Conference Agenda

Across Europe, universities are rethinking doctoral education as sociotechnical change and doctoral expertise is expected to travel across academia, industry, and society. To empower this understanding, Finland has launched a national-wide pilot (2024-2027), popularly known as the ‘1,000 Doctors’ initiative, that restructures doctoral education around cross‑disciplinary, cross‑sectoral collaboration, with €255M in competitive funding and 15 thematic consortia that cut across fields such as artificial intelligence, software development, social services, and cancer medicine (UNIFI, 2024). The reform aims to shorten time‑to‑degree through three‑year employment contracts and to increase R&D‑ready doctorates in line with the national target of 4% of GDP for R&D by 2030 (Hämäläinen, 2024). Yet, this pilot remines niche specific. Observing that, a standalone research field of CONVERGENCE of Humans and Machines (funded by Jane ja Aatos Erkon säätiö) has emerged to understand how doctoral education be shaped when doctoral researchers receive guidance from supervisors across different disciplinary fields.

We examine what this transformation means as an organizational education problem: how universities configure governance, routines, infrastructures, and ethical orientations so that interdisciplinarity becomes a reliable capability rather than an ad‑hoc ideal (UNIFI, 2024; Hämäläinen, 2024). Conceptually, we mobilize boundary‑object theory to explain how shared research environment, platforms, and protocols integrate heterogeneous epistemic cultures (Star & Griesemer, 1989), communities‑of‑practice to understand collaborative learning dynamics within and across units (Wenger, 1998), and sociotechnical imaginaries to situate the reform’s normative horizon (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Together, these perspectives support an educational viewing of organizational design choices within universities at national and European levels.

Methodologically, we conduct a programmatic case study of a multidisciplinary doctoral initiative at a Finnish university, drawing on governance artefacts, curriculum and supervision guidelines, and reflexive memos from the establishment phase. Our purpose is formative rather than summative: to identify enabling conditions and design tensions when embedding cross‑disciplinarity into doctoral structures, and to align emergent findings with Finland’s system‑level recommendations (UNIFI, 2024) and policy rationale (Eurydice, 2024; Hämäläinen, 2024). We also locate the work within European debates on universities’ future roles in human‑centered innovation (Carayannis & Morawska‑Jancelewicz, 2022).

Three insights stand out. First, boundary‑spanning must be institutionalized. Co‑supervision across units, cross‑faculty doctoral boards, joint seminars, and shared assessment practices lower transaction costs and provide predictable coordination for interdisciplinary projects (UNIFI, 2024; Star & Griesemer, 1989). Second, ethics and responsibility function as organizational capabilities when embedded across the doctoral work system, supervision charters, research planning, data governance, and public‑facing dialogue, rather than confined to standalone courses (UNIFI, 2024; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Third, shared infrastructure/environment act as boundary objects that anchor everyday collaboration, creating communities of practice through which different disciplines can converge in daily doctoral work (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Wenger, 1998).

From the organizational education perspective, we contribute a capability‑building perspective on cross‑disciplinary doctoral education in Finland: a design pattern comprising (a) co‑supervision plus cross‑faculty oversight; (b) an ethics‑in‑practice pathway; (c) shared ecosystem‑centered communities of practice; and (d) external engagement mechanisms that align doctoral work with societal needs and non‑academic careers (UNIFI, 2024; Eurydice, 2024). We discuss tensions, e.g., harmonizing evaluation criteria, managing academic workload, and balancing breadth with depth, and argue that CONVERGENCE demonstrates feasibility for institutionalizing interdisciplinarity as a strategic organizational task within European public universities (Hämäläinen, 2024; UNIFI, 2024).
Unlike prior studies that focus primarily on doctoral outcomes or individual competencies, this study centers on how organizational design shapes doctoral learning conditions under cross-sectoral reform.

A fundamental attribute of higher education organisations is their capacity to amalgamate disparate working and cultural logics. It is imperative that they establish and maintain a constant connection between the domains of research, teaching and administration. Moreover, there is an increasing necessity to harmonise external environmental influences, such as political requirements and market-based financial interests (Besio 2012). Building upon the theoretical framework of conventions (Diaz-Bone/Thévenot, 2010), Besio and Meyer (2014) conceptualise universities as organisations whose institutionalised structures and organisational practices are shaped by a central logic of compromise. These compromises facilitate the establishment of a common ground between disparate world logics, circumventing the need for direct confrontation (Boltanski/Thévenot 2007). It is evident that compromise objects, such as autonomy-oriented departmental structures or the project-based organisation of research and organisational development, represent specific mechanisms of knowledge and action. These mechanisms facilitate the integration and linkage of the requirements of different reference worlds within the organisation (Besio/Meyer 2014). In accordance with the theory of conventions, it is precisely the different value systems and the conventional practices inscribed in them that have the potential to engender contradictions and conflicts in organisations if left unaddressed (Knoll 2014).

The digitalisation of universities has given rise to the re-emergence of long-standing conflicts of values. Digitalisation is often blamed in an attempt to address these conflicts and find solutions (Pasternack et al., 2018). This paper critically examines this thesis. Referring to findings from the current research project, 'DigiHochX: Cultural Conflicts of Digital Transformation in Interface Processes at Universities', the article uses data collected through organisational-technographical methods to demonstrate that digitalisation leads not only to irritation and the renegotiation of established compromise objects, for example, by blurring clear responsibilities within departmental boundaries, but also to the disruption of implicit organisational knowledge and practices. In changed cross-departmental collaboration, organisational members must build new knowledge and practise new compromises, which is often fraught with conflict. The article aims to adopt an organisational educational perspective on conflicts arising from digitalisation, highlighting the renegotiation of compromise issues and placing their management more firmly within the context of organisational learning.

Educational discourse commonly has a future-oriented disposition, but these notions of future ideals are not formed in a vacuum. They are shaped and informed by past educational struggles, development, and scholarly inquiry, which have led to questioning what education is for and what kinds of changes are possible for educational improvement. In contemporary higher education (HE) research, social justice in education and socially just education embed notions and conceptualisations of reimagined future possibilities, yet these futures are rarely explicitly discussed or theorised, even though they play a central role in shaping the discourse. This paper argues that a historically informed ‘utopia as method’ application to the existing and future discourse can offer a theoretical and methodological lens through which past educational imaginings can shape present practices and facilitate future reimagining of socially just HE.

Utilising utopia as a method to guide education towards its idealised future form comprises three modes: archaeology, ontology, and architecture (Levitas, 2013). When applied to an education context, the archaeology mode requires reflexive practice to examine what constitutes a ‘good education’. Absences and deficiencies can be identified by examining the historical and present foundations of educational systems, institutions, and policies. Critiquing the usefulness of these elements in the envisioned future of education will clarify which policies and practices facilitate socially just education and which do not (Levitas, 2013, pp. 153-174). In ontology mode, there is a reorientation of perspective: we are required to look forward to the future to specify how we want to restructure society based on the archaeological mode’s discoveries. In this mode, ‘what is understood as human flourishing, what capabilities are valued, encouraged and genuinely enabled, or blocked and suppressed, by specific existing or potential social arrangements’ (Levitas, 2013, p. 153) are explored and critiqued. Lastly, the architectural mode involves the (re)imagining of potential futures and possibilities, guided by the critiques of the previous modes. However, once the imagined future is visualised, the actual implementation of creating utopias can take different forms. Wright’s (2010) transformation types can help scholars realise pathways to actualise socially just HE.

Wright (2010) suggests three transformation types: ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic. Ruptural transformations require a ‘direct confrontation and political struggles…[to] create a radical disjuncture in institutional structures in which existing institutions are destroyed and new ones built in a fairly rapid way’ (Wright, 2007, p. 6). In contrast, interstitial transformations are based on ‘incremental modifications of the underlying structures of a social system’ (Wright, 2010, p. 321), while symbiotic transformations require collaboration with the institutions in power to solve identified problems while expanding ‘the scope of social empowerment’ (Wright, 2007, p. 6). Complete ruptures of educational systems and institutions may not be possible. However, interstitial and symbiotic transformations may be more accessible to scholars in their everyday practice, for example, through the pedagogies they employ in their classes, student/staff co-creation of curriculum, creation and/or adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for classroom use, or other experimental interventions.

Integrating utopian methodology with educational reimagining of future socially just possibilities, this paper demonstrates how educational futures are shaped by historical developments and present practices. The paper argues for the explicit use of archaeology, ontology, and architectural modes in social justice in education and in socially just educational discourse to contextualise the work already done and to chart the way forward in HE research. This will enable scholars to move toward more reflective, reflexive, imaginative, and socially just educational futures.