University Governance in Meso and Macro Perspectives. How does it help analyzing the management of the COVID crisis by French higher education institutions - e-lecture [February, 16]

The Covid crisis is not only a health crisis. It is also an organizational crisis as firms, administrations, schools, and also universities had to face a complete lockdown, rethink the way they work and their management. University governance, at the macro and meso level has been challenged. How can what we know about university governance help us understand what happened during this crisis? How does the crisis impact our understanding of university governance? These are the two main questions that will be addressed during this talk. Christine Musselin will rely on the one hand on the paper she published in the Annual Review of Sociology and the reflection she led on the notion of university governance. On the other hand, we will mobilize the results of the large empirical study she has led with Stéphanie Mignot-Gérard and Aline Waltzing at the national level and within five French higher education institutions (4 universities and a business schools) during the Covid crisis and explore the questions it raises in terms of university governance,

Theory:

Weick KE. 1976. Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly. 21(1): 1-19

Whitley R. 2008. Universities as Strategic Actors: Limitations and variations. In The University in the Market, ed. L Engwall, D Weaire, pp. 23-37. London: Portland Press

Practice:

Musselin, C. (2013 ) : « How Peer Review Empowers the Academic Profession and University Managers: Changes in Relationships between the State, Universities and the Professoriate », Research Policy, 42 (5), pp. 1165-1173.

Speaker:

Prof. Christine Musselin is a researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Organizations (CSO), a Sciences Po and CNRS research unit. She leads comparative studies on university governance, higher education policies, and academic labour markets. She has been a DAAD fellow in 1984-85 and a Fulbright and Harvard fellow in 1998-99. She has led the CSO from 2007 to 2013 and has been the Vice-president for Research of Sciences Po from June 2013 to November 2018. From 2011 to 2014 she has been a member of the council of the French evaluation agency (HCERES), from 2009 to 2015 she participated to the strategic commission of the German initiative of excellence. She is the author of The long March of French Universities, New York, Routledge (2005) and The markets for academics, New York, Routledge (2009). One of her last books La grande course des universités was published by the Presses de Sciences Po in 2017.

Moderator:

Dr. Yuzhuo Cai is Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at the Higher Education Group (HEG), Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Finland. He has been with the HEG for 20 years and was the Acting Professor of the unit from August 2013 to July 2014. He is the Director of Sino-Finnish Education Research Centre, a network organisation involving over 20 Chinese and Finnish universities, and the Deputy Director of Research Centre on Transnationalism and Transformation (TRANSIT), an interdisciplinary research centre spanning three faculties at Tampere University. He is also in the coordination group of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Research Tampere Network and the coordination group of Think Tank for China, SGroup Universities in Europe. He is Editor-in-Chief of Triple Helix and  Co-Editor of Journal of Studies in International Education. His main interests are in higher education research and innovation studies, focusing on interactions between higher education and society also on the international dimension. He has published more than 130 academic publications in these fields, including those in prestigious journals, such as Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, International Journal of Management Reviews, Technovation, Minerva, Science and Public Policy, European Planning Studies and Scientometrics.

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yuzhuo_Cai

Google Scholars: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-7WAlH4AAAAJ&hl=en