State/University Relations and How to Change Them: the case of France and Germany

This article will focus on the issue of steering higher education in public systems. First, we shall present some of the results of the empirical studies we carried out in France and Germany at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s on the bodies that are responsible for higher education. We shall thus be able to show that there is a specific (national) type of relation between the state bodies and the universities in each country and that it differs greatly. Hence, we shall argue that State/universities interactions have national bases that must not be seen in terms of culture, but rather as societal (in the sense of Maurice et al., 1982) constructions of relationships. [Article's first paragraph