Kaleidoscopic collegiality and the use of performance research metrics. The case of French universities

The extent to which collegiality conflicts or merges with managerial ideas and practices has recently given rise to a lively scholarly debate: have universities surrendered to managerialization or, on the contrary, do they continue to exhibit collegial traits? Part of this debate arises from the lack of a clear definition of "collegiality" in prior studies, where it is either reified or viewed through a limited number of different and possibly loosely coupled dimensions. We therefore deconstruct the collegial model and its structural and behavioral aspects, i.e., professional autonomy, organizational citizenship, faculty participation in decision-making, and academic units' decision-making power. We examine the links between these dimensions of collegiality and performance metrics applied to research activities and outputs (PRM), because they are concrete artifacts of managerial practices seen as particularly deleterious to collegiality. We address this issue by undertaking a quantitative study of all French public universities (1,334 questionnaires analyzed). Our study draws two important conclusions. Firstly, it finds a mix of both conflict and hybridity depending on the dimension considered: the use of PRM is negatively linked with professional autonomy but compatible with organizational citizenship and faculty participation in decision-making. Secondly, we find that academic units' reputation strengthens the positive link between PRM and faculty participation, but on the other hand, mitigates the increase of organizational citizenship and academic units' decision-making power. In sum, we suggest that faculty participation in decision-making is the only aspect of collegiality that resists the advance of managerial logics in universities.