provided in some form in every region.
Another element of change was the greater integration of HE into economic growth and international competitiveness.This policy was strongly recommended by the influential supranational regime, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and it had a significant impact on the adoption of new structural development policy in Finland (Kallo, 2009).According to new policy guidelines adopted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Finland could only succeed in the international HE competition with strong, internationalized and top-class universities.That is why, at the beginning of the 2000s, Finland abandoned the traditional HE policy that emphasized national orientation and became part of the European Higher Education Area.This change was also linked to the discussion on the global university rankings and the success of Finnish universities in them (Erkkilä & Piironen, 2013;Välimaa, 2019).
This cumulative change process can be described as "economization of higher education" (Musselin, 2018, p. 658), which refers to the invasion of the world of excellence (market worth and the worth of fame) into every sphere of academia.It also demonstrates the fact that universities are mobilized in the extension and proliferation of neoliberal market-like norms.University mergers can be seen as a tool for achieving a better position in global university rankings, which in turn are a market indicator of university reputation and status (the worth of fame) as well as national competitiveness in the global community (cf.Hazelkorn, 2017;Hazelkorn & Mihut, 2021).Economization of HE in Finland has been similar to that in other Nordic countries.Since the 1990s and especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the previously dominating Nordic welfare state that was based on the world of equality began to give way, at least to some extent, to a competition state and the world of excellence in which rankings and mergers have a significant role.This specific historical period of transformation created pressures and opportunities for universities to merge.Especially two global rankings of significance: the research university comparison by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (ARWU), which commenced in 2003, and the combined index of the "best universities" managed by the Times Higher Education Supplement, which materialized in 2004, paved the way for the new rationality and policy.Soon after that it became obvious that despite many skeptical and critical voices, and the fact that only a marginal share of HE institutions have a realistic chance of reaching the status of "world-class university", rankings had gained success in setting standards for HE policy and practices in the European and Nordic countries (Kehm, 2013).

The emergence of ranking regime and merger mania in Finnish HE policy
The first international university rankings in the beginning of the 2000s caused a transnational shock wave.Many policy makers and captains of industry made a simple correlation between the poor rankings of Continental European universities and global knowledge-based economic competitiveness.Their conclusions were clear: many reforms and implementations had to be introduced in response to the challenges of rankings.This strategy known, as "Harvard here syndrome", also became well known in the Nordic countries and it could be identified as one precipitating factor in the background of their university reforms in the 2000s and 2010s (Kehm, 2013;Erkkilä & Piironen, 2013).Denmark, which had adopted accountability aspects of the world of excellence already in the beginning of the 1980s (Kohvakka et al., 2019, p. 40), experienced a wave of university mergers in 2007 and thus proved to be a front-runner in Northern Europe.In many cases, Denmark was used strategically as a reference at both state and organizational levels by merger proponents of other Nordic countries, as Sweden, Norway and Finland began to implement their own merger initiatives a few years later (Pinheiro et al., 2016b).
In Finland, the first tentative public discussions about university mergers and ranking lists had taken place during a deep economic depression in the early 1990s.The Science Evaluation Group (Korkeakouluneuvosto in Finnish), which operated under the MoEC, ranked universities according to the number of degrees awarded, research funding received from the Academy of Finland, and the intensity of international researcher and student exchange.In the opinion of economic life, universities of technology and business schools in particular, these numbers provided objective and just information about the universities' activities.According to economic life, these numbers also indicated the need to reduce the number of universities in Finland.However, the supporters of the rankings were opposed by a large majority who thought that the above-mentioned indicators were not comparable because the disciplinary backgrounds and operational environments of universities varied considerably.Consequently, these numbers did not say much about quality and were not suitable as grounds for downsizing the university system.Some representatives of the MoEC also thought that the domestic ranking lists at that time were, mainly, "numerical exercises" from the existing statistics in Finland.(HS 15.5.1994)The preliminary exercises started to become reality ten years later, as the development of performance indicators took the next step towards internationally scaled ranking lists (Usher, 2017).Reaching the international top was emphasized more than before, for example, in the HE development programs of 1999-2003 and 2003-2008 and in the government programs of 1999 and 2003 (MoEC, 1999(MoEC, , 2004;;PM Office, 1999, 2003).Interestingly, however, it was the official report made by the civil servants with a background in economics, and the representatives of business life, which directly referred to the "poor" positioning of Finnish universities in international ranking lists, as only the University of Helsinki "barely made it into the top 100 universities" in 2004 (VNK, 2004, p. 30).The report that focused especially on the ARWU list in no way questioned its premises.On the contrary, the ARWU list was considered to measure the excellence of universities objectively.Accordingly, the central argument of the report was obvious: the Finnish HE system must be reformed rapidly in order to reduce the fragmentation of resources and increase the international competitiveness of universities.
