Over the last thirty years, institutional and socio-economic development and globalization have played a crucial role in the changes seen in the higher education sector. These changes have impacted aspects such as governance, organization, financing, management systems, and the academic and social legitimacy of universities (Burke & Associates, 2005).

Previous studies have focused on changes in performance management (PM) and the management of universities, for example, in the implementation of PM (Deem, 1998; Shun et al., 2006; Broadbent, 2007), the assessment of academic performance (Kanji et al., 2010), the use of key performance indicators (Ball & Halwachi, 1987; Lewis et al., 2000; Guthrie & Newman, 2007), and the measurement of institutional and individual performance (Modell, 2003, 2005, 2006; Taylor, 2001; Kallio & Kallio, 2014; Ter Bogt & Scapens, 2012). The common factor in these studies seems to be a transition in institutional logics from academic logics to business logics (see Pettersen, 2015).

In line with this recent development, the competition between universities in Nordic countries for students, researchers, and resources has been on the rise; these universities are now being managed using different PM tools (see Vakkuri & Meklin, 2003; Kallio et al., forthcoming). Universities are complex and heterogeneous organizations characterized by the multiplicity of “institutional logics,” which can compete, shift, and interact (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008).

The present study uses institutional logics to analyze how the renewal of the PM system in Finnish universities has led to a change in the operating logics of university employees. The study is based on a results of a survey conducted in 2015, which included 672 respondents from three universities in Finland. The preliminary analysis revealed that despite the way in which university employees’ perceive the PM system in use, this system has initiated a change in the institutional logics of individual researchers and lecturers.