Le nouvel esprit de l’université : une institution au défi de la troisième mission

This thesis focuses on the evolution of the university in French-speaking Belgium since the European reforms of the end of the 20th century (Sorbonne declaration, Bologna process, Lisbon strategy). We start from the observation that universities are now subject to injunctions from the New Public Management and more broadly from managerial ideology, but also to constraints linked to the context of underfunding of higher education in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. We will see that in addition to the market constraints, the university must also respond to the expectations of society, leading to a new reconfiguration of knowledge. The aim of this research is to study how the university responds to the injunctions of profitability and transparency addressed to it as well as to society's expectations. We analyse to what extent and how the notion of third mission and the activities related to it contribute to the university's response to the requests addressed to it. As part of this work, the University of Liège constituted our main research field while two other so-called "complete" universities of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation were studied to a lesser extent (the “Université Libre de Bruxelles” and the Catholic University of Louvain). Our method is qualitative, based on the one hand on the analysis of institutional discourse and on the other hand on semi-structured interviews conducted with actors in the academic world, but also outside it. Our observations show that the idea of a third mission covers both service to society, as it can be defined in the literature, as well as the service to the university community. However, for those working in the field, the definition of the third mission remains unclear and unequivocal. We propose a modelling of the third mission by studying different services and devices of the university as boundary objects between the university and other actors outside it. The analysis of the university through the prism of the City by projects and the perspective of a networked world makes the third mission perceived as a way of legitimizing the institution in relation to the injunctions emitted from European reforms, but also as a response to society's requests.

Grantor dc:publisher

ULiège - Université de Liège

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Hoerner, Céline

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bachelet, Jean-François
• CRIS

• université
• nouveau management public
• justification
• réseau
• troisième mission
• objet-frontière
• Social & behavioral sciences, psychology
• Sociology & social sciences
• Sciences sociales & comportementales, psychologie
• Sociologie & sciences sociales

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Licence

• http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2

Language dc:language

fr

Identifier

info:hdl:2268/246637

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:orbi.ulg.ac.be:2268/246637