Kerstin Sahlin: Governance Mixes and Varieties of Collegiality in Universities

The internal seminar is held in English.

Governance Mixes and Varieties of Collegiality in Universities

Recent reforms of systems of higher education and research across the world have been accompanied by the questioning and erosion of faculty authority and challenges to academic collegiality. In a recent, double volume, special issue we have documented main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but our studies also reveal lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance . Together, the papers of the two volumed develop a conceptually precise discussion on what academic collegiality is, how it is practiced, and why collegial governance of higher education and research is important.

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In a jointly authored concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and we highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.

In this seminar I would be most interested in discussing our observations and conclusions, relate these to other studies and developments and hear your views on valuable themes for future research.
 

About Professor Kerstin Sahlin:

Kerstin Sahlin is Professor of Organization in the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University. Her major research interests include decision-making on complex projects, the expansion and translation of management ideas, organizational reforms of public sector, transnational regulation and more recently university governance and collegiality. She has recently led an international comparative research project of collegiality in higher education and research. The results of these studies were published in 2023, in a double special issue on collegiality (Research in the Sociology of Organization, vol. 86 and 87). Kerstin Sahlin has been Vice President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Secretary General of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Swedish Research Council, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University. She is currently Chair of the Research Program WASP-HS (The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program–Humanities and Society).