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This paper analyses French and US universities’ organizational responses to the more or less explicit pressures they face to go interdisciplinary. Defining universities as pluralistic organizations, I show that the implementation of interdisciplinary research does not result in well-integrated institutional strategies, but rather combines initiatives from the scientific community and from university leaders. Based on case studies conducted on the development of interdisciplinary nanomedicine in five leading French and US research universities, I identify three settings where the implementation of interdisciplinarity involves shifts in organizational structure – in principal investigator-based research teams and scientific networks, in departmental boundaries, and in institutional structures, and question issues of governance, leadership and resource allocation arising from those shifts. We see similarities between the two countries in terms of how initiatives by “entrepreneurial academics” – searching for funds for interdisciplinary research – and by the university leadership – also searching for funds, and redefining institutional projects around interdisciplinarity – complement each other. We also identify one major difference – with French pro-interdisciplinary university policies being strongly influenced by a political impetus from the French ministry of higher education and research.

The purpose of this paper is to study the issuance of sustainable development reports by French universities, based on two dimensions proposed by Ansari et al. (2010): extensiveness and fidelity.

Three complementary data sources were used: an extensive literature review, exploratory interviews with sustainable development (SD) officers from French universities, and the four editions of the Responsible Campus Guide (Guide des Campus Responsables). The empirical data collected were then subjected to a dynamic multi-level analysis drawing on three theoretical frameworks.

Four different profiles of universities appear, suggesting that the many isomorphic pressures exerted on universities influence the characteristics (extensiveness and fidelity) of their SD reports.

Further research is required to explore whether these findings are generalisable to business schools and universities in different contexts.

This study will be of interest to other higher education institutions seeking to embark on a similar sustainability reporting track. It is also a way to observe the characteristics of SD reports, to analyse what and how first-time reporters communicate.

This paper adds to existing research by focusing on a managerial innovation that is still relatively new in French universities. Its second contribution lies in its comparative approach introducing a distinction between early and later adopters of SD reporting. It also contributes to extending the existing theorisation of SD reporting.

This article questions how institutional change influences actors’ behavior within organizations affected by the evolution of their institutional environment. This issue is addressed by looking at how university leaders are empowered by the external reviews led by evaluation agencies and research councils and how they use these reviews as managerial tools and to make decisions. It is argued that this process is complementary to the reforms in university governance and structures and amplifies their effects because it is more legitimate, favors organizational coupling and the appropriation of new norms. It draws on a study led in three French universities in 2011.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the influence of cultural differences on the design and management of two franchise programs and one joint degree program run by a Chinese university in partnership with a British university and a French university. The cross-cultural challenges and the differences in the strategies taken by the managers in both types of program to deal with such challenges are analyzed. The frameworks for such strategies are also proposed.

A case study approach was used for the analysis. Participatory observation and interview were adopted to collect information in combination with the written reports on the programs. The interviewees included managers, faculty members, and students. Thematic analysis was conducted to find out the common themes from the coded data.

For franchise programs, the British university takes a “collaborating” strategy focusing on globalization, which is combined with the “compromising” strategy of the Chinese partner university focusing on localization. Both parties keep their different styles of management and combine them into one new management mode. By contrast, in the joint degree program, the French management mode can be described as a “collaborating” strategy toward the management of the Chinese students and curriculum, while the Chinese managers are seeking to progressively “accommodate” the needs of the French students.

Few studies in the current literature are targeted at the cultural influences on the design and management of transnational higher education (TNHE) programs as well as the proper management strategies to deal with such cultural differences. The result of this study will provide useful advice for researchers and practitioners in cross-cultural management of TNHE programs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine differences in students' perceptions of quality and satisfaction with their educational experience among four types of higher educational models, American, French, Egyptian and Lebanese, in Lebanon.

A sample of over 200 students from each of the seven universities included in the research study were surveyed. Their perceptions were sought on a range of demonstrable performance outcomes. These outcomes include the observance of democratic practices, the effectiveness of the teaching/learning experiences, the quality of academic and non‐academic services, and relationships and destination upon graduation.

The findings indicate that universities adopting the American and French academic model, including the Lebanese university, tend to more readily involve students in institutional decision making at both the academic and non‐academic levels in comparison to the university following the Egyptian academic model encouraging democratic practice among youth. Despite the considerable differences among the various institutional types in the philosophy of education, the perceptions of the purposes of higher education and the pedagogical approaches they adopt, students generally expressed satisfaction in the quality of their university education.

With the continuous establishment of universities in Lebanon and the region following different academic models, the research findings may serve to inform policy makers and academic leaders of students' perceptions of quality and satisfaction.

