Is Commitment to Performance-based Management Compatible with Commitment to University “Publicness”? Academics’ Values in French Universities

Individuals’ values in the context of NPM-based reforms are a central theme in studies of public professional organizations. While organization studies mainly focus on “professional” values, research on public administration primarily addresses the issue of “public” values. This article brings these two research streams together in order to investigate the relationship between two sets of individual values—commitment to performance-based management and normative publicness—in the context of French public universities. It draws on a quantitative survey of academics involved in university governance. The study demonstrates that a positive attitude towards performance-based management is negatively correlated with commitment to university publicness; furthermore, it delineates different groups within the academic profession—according to professional status, managerial position within the organization, and the department’s reputation and ability to generate revenues—which have differing attitudes regarding performance-based management and university publicness