The report received strong support from the domestic media and especially from the leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (HS), which began to compare the positioning of Finnish universities with the best single universities in the USA and the United Kingdom.HS also introduced its own "vision of future HE in Finland", of which the main idea was to create, via mergers, a few "super universities" supported by a few lower-level polytechnics.The agenda of HS clearly represented the world of excellence and was inspired not only by the ranking discussion, but also by the alignments of the Government and MoEC in 2004and 2005(HS 17.11.2005;HS 4.12.2005).
In 2005, the Finnish government made the pivotal decision for structural development of the public research system.The objective was to improve quality, effectiveness and research and development activities by creating a new university system of bigger and geographically more centralized units that would be able to challenge the best universities globally (PM office, 2005;MoEC, 2006).This promotion of the market worth and the worth of fame questioned the tradition of a large and geographically dispersed HE system built on the principles of civic worth and domestic worth.However, what is worth noting is the critical stance which the MoEC adopted regarding the global university rankings as an indicator of quality, as the following excerpt from the interview of a highprofile civil servant of the MoEC indicates: We have from the beginning been strongly dissociating ourselves from ranking lists, that they are not what universities and polytechnics should be judged on.But then, of course, the importance of international quality and its continuous improvement has been important [all the time].(Civil servant of the MoEC in 2018, translated from Finnish) Instead of "ambiguous and imprecise" global rankings, the MoEC was eager to measure quality through its own domestic indicators.This path culminated in the early 2010s, when Finnish universities established their own evaluation system, the Publication Forum (JUFO), for the MoEC to use in evaluating the quantity and the quality of universities' performance in research.The JUFO represents the MoEC's will and ability to develop its own set of indicators that has its own features and only a loose link to other (international/global) indicators.This way of creating quite an inconsistent set of indicators seems typical in the economization of HE, considering that each ranking and evaluation system, international or domestic, has its own dynamic separated from others.Thus, one can claim that all rankings are social constructions that invent new realities and are linked to public action.
The MoEC's decision to criticize global rankings and to invest in its own national-level evaluation systems led to a clash of two realities that shared the same aim of improving quality but had disagreements concerning the "best practices" to reach that aim.On the one side with the MoEC were several head figures of multidisciplinary universities who were very critical towards global university rankings underlining the uncertainties in measuring of reputation, emphasizing the role of medicine and natural sciences in publishing, and reaching objectives with inadequate resources."With these numbers of students (and this amount of money) you can forget [reaching] Harvard", wrote the Chancellor of the University of Tampere (HS 17.12.2007).The Chancellor of the University of Helsinki and the Rector of the University of Turku were questioning the ability of business life to read and understand the message of rankings correctly.The latter even suggested that "maybe business life should concentrate on taking care of business and let the universities take care of themselves" (HS 3.10.2008;see also Erkkilä & Piironen, 2013).
On the other side were the representatives of the technology industry, as well as the head figures of several universities of technology and business schools, who were eager to transform the identities of universities from the traditional "social democratic" to a purer version of the "top universities" as represented by the American Ivy League universities such as Harvard.For them, the global university rankings, along with other quality assessments such as national evaluations and international accreditations, were tools for developing a new model of "world-class university" that pushes universities towards a more thorough imitation of the Anglo-American model of university management."The technology industry needs top universities.Only by concentrating resources [on a few units] is it possible to reach the top of the world.Second place is nothing", as the chairman of Technology Finland bluntly put it (HS 14.10.2006;see also HS 20.11.2005;HS 20.10.2006;HS 9.11.2006;HS 1.2.2008).
The promotion of top universities by concentrating resources on a few units was in clear contradiction with the view of actors, mainly operating outside the capital region.According to them, a consistently good quality of the Finnish university network was an asset in an international perspective and thus justified the equal distribution of resources.This division and struggle between the world of excellence and world of equality was clearly seen in 2007-2010 when the interwoven relationship of university rankings and mergers became materialized via the cases of Aalto University and the UEF.Moreover, these established dividing lines remained visible in the debate on Finnish HE policy until the 2020s (HS 20.8.2014;HS 1.9.2014;HS 18.9.2014;HS 12.11.2014;HS 17.12.2015;HS 6.1.2016;HS 13.3.2016;HS 6.1.2016;HS 15.8.2016;HS 5.9.2017;HS 7.12.2020;HS 8.11.2021).

