Leveraging Europe to Protect Professional Interests: European Academic Associations and their Institutional Settings

The integration of European research and higher education is both a challenge and an opportunity for the academic profession. On one side, calls for competition, efficiency and standardization conflict with traditional monopoly and discretion over academic work. On the other side, academics can seek support for their concerns in the European arena bypassing national authorities and institutional leadership. Academic associations with European scope represent one way to organize and protect professional interests transnationally. According to an institutional approach, longstanding associations would be more defensive and act based on professional norms of academia. More recently founded associations would be more strategic and engage in innovative fashions to influence European policy processes. European academic associations are analyzed according to goals, internal structure, membership, tasks and institutional linkages. Drawing on field and multilevel governance theories, the paper elaborates on the implications for the (emerging) governance of the academic profession in Europe.