No such comparative study has been conducted to determine the satisfaction of students with their overall higher education experience in Lebanon and the region.

This paper aims to present a concise history of the main action research (AR) contribution in France. The authors discuss the role of AR in the organizational research field in general and compare it with intervention research (IR) and presented Institute of Socio-Economy of Enterprises and Organizations’s specific contributions and its presence on the international stage through review publications and wider works.

A narrative approach was used to analyze this history.

AR is considered as a research family. The authors define and compare AR with other qualitative methods. They analyze AR and IR principles, which include interaction with practitioners, negotiation with them, focusing in the third part on the case of ISEOR research team.

AR and IR permit to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners, to develop useful research. At the same time, they permit to develop new researchers' competencies and to fund research, in a context of reduced public research funds.

This article permits to understand the reality of what is and how to develop an IR, and the difficulties for researchers to insert them in the academic community, although France seems to be more permissive than others’ contexts. It permits also to better know the French IR and AR research in management.

Adopting an agentic positioning, we question and compare competing logics hybridization within French hospitals and universities facing major reforms inspired by new public management. In addition to the resulting forms of hybridization exposed in the literature (accepted or refused), we observe four additional modes: instrumentalized, uncomfortable, reformulated, and suffered. They all reveal the varied manner with which each professional faces reform. However, we develop a new argument: the ways professionals hybridize (or do not) their prevailing logic depends on an overarching mode of hybridization that characterizes the way their organization deals with reform. We identify two contrasting modes: overarching strategic logics hybridization and overarching enforced logics hybridization. They give insight into how actors decouple structure from practices. We contribute to the literature on logics hybridization by first analyzing the role of specific actors who act as either a translator-actor or a closure-actor to respectively facilitate appropriation of the reforms or to protect professionals against the growing dominance of the new logic introduced by the law; and secondly by discussing importance of articulating higher and lower organizational levels all involved in hybridization.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the pandemic affects the motivation and job satisfaction of university researchers as a whole and by their separate groups by gender, age, academic position (career stage) and degree.

The authors studied French universities for changes in motivation and job satisfaction among researchers under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this, two hypotheses were tested, using the one-way ANOVA parametric test and the Kruskal–Wallis nonparametric statistical test with the data collected during the in-depth interviews and surveys with university researchers from the Paris Diderot University and Jean Moulin University of Lyon III in 2019 and 2021.

There were found significant differences between changes in motivation and job satisfaction of respondent groups by gender, career stage and scientific degrees. All these differences in changes confirm hypothesis about the significant impact of the pandemic on certain motivators and elements of job satisfaction of various groups of university researchers. The study showed that pandemic restrictions and fears positively affect the motivation and job satisfaction of the younger generation of researchers and males, and negatively on the older generation and female researchers. During the pandemic, early-stage researchers are mostly unhappy only with the salary and the lack of teaching skills. While experienced and senior researchers do not have time to fulfill all their duties due to overload by a combination of different forms of teaching, many teaching hours, administrative duties and mastering new communication tools.

The results capture the selective impact of pandemic restrictions, its physical and mental effects on academic staff. Although only two universities in a single country were considered, the findings show the heterogeneity of the perception of new (pandemic) working conditions by different groups of university workers. If such heterogeneity is revealed in the example of two universities, then it is very likely to be observable also in broader studies.

The results of this study can help university administrations, higher education regulators and national research agencies address the needs of all groups of researchers, alleviating the most acute restrictions and fears caused by the pandemic and providing the necessary incentives for relevant groups, e.g. higher salary, teaching school and awards for young researchers and a lower teaching loading for experienced and senior researchers.

This is the first study that define pandemic impact on motivation and job satisfaction of university researchers in France.

We have been applying inquiry-based learning (IBL) methodologies to language teaching in the department of French studies at the University of Manchester (UK) since 2006. We were aware that IBL was successfully employed within scientific subjects such as medicine and dentistry, but little research had been carried out within higher education in the adoption of such methodologies in advanced level language learning. Our projects in grammar, phonetics, interpreting and in producing resources for students on their period of residence abroad have not been without their challenges and we have experienced some reticence from students and educators alike. This chapter will set out a rationale for the adoption of IBL methodologies in language provision, detail the projects undertaken and analyse their results in terms of both measurable ‘product’ and perceived ‘process’-based outcomes. Finally, we will examine the dovetailing of competencies enhanced by IBL with those promoted more generally through language learning, a combination which we believe rends our students highly employable in the global jobs market.