The role of rankings in the establishment and development of UEF
If we analyze the role of university rankings in the background of university mergers in the Helsinki metropolitan area and in the geographically "peripheral" Eastern Finland, we can see the difference between these two cases.The making of Aalto University in the Helsinki region was based on notions of becoming "world-class" that would, so it was claimed among the academic actors of merging universities, distinguish the new university from its domestic counterparts and make it an attractive and competitive global player whose level of success would be determined by subsequent rises or falls in university rankings (Aula & Tienari, 2011;Kivistö & Tirronen, 2012;Aula, 2015;Tienari et al., 2016).For the builders of Aalto University, the merger process followed faithfully the rationalities of the world of excellence as it responded to calls for streamlining and consolidating the Finnish HE system and for highlighting its role in the national system of innovation and the global knowledge-based economy, as the following extract from the memorandum of the Aalto University planning group shows: The national task of the University is to support Finland's success by means of high-level research and teaching.The University supports in a positive way Finnish society, its technology, economy, culture and international interest towards it.[…] The number of foreign degree and exchange students and the provision of English-language degree programmes would be substantially increased in a controlled way from the present level.Internationalization also includes the possibility to recruit world-class researchers from abroad.This would improve the international competitiveness of the University.(MoEC, 2007, p. 6, translated from Finnish) The merger of the UEF, however, was somewhat different.One of the parent universities, the comprehensive University of Joensuu (UJO), had a historical tradition of balancing regional equality logics (the world of equality) with competitive logics (the world of excellence), in which the dominant civic worth and the more peripheral market worth co-existed rather peacefully.The rector of the UJO had adopted a rather critical stance on the rankings.In his opening speech of the academic year in 2005, the rector gave his strong support to the Nordic world of equality (civic worth and domestic worth) as he compared university rankings to the Eurovision song contests and criticized the way in which they measure the success of individual universities and the volume in selected fields, not the success of the whole university system in Finland.
The "Shanghai list" emphasizes the Nobel Prizes awarded to university researchers, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and other international publishing activities, and it is clear that such a measurement favours English-speaking universities in the fields of science and medicine.(Speech by the rector of the UJO in 2005, translated from Finnish) The other parent university, the University of Kuopio (UKU) that was specialized in medicine and allied natural sciences, had invested considerably in the market worth and the worth of fame (the world of excellence) since the early 1990s.This was reflected in the fact that already before the merger the UKU, unlike the UJO, had achieved a position among the 500 ranked universities both in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University -ranking and in the Times Higher Education Supplement -ranking.The rector of the UKU also had a more positive attitude towards rankings than his colleague in the UJO.In his interview, he recalled how competition issues were highlighted in his thinking and more broadly in the university he led.
At least here in Kuopio, competition and competitiveness mattered.I also followed these issues pretty closely, how certain rankings came to the fore, and how the UKU was positioned nationally and also internationally.We were on the so-called Shanghai list, if I remember correctly, already in 2004.The UKU started to rank quite well in other rankings as well.It was one of my tasks to judge whether this new university would become stronger.That is, strong enough that no one can attack it.(Former rector of the UKU in 2018, translated from Finnish) Speaking of strength, the rector referred to the economies of scale that had achieved a dominant position in Finnish HE policy in the early 2000s.The structural development of HE required both structural synergies, such as critical mass and multidisciplinary, and larger units in order to succeed in strategic (re)focusing of institutions and research areas.Through the merger, the UKU would become part of a larger unit, while the UJO would receive the benefits of medicine, "the key field in the ranking game", as a former director of administration from the UKU put it (Former director of administration in 2018).Similarly, a bigger university in "periphery" would be an essential counterforce to the novel spatial hierarchy in which the metropolis dominates and suppresses second-tier centres and other "non-competitive" peripheries (cf.Ahlqvist & Moisio, 2014, p. 34).
