According to various more or less speculative and spectacular rankings and assessments, Finland has been celebrated recently, for example, as an alternative model for the information society (Castells & Himanen 2002), as economically one of the most competitive and innovative societies in the world (Global Competitiveness Report 2005-2006) and as an example of an excellent education system combining quality and equality (PISA 2000 and 2003 surveys). While in the vanguard countries of university reform (such as the UK, the US, the Netherlands, and Australia), the managerialist wave, the quality revolution and the fact that the evaluation industry has been launched since the early 1980s, the Finnish university has faced these changes more than a decade later. Therefore, we do have at hand both reasonably developed international research and an interesting national case to illuminate one of the most essential social and political questions of our era: how does the transnational meet the national, and how does the global meet the local? In this paper, we will outline the late arrival but, while landed, an effective mushrooming of the NPM inspired managemerial discursive practices in Finnish university field: how have these new modes been travelling to and embedding in the Finnish universities? Here we are interested in the ways global and European agendas have been mediated and received, filtered and inflected in Finnish universities. In this paper, we focus on two levels: the supranational level (especially the EU Higher Education Policy) and the national level (the Finnish HE policy and governance). Historically, our study covers the period from the turning point of Finnish university policy in the late 1980s until 2006. Our research material consists of documents and memoranda of higher education policy and steering on all two levels since the late 1980s. Our material will also include interviews of the actors on each level.In analysing the university policy documents and memoranda for an almost 20-year-long historical period on the supranational and national level, we will use content analysis, discourse analysis and policy implementation analysis. When analysing statistics and registers, we will use quantitative time series analysis. When analysing the interviews of the actors, we will use qualitative discourse analysis of 30 key policy actors. (Simola & Rinne in press) The paper concerns to a research project "Power, Supranational Regimes and New University Management in Finland", started January 2007. Therefore, the research is still very much in process at the time of writing but we anticipate offering some outlinings of the arrival, connections and development of the new management disocurse in Finnish universioty field. The main aim of the whole research project is a contribution to the theoretical understanding of the movement of policy and politics from transnational to national, from global to local, in this case concerning higher education. The research will hopefully and finally generate new knowledge for understanding the up-to-date situation of the new "enterprise universities" in the European higher education space (Rinne & Koivula 2006) . It is not only a question of mere rhetoric to discuss the market-orientation or the market-drift of the entire university institution. The fact simply is that new mechanisms, such as New Public Management and other regulation and salary systems, include a historical turning point for the national scientific production and innovation systems of knowledge as well as new mechanisms of symbolic power inside universities and knowledge production. The research on these new mechanisms will also reveal the global and supranational powers that are exerting their influence over nation-states and the politics they are implementing.Castells, M., & Himanen, P. 2002. The information society and the welfare state : The Finnish model. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Global Competitiveness Report 2005-2006 (2006). http://www.weforum.org/site/homepublic.nsf/Content/Global+Competitiveness+Programme%5CGlobal+Competitiveness+Report Accessed 19.4.2006. Rinne, R. 1999. The Rise of the McUniversity. In I. Fägerlind, I. Holmesland & G. Strömqvist (eds.) Higher Education at the Crossroads. Studies in Comparative and International Education 48. Institute of International Education. Stockholm University, 157 - 169 Rinne, R., Kivirauma, J. & Simola, H. 2002 Shoots of revisionist education policy or just slow readjustment? The Finnish case of educational reconstruction. Journal of Education Policy 17(6), 643-658 Rinne, R. & Koivula, J. (2006) The Changing Place of the University and the Clash of Values. Higher Education Management & Policy 17 (3), 91-124. Simola, H. 1998. Firmly Bolted into the Air: Wishful rationalism as a Discursive Basis for Educational Reforms? Teachers College Record, 99(4),731-757. (Republished in Ball, S. J., (Ed.) (2000). Sociology of Education. Major Themes, vol. IV London: Routledge / Falmer. Pp. 2112-2138.) Simola, H., Heikkinen, S. & Silvonen, J. 1998. Catalog of possibilities: Foucaultian history of truth and education research. In T. S. Popkewitz & M. Brennan (Eds.), Foucault's challenge: Discourse, knowledge, and power in education (pp. 64-90). New York: Teachers College Press. Simola, H., Rinne, R., & Kivirauma, J. 2002 Abdication of the Education State or Just Shifting Responsibilities? The appearance of a new system of reason in constructing educational governance and social exclusion/inclusion in Finland. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 46(3), 237-246.Simola. H. & Rinne, R. (in press) Researching the political effects of quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) in education - Reflections on some comparative issues in sociology and the politics of education in the audit society. In M. Pereyra (Ed.) Changing knowledge and education: communities, information societies and mobilities. Peter Lang Publishing Group.