Tuesday, June 7, 2016
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch to follow
Library Evans Hall, Room 768
Samuel Sponem
Visiting Scholar, CSHE, UC Berkeley Associate Professor, HEC Montréal
Samuel Sponem’s talk will focus on his paper entitled “Does Measurement of Performance Erode Collegiality?”. 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 (Krücken and Meier 2006). Sponem will analyze the extent to which the use of performance measurement instruments within our contemporary universities are transforming the collegial nature of the latter. Based on a quantitative study of universities governance in France, it aims at discussing the common view found in the literature that managerialism is contrasted in a binary way with collegiality (Yokoyama 2006).
Biography
Samuel Sponem is a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He is also Chairholder of the International CPA Chair for Research in Management Control and Associate Professor at HEC Montreal. His research and teaching interests focus on the use and impacts of management control and accounting tools in private and public organizations. He worked on how budgets are used and on the variety of roles played by accountants in large organizations. He also studied the different roles of management control and performance measurement tools in non-profit and creative organizations. In the field of higher education, he worked on how faculty and administrators perceive the introduction of performance measures in French universities as well as their impacts on academic identity and university governance. During his year as a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, Samuel Sponem wishes to further this work by studying how universities react to budget cuts and the impact of such measures on university strategies.