Paper answers to the questions how the professional group of fixed-term researchers has developed and what are the political reasons for the expansion of it. The paper focuses on the neo-liberalization of the personnel policy and legislation within the Finnish university sector and its impact to academic work and its contractual basis. The aim of the paper is to analyze the development of universities from strictly steered government offices to independent legal units. The objectives of the paper are: 1) to describe the change from the state steered employment policy based on the civil servants and central administration to new university employers corresponding to private employers, 2) to conceptualize the role and status of the fixed-term researcher in Finnish university system and 3) to analyze the possible impacts of the changes to the dynamics of university community.

We construct our paper so that we begin by an introduction to the development of the Finnish higher education system from the early 1990s to the present. From the beginning of 1993 the management by results system, a Finnish form of New Public Management, was applied to all Finnish universities. Final step on the avenue of managerialization of the academia was taken in 2010 when the new Universities Act came into force. Through the act universities became independent legal and economic entities and as a part of this development they got a position of real labor market partner.

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