During the merger process, the significance given to rankings changed in a way that sought to find a compromise between the worlds of equality and excellence.It was a planning group of middle managers of merging universities and external local stakeholders who, after various calculations, made a proposal to aspire to be among the top 200 universities in the world.Academic leaders who were responsible for the merger were ready to accept this proposition, that was seen as both ambitious and moderate enough.On the other hand, they also searched for a balance between excellence-oriented research and equality-oriented teaching tasks, as the following extracts from the interviews indicate.
Then there is this international perspective or ambition.These rankings came very strongly in that regard, and we started staring at them.And here came this dimension, that we wanted to be a research university, not a teaching university.Of course, the teaching task of serving Eastern and Northern Finland in medical doctor, priest and teacher training was also important, but we wanted to do more than that.(Former director of administration in 2018, translated from Finnish) The goal of the UEF is to be among the top 200 universities in the world and among the top three in Finland in 2020.So, what does that mean?It means that we do not imagine that we are any Yale or Oxford of Finland, but that we are trying to be good on an international scale, a good university, whether we are talking about research or about education.Yes, we want to be a good ordinary university for ordinary people.In the sense that Finnish society is ordinary and democratic.(Then rector in 2008, translated from Finnish) The balancing attitude towards rankings adopted during the merger was maintained after the new university started to operate in 2010.The management group of UEF realized already in the early 2010s that access to the top 200 universities would be challenging "because whatever you do, Asian universities are doing the same with greater resources and by such means that are not used in Finland", as one key person recalled the situation in an interview in 2018 (Then member of the management group).UEF's ranking remained among the top 500 universities in the ARWU ranking and among the top 400 in the Times Higher Education ranking throughout the 2010s.Interestingly, although the goal of getting among the top 200 universities appeared to disappear into the horizon, the UEF did not consider the situation as something that required radical changes to the university's strategy (see UEF, 2015UEF, , 2018) ) and practices, as one middle management representative who knew the topic quite well stated: I have been on those mailing lists that say, "hey, again, we dropped a bit in the rankings", and then there is a short discussion about why this is the case.And then a year later the same conversation will be held again.In the meantime, nothing is done about it and there is no more information about it.When we have risen in some subject-specific rankings, there has been a press release about it.Otherwise, they [rankings] have not really been emphasized in our operations.(Administrator in 2022, translated from Finnish) Those leading academics and administrators who had adopted and invested in the world of excellence, and thus reacted favorably to the rankings, appeared to represent the minority in the UEF.In their view, the prevailing culture of equality was, and still is, so strong in the UEF that it has begun to equalize or level the whole organization in a negative sense, which leaves little room for supporting top fields and research groups.However, the critics of (over-)equalization also recognize the risks of the world of excellence and the ranking regime, as this reflective interview quote shows: I know that at the university [X] in Finland professors have higher average salaries and researchers get bonuses or incentives for top publications.Our official stance is that you have to have an inner flame to do science.However, the fact is that money motivates.If you want to raise the ranking position, you need investments in the top sectors, but then again, the money is away from other sectors.So, it is not an easy task for university boards and rectors to make wise decisions [in resource allocation].(Leading academic in 2022, translated from Finnish) The current representatives of the UEF's top management view rankings as (too) abstract and problematic tools for measuring success.They call for more analytical debate of their quality, purpose and what they actually measure."At the moment we are talking about beauty pageants", as one interviewee described the opacity of the rules of the ranking game (Leader in 2022, translated from Finnish).For this reason, rankings are not used as a basis for decision making in the UEF.Instead, the university relies more on several indicators of its own choosing, such as the quality of publication measured by the domestic rating and classification system JUFO, research staff structure, and domestic and foreign research funding.Similarly, in education, the UEF is measuring quality with student feedback, with the quality analysis performed by the disciplines themselves and with employment statistics (UEF, 2021).
