Indicateurs et récits dans le nouveau management des universités

• Main Author: Olivier Chantraine
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2010-02-01
• Series: Sciences de la Société
• Subjects: évaluation; university; management; innovation; institution
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sds/2759

The paper proposes to describe and analyze an aspect of the communicational crisis European universities are affected by, since they are subjected to the « Bologna process » imposed by the European and national political authorities. It focuses on the so-called « evaluation » procedures and, more widely, the whole frame of standardization and unification procedures of the European high education system. These procedures are sustained by the effective action of uprising institutions created for that specific purpose by the political authorities, which tend to substitute the traditional systems and usages by which universities and professors handled until recently in an « autonomic », in the original meaning of that word, way their functioning, the profession, the production, discussion and publication of knowledge. These institutions impose effectively a new mode of production of knowledge about universities and, following, a new mode of management of universities, from which arises a new institutional, cultural, economic and social deal. The methodology for this analysis and description relies on participative observation, interrelated with analysis of documents these uprising institutions publish. The interpretation of this phenomenon is situated in the wider frame of « institutional innovation », specific of the reforms in the era of « new public management ».