Internal Contracts for Objectives and Resources at University: An Enabling and Facilitating Tool

Les contrats internes d’objectifs et de moyens à l’université: un outil habilitant et facilitant

Larbi Hasrouri ()
Additional contact information
Larbi Hasrouri: UFR Sciences économiques [Poitiers] - Université de Poitiers – Faculté de Sciences économiques - UP - Université de Poitiers = University of Poitiers, IPAG [Poitiers] - Institut de Préparation à l’Administration Générale [Poitiers] - UP - Université de Poitiers = University of Poitiers

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The paper is about formalizing contracts within universities, which at the heart of the New Public Management doctrine (Hood, 1995). A literature (Bollecker, 2013, Châtelain et al., 2013, Fabre, 2005) looked into objectives contracts as part of the management control field. We focus the study on the internalization of such contracts in terms of tool of control. The aim of this article is to characterize the internal contracts of objectives and resources (CIOMs ) implemented between university governing chancellorship and the departments and faculties as a control technology within an average university trying to exit from a critical situation. So, our problematic is to analyze to what extent such internalization of objective contracts can be a control tool from the point of view of the departments. Employing a theoretical point of view, we use Adler and Borys's (1996) grid for so-called enabling control in three possible dimensions (facilitating, enabling, guidance), Simons's (1995) conceptual framework of control (interactive versus diagnostic), and the boundary-object framework (Trompette and Winck, 2009, Zeiss and Groenewegen, 2009). Our methodology is based on a textual analysis of the nine ICORs of the studied university and its departments, in addition to interviews with three division directors. The textual analysis results show indeed a certain similarity for three departments. The textual analysis of the ICORs also show that enabling control is the dominant dimension and can be explained, according to the three interviewed faculty directors -whose results of the textual analysis show a strong similarity- by greater self-knowledge during periods of interactive control through dialogue and discussion phases with chancellorship, particularly when departments directors can choose their own indicators for the department during these phases. The facilitating aspect of enabling is mainly explained by the spread of ICOR indicators as close as possible to the teams in the departments. Last, there is a constraigning aspect (Ragaigne et al., 2014) to using ICORs, although there is no prescription for their adoption or deployment.

Keywords: Objectives contract; Control; Enabling; Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA); Contrat d’objectifs; Contrôle; Analyse qualitative comparée (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv and nep-mac
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04579798v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Gestion et management public [2012-..], 2024, 2024/5 (Pub. anticipées), pp.1d à 24. ⟨10.3917/gmp.pr1.0010⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04579798v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04579798

DOI: 10.3917/gmp.pr1.0010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().