All in all, the representatives of top management of the UEF do not completely deny the importance of the rankings, but mostly connect it to the brand and media publicity discussions.In these discussions, they give the rankings a significant role in terms of recruiting students to international bachelor's and master's programmes and promoting the good quality of the entire Finnish university system.According to them, the most important aim should be that as many Finnish universities as possible would gain visibility on the ranking lists and that UEF would somewhat improve, or at least maintain, its current position on those lists.Through this, they combine the worlds of excellence and equality in a way that seeks to find a compromise between the civic worth and the worth of fame, and to develop a more lasting agreement between them that may become institutionalized over time (cf.Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 277-278), as the following interview excerpts indicate: What is thought to be affected by the rankings is recruitment of students to international master's programmes and in the future also to bachelor's degree programmes.But this is more of an abstract talk that there is some assumption that we have to do well in the rankings because some Asians apply to the best universities in the world.So, perhaps the most important thing here is that we somehow show up in those rankings.(Leader in 2022, translated from Finnish) The Nordic university system is based purely on welfare state thinking, and I think it has been a good successful solution and Finland has done well thanks to this system.Universities must stubbornly stick to the long lines of development that we ourselves have seen as wise.The university management must defend this continuity.The fact that the MoEC has never used rankings as a quality indicator has been a wise decision.(Leader in 2022, translated from Finnish)

Concluding remarks
Global university rankings, university mergers and the idea of world class universities are all interrelated manifestations of the (neoliberal) world of excellence.The claims that "rankings are here to stay" (Baty, 2018), whether we like them or not, and that "everyone wants to be a world-class university" but "no one knows what a world-class university is" (Altbach, 2003) represent the consciously fuzzy rhetoric of necessity that forces universities to constantly compete with each other for something very vague that seems to be escaping all the time on the horizon.The aim is not to provide an answer to the question: "is there actually a best university?" (cf.Kivistö & Tirronen, 2012, p. 74), but to (re)institutionalize structural and institutional features that guide societal and academic reasoning in the direction of neoliberalization and economization.This fuzzy rhetoric, spoken and written by an internationalized elite group of like-minded technocrats, is used to legitimize the adoption of specific transnational discourses of the world of excellence.
Yet, as we have argued by following the approach of Scandinavian institutionalism (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996), the issue of global university rankings and mergers highlights organizational variation and distinctiveness rather than isomorphism and standardization.We are talking about the creative translation or interpretation process of ranking and merger discourses conducted by local actors that can be realized in several ways, as the cases of Aalto University and UEF have shown.Whereas Aalto University represented a purer supporter of the Anglo-American world of excellence, the UEF adopted a stance in which it tried to find a balance or compromise between the market worth and the worth of fame (the world of excellence), and the civic worth and the domestic worth (the world of equality).In practice, this meant a strategy that saw global rankings as a "necessary evil", a fact that had to be taken into account by ensuring visibility and adequate positioning on the most important ranking lists.However, the UEF appeared to want to preserve its "Nordic" role as a multidisciplinary and multi-functional university that would meet its research and teaching responsibilities in a way that also serves the needs of ordinary people, both nationally and internationally.Paradoxically, however, this Nordic strategy resembled that of the American type of "multiversity" in which mass (equality) and elite (excellence) types of HE exist rather peacefully side by side within the same institution (cf.Kerr, 2001Kerr, [1963]]).
The main reason that allowed the UEF's compromise-seeking strategy regarding the rankings was the MoEC who, unlike the powerful economic life and leading national media, examined global rankings with critical eyes.As a gatekeeper in HE policy, the MoEC was not ready to base its policy development and resource allocation decisions on the results of those rankings, but rather on indicators of its own choosing.This secured the MoEC's position as a gatekeeper and a central node in the network responsible for developing HE policy in the future as well.As one primary carrier of isomorphic ideas of the global rankings was missing, the economic life and media, despite their increasing influence in HE, were not able to bring the rankings into the Finnish world of excellence in full force.Rather, the global rankings made visible the dividing lines created in the Finnish university community.Roughly speaking, on the one side there were many traditional comprehensive universities with a tradition of posing social criticism (also on rankings), and on the other side there were business-and technology-oriented universities which strategically used global rankings to market themselves in niche terms as more globally engaged and to participate in elite training schemes.
Consequently, in a theoretical sense, our article perceives convergence and divergence in merger and ranking discourses as an expression and as a result of the reflexive translation practices of social actors in situations of frictional negotiations.By following the logic of French pragmatic sociology, we are highlighting the ability of actors to (re)interpret merger and ranking practices as thematically different yet interlinked manifestations of neoliberalization and economization in their own terms.Analyzing actors' translation practices not only through the orders of worth, but also with regard to their specific alignment with the worlds of excellence and equality at play on the societal level, allows us to focus on understanding the dynamics of action which differs from the neo-institutional approach and its structural theory of reproduction that has been widely applied in HE research.We are arguing that this approach helps us gain a better outlook on how competent actors actively shape institutional dynamics by mobilizing transnational moral orders in their organizational practice, which, in turn, has its own socio-historically contingent consequences for the field of HE.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.A visual representation of the theoretical framework.