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Wright, S., Carney, S., Krejsler, J. B., Nielsen, G. B., Ørberg, J. W. (2020). Enacting the 
University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. Springer Nature B. V. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1921-4 
 
The anthropology of higher education is a small area in the subfield of the anthropology of 
education. While most anthropologists who work in education are doing research in K-12 
institutions or informal educational contexts, there is a highly specialized group of 
anthropologists working in higher education. Nevertheless, Enacting the University: Danish 
University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective by Susan Wright, Stephen Carney, John 
Benedicto Krejsler, Gritt Bykærholm Nielson, and Jacob Williams Ørberg is a very important 
book. It makes important theoretical and methodological contributions to social and cultural 
anthropology more broadly. And while it is looking at the university in one European country, 
the implications of this work are important for everyone who works in higher education 
globally. This review will focus on two main contributions. The first is a contribution to thinking 
about ethnography. Second, the volume makes important contributions to our thinking about 
institutions in a globalized and neoliberalized world and the ways the larger forces intersect 
with the activities of people within them.  
 
Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective is not a 
traditional ethnography. It is not the sole researcher engaging in participant observation with a 
specific group of people. Rather it is a team of researchers who are looking at a small set of 
large institutions (Danish universities) as they sit within a national and international context. 
Anthropologists tend not to see ethnography as a method but rather something like a stance 
toward the other. This perspective on ethnography offers the ethnographer a “tool-kit” of 
methods, rather than simply relying on participant observation. In fact, the focus on 
ethnography as a method in other fields has led to some prominent critiques in anthropology 
(Ingold 2014, Herzfeld, 2001). But even as a stance toward the other, traditionally, 
anthropology has thought of that other in fairly simple terms. And when one begins to think of 
the other as “Danish Universities,” this raises a whole host of new problems. These are 
problems that some anthropologists have been trying to address (Holmes & Marcus 2008, 
Marcus 2011, Riles 2000, Strathern 2004). In a global world, ethnography often needs to be 
practiced in teams, and those teams need to be able to echo the kinds of collaborations that 
one sees in other institutions and organization in the global economy (Marcus 2011). Following 
Riles (2000), anthropologists are not outside of the global networks they study but are 
themselves part of these complex institutions and networks where there is no outside.  
 



Wright and her team very much take this principle of being a team within the network to heart. 
And to understand Danish University reform ethnographically, the team takes on the different 
levels of analysis woven together with Wright’s Introduction and Conclusion. In this way, they 
are able to look at interactions and discourses at the macro level of the OECD, EU, and Danish 
government, as well as at the levels of university leaders, university faculty and researchers and 
students. 
 
This leads directly to some of the theoretical contributions the book makes to the study of 
universities and large-scale institutions within a global context. In the opening chapter and the 
Conclusion, Wright explains the two senses of the term “Enacting.” Drawing on the perspective 
that developed in British cultural studies and the Birmingham School, enactment on the one 
hand is the enactment of laws and the ways that power frames the field withing with actors 
interact. The second sense of enactment is the more on the ground struggles and practices of 
individuals who are engaged in a range of practices, from interpreting how to best follow the 
law to active resistance and attempts at rearticulation. And even among the elite policy makers 
and the university leaders, there is not a single vision, but rather a set of ideas that people 
interpret differently. Using a number of theoretical tools from Stuart Hall, Norman Fairclough, 
Michel Foucault, Anna Tsing, and many others, the teams look at the ways that the 
transformation of the Danish University, has been partial, met with resistance, but ultimately 
the university is in the process of change. 
 
Wright shows that within the OECD, at the most global level, and the EU and Danish 
government, there was a shared sense that universities needed to be aligned so as to become 
more competitive in a global knowledge economy. But even at the highest levels, Wright shows, 
through detailed ethnographic work, that change was not a coordinated elite plan, but rather a 
shared view of the world among a fairly small group of elites. One of the ideologies among 
elites is a different sense of freedom. Wright shows us how the idea of freedom among the 
politicians and policy makers is not the traditional notion of academic freedom, but rather 
seeing the university as an individual and free agent capable of making contractual relations 
with other for-profit players in the economy providing the knowledge and technologies that the 
market demands. Wright and Ørberg show that the process of articulating the relationship of 
political leadership to organizations in the society went through a series of changes. And as 
universities went through those changes, they became freer, but at the same time more 
beholden to the state, because as free actors they needed to earn their keep rather than just 
relying on an assumed budget from the state. At no point in the work do we have a simplistic 
view of the powerful dominating or the less powerful simply being dominated. But the overall 
effect of the changes in legislation in Denmark has been the transformation, and perhaps what I 
would call the destruction of the modern research university as originally envisioned by the 
Humboldt tradition. Indeed, if the modern university was founded on an idealistic contract with 
the state where the individual and society is called upward through and unfettered pursuit of 
knowledge, the new contract is one that is one where all are called to help produce profit for 
the knowledge economy, the new definition of well-being. 
 



The book moves from this larger view through each of the levels of the university. Carney looks 
at how university rectors have dealt with the new legislation and the new pressures on them to, 
like a corporation, make their institutions leaner and more accountable to the goals of 
supporting the knowledge economy. In important ways these university leaders become more 
like corporate CEOs and begin after the 2003 University Law to try to make quick and sweeping 
changes to the structure of the university and the makeup of the faculty. Using a Foucauldian 
model, Carney discusses the ways leadership uses a discursive model for articulating what is 
normative within the university. Academic decisions shift to financial ones as new priorities are 
articulated at different levels. And while the first wave of reforms and reform leaders were 
resisted, and several of them replaced by leaders who pursued the agenda more softly, the 
overall effect of these efforts have been to change the university and its orientation to teaching 
and knowledge in significant ways. 
 
As Wright showed in the early chapters of the book, “freedom” and “democracy” were floating 
signifiers. Policy makers and politicians used the slippage in these terms to move from a 
traditional notion of academic freedom to a free institution, free to offer its services in the 
global information marketplace. And so, the university is freed on the one hand as an economic 
actor. But on the other hand, it gave the state more control over the university by using an 
accountability discourse and seeing accountability in terms of being an economic service to the 
public. Krejsler, like Carney, shows that the discursive play around key signifiers is both a 
mechanism to control behavior, but at the same time can be invoked as a strategy of resistance 
on the part of academic faculty. And further, Krejsler shows that faculty’s attitude toward the 
changes in the university vary by field and type of institution. The success in slowing down the 
process of instrumentality also varies by institution as well, with the older more established 
universities being able to more successfully deploy an Humboldtian discourse surrounding the 
status of the university. In different ways, much of the discussion is about how academics are 
positioned by the knowledge economy discourse, and how they responded by attempting to 
position themselves within the Humboldtian, academic freedom, discourse. 
 
In my own work, I suggested that university students in the United States, struggling for the 
rights to be part of the process of knowledge production in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately lost 
that battle, but in the process gained consumer rights. And this shift in freedom and rights was 
part of the larger American transformation of the university. In a somewhat similar way, but in 
a very different context, Nielson talks about the struggles over imagination of the student in the 
Danish context. She uses the notion of “figures,” a concept articulated by several 
anthropologists, to talk about the ways that university students have changed over time and 
particularly from the 1960s to the present. For Nielson, a figure is both a product of 
imagination, but also a social category that has been forged from the empirical context in which 
students find themselves. For example, the current notion of the student as consumer is both a 
product of social imagination, but students are also literally engaged in consumer behaviors and 
activities in relationship to the new marketized university. Nielson captures the ways that 
student have moved from struggling to have claim in the production of knowledge within the 
university, to a more issue-oriented approach to their relationship to knowledge within and 
without the university. And while students have moved to a more “consumer rights” position, 



they also remain a political force in the ways, as she points out, that Hardt and Negri (2004) 
might see political struggle.  
 
Enacting the University gives us a lot of detail at a number of different levels of the changes 
going on in Europe and Denmark. But the book has implications for these processes that 
universities are facing around the world. And while the particulars networks and institutions 
vary in different locations, the increasing focus globally on an instrumental rationality to 
evaluate universities is almost universal. Rider (2009:87) drawing on the vision of Humboldt and 
the sociologist Robert Merton, suggests there is real value in the autonomy of science.  
Scientific discovery needs to be separate from the particular instrumental goals of various 
actors. This is true for the good of society, so that science does not get adopted for nefarious 
purposes. But it is also true, that scientific discovery, even discovery that is useful for the 
economy, cannot always be preplanned. Otherwise, it would not be discovery. The processes 
that Wright, Carney, Krejsler, Nielson, and Ørberg discuss are ultimately detrimental to 
universities as institutions, and to society at large. 
 
Hardt M. & Negri A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Press.  
Herzfeld, M. (2001).  Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society.  Malden: 

Blackwell Publishers. 
Holmes, D. R. and Marcus, G. E. (2008). Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the 

Classic Scene of the Fieldwork Encounter, Collaborative Anthropologies Volume 1: 81-101. 
Ingold, T. (2014). That’s enough about ethnography! in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 

4(1): 383-395. 
Marcus, G. E. (2011). ‘Notes from Within a Laboratory for the Reinvention of Anthropological 

Method. In Ethnographic Practice in the Present, edited by Marit Melhuus, John P. Mitchell, 
and Helena Wulff, 69 79. New York: Berghahn Books. 

Rider, S. (2009). The Future of the European University: Liberal Democracy or Authoritarian 
Capitalism? Culture Unbound, Volume 1: 83–104. Hosted by Linköping University Electronic 
Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se  

Riles, A. (2000). The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 
Strathern, M. (2004). Partial Connections, Updated Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 

Publishers. 
 
 
Wesley Shumar is an anthropologist and professor of communication at Drexel University with 
research experience in higher education, mathematics education, online learning, and social 
learning theory. In higher education he is author of College for Sale: A Critique of the 
Commodification of Higher Education, Falmer Press, 1997. Hi is co-editor, along with Joyce 
Canaan of Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, Routledge, 2008, as well as co-
editor along with Søren S. E. Bengtsen and Sarah Robinson of The University Becoming: 
Perspectives from Philosophy and Social Theory, Springer, 2021. 

© 2023 Wesley Shumar 


