Abstract
At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sit the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations. In Canada, it is suggested that provinces have increased the number of accountability procedures imposed to universities and those measures would have had an impact on professors' academic workload. This study relies on the Canadian faculty's perspectives collected through the 2007 Changing Academic Profession (CAP) study (n = 1151) and the 2017 Academic Profession in the Knowledge Society (APIKS) study (n = 2968). Descriptive statistics and a MANOVA comparing the scores of five variables in 2007 and 2017 suggest that academic workload increased significantly in ten years, academic acvities are significantly more evaluated, although