A comparative perspective on the work content of the academic profession

This chapter examines the comparative research on the academic profession and gives a picture of the Finnish academic profession’s characteristics in a comparative framework. It presents an overview of the Finnish part of the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey, its motivations and context. Empirical work based on comparing the structure of academic work illustrates the challenges in undertaking such comparisons between different national systems. The comparison here is between Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Although these countries are all part of the European processes of integration of higher education, and they responded to the same questionnaire in their respective national surveys, the structure and definition of the academic profession in these countries remains different. The comparison illustrates gradually the challenges of comparison of different branches of the academic profession and the challenges of definition of independent variables within the European framework. The challenges are caused by the existence of different types of higher education institution and different definitions of academic profession.