Global competition has made European universities increasingly expressing their commitment to excellence as the overarching goal. Widespread reforms of governance and funding of universities have taken place in most Western countries, many of them influenced by New Public Management (NPM). National calls for excellence and the construction of research evaluation systems

This study seeks to add to the knowledge of performance based systems by investigating how changes are carried out on the organisational level and promote greater empirical knowledge on HE organisation and systems of research funding. This study sets out to study the following: How are policy changes received and translated in specific HE organisational contexts? Based on the neo-institutional theory of translation (Latour 1986), the idea of changes in research funding systems can be viewed as being dependent on actors passing on structural changes in HEIs.

The process of translation can be seen as a continuous transformation of ideas that moves from one actor/level to another, where the degree of change, at the local level, can vary based on organisational space for interpretation. Actors can be seen as socially embedded in and influenced by their environments (Ramirez and Tiplic 2014). Ideas, thus, seem to be adopted and used in rather homogeneous ways, making organisations increasingly similar, which can be described by isomorphic processes (DiMaggio and Powell 1983).   From the above-presented information, this article seeks to describe how the changing system of assessing and funding research quality impacts Swedish HEIs regarding the universities’ internal organisational performance based systems. This article seeks to explore changes in research policy and its effect on internal organisation of performance based on funding systems in Swedish higher education institutions.

Which models of performance based systems have been introduced? How are the models relating to the national model and how do universities motivate their introduction? The aim of the study is to analyze the introduction of performance based systems for research funding at Swedish universities. The analysis is based on an analytical framework inspired by Whitley (2007) including the 1) frequency and standardisation of systems, 2) Unit of assessment, 3) Motives for introduction and 4) Consequences for funding.

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