Does Measurement of Performance Erode Collegiality? Empirical Evidence from French Universities
Stéphanie Chatelain-Ponroy (CNAM, LIRSA)
Stéphanie Mignot-Gérard (UPEC)
Christine Musselin (CSO, Sciences Po et CNRS)
Samuel Sponem (HEC Montréal)
According to a Weberian perspective, “collegial organizations” involve members considered as equal peers, who have different fields of expertise but share common values, which permits self-determination through consensus. Until the 1970s, universities were viewed as archetypes of this collegial model and described universities as communities of scholars whose common values and norms allowed them to make consensual decisions. In the next decade, some authors emphasized the existence of bureaucratic features within universities and the idea of coexistence between bureaucracy and decentralization was also captured by the concept of “professional bureaucracy” developed by Mintzberg (1979).
Since that period, the universities environment has dramatically changed, contributing to challenging their “original” nature as collegial organizations. Along with the expansion of mass higher education, universities are now pushed to become more accountable for their performance and their use of public resources. These evolutions have paved the way for the use of performance indicators in universities. In the past decades, universities worldwide have experienced an increasingly pervasive “audit culture” (Power 1999). The proliferation of university rankings, the extensive use of bibliometrics in the evaluation of research, the definition of performance indicators by states and universities… offer ample evidence of this movement of quantification in higher education. The expansion of those metrics has paralleled and in turn sustained the transformation of universities into “complete” organizations.
Many scholarships have demonstrated that collegiality in universities has been hindered by the use of performance measurement. On one hand, performance management tools sustain centralization of decision-making; on the other hand, their implementation may disrupt the consensual culture of universities. However, the literature also tends to demonstrate that high status institutions are simultaneously more collegial and less centralized.
This paper analyses the extent to which the use of performance measurement instruments within our contemporary universities are transforming the collegial nature of the latter and aims at discussing the common view found in the literature that managerialism is contrasted in a binary way with collegiality (Yokoyama 2006).
We develop four main hypotheses drawn from the literature.
H1: Use of performance indicators at the university level conduct to greater centralization
H2: Use of performance indicators at the university level may lead to less collegiality
H3: High status universities are more collegial and less centralized
H4: Autonomous universities use more measures of performance than less autonomous universities
The exploration of these hypotheses relies on a quantitative study of universities governance in France. The data were collected in a survey sent to the actors (both academic and administrative staff) involved in the governance of all French universities. The 84 higher education institutions considered as universities by the French ministry of education were included in the sample.