Across Europe, university governance is moving into the direction of increasing levels of accountability and transparency (Pollitt & Boeckeart 2004; De Boer, Enders & Leisyte 2006), regulated under formal procedures and performance criteria, both for teaching and research (Teelken, 2011). In this presentation, we report on recent changes in university governance in the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, and compare how respondents from universities in these three countries perceive these changes in terms of pervasiveness and impact on teaching and research, as well as their attitude towards these changes. Further, we compare their views and perceptions to a previous round of data collection, thereby allowing for a longitudinal analysis, based on 100 interviews (47 in 2007, 53 in 2011, 29 interviews involved the same respondents). However, whereas in 2007 the respondents were still quite critical, sometimes even resistant and at least creative in attempting to maintain their own autonomy, in 2011 this attitude seems to be replaced by a more complacent, instrumental and even submissive position. In order to further develop micro-institutionalism (Powell & Dimaggio, 1991) as an alternative explanatory framework for investigating the responses, we are looking for additional categories in order to label these changes