Abstract
The engagement of academics in organizational change in higher education institutions is generally understood as involving a wide range of behaviors, and previous studies have situated academics’ actions at various points along a continuum between passivity and pro-activity. This article complements this approach by asking how—rather than in which contexts—academics act as central agents for change in higher education. Rather than trying to assess their global level of proactivity in a given change situation, we aim at identifying the actions which show them behaving more or less strategically. We argue that the notion of ‘bricolage’—widely used in organization theory—can be useful in this respect. Based on a qualitative study of the creation of 20 post-graduate nanotechnology programs on French university campuses, the article shows that academics participating in curriculum change engage in three distinct forms of bricolage. We suggest that the bricolage lens can identify two types of actions via which academics implement more or less pro-active strategies—identifying a repertoire of resources, and assembling those resources—and so allows us to reflect more deeply on how these actions may demonstrate several forms of agency, as well as several different relationships with norms, in each organizational change situation.
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Notes
The Bologna process is an intergovernmental initiative, now involving 46 European and non-European countries, who have all freely committed themselves (by signing the Bologna declaration of 19 June 1999) to harmonize their higher education systems. Among other reforms, these countries commit themselves to adopting a common degree structure, based mainly on undergraduate and graduate/masters level qualification. France began implementing the Bologna process in 2002.
Source: U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative: http://www.nano.gov/.
Source: “nanotechnology in French higher education”, unpublished source from “micro and nanotechnology club” (professional association in the field), September 2002 (http://clubnanomicro.asso.fr/documents/nano_mont.pdf).
Source: the magazine, L’Etudiant.
Source: C’Nano, national network that federates all the French academic teams conducting research in nanotechnology.
There are currently two kinds of master degrees in France: research-oriented (“master recherche”), and vocational-oriented (“master professionnel”).Some master programs are both research- and vocational-oriented.
See the table of synthesis (Appendix Table 2). Our interview records indicate the location, and the main scientific orientation of the programs involved in this study.
Table 1 in the Appendix gives an extract of the coding. Because of space limitation, we do not reproduce the entire coding for this interview, and have removed any double coding.
See Table 1 in Appendix.
Some factors affecting curriculum change (such as institutional support or lack thereof, see Table 1 in Appendix) may orient one or the other actions involved in bricolage activity, whether they relate to the general project or to its specific content.
We found no examples of ‘manipulation’ strategy being used in Region 1. However, a project which was under negotiation at the time of our interviews (and which we do not analyze here for this reason) shared some similarities with this ideal-type.
For each bricolage form, we illustrate both types of actions with quotations that are particularly representative of the main actions undertaken by academics leading the curriculum change (quotations were translated into English by the author).
The EU awards this label to European joint Masters and Doctorates, Partnerships with non-European higher education institutions, and Projects to promote European higher education worldwide. Source: http://ec.europa.eu/education.
Created in 2006, the PRES (Pôles de Recherche et d’Enseignement Supérieur) are intended to regroup higher education and research institutions in France into large units, often by regrouping institutions in the same geographic areas.
Such as those gathered under the Ministry’s label “Initiative for Excellence”, launched in 2010.
All graduates from first degree courses (Licences) are freely admitted to the first year of all masters’ programs in the same specialty, but entry into subsequent years is selective.
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Acknowledgments
This work is carried out within: the Nanoexpectation project n°ANR-09-NANO-032 funded by the French National Agency (ANR) in the frame of its 2009 programme in Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies and Nanosystems (P3N2009); the Hybridtrajectories project n°ANR 2010 Blanc-1811-01 funded by the French National Agency (ANR).
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Louvel, S. Understanding change in higher education as bricolage: how academics engage in curriculum change. High Educ 66, 669–691 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9628-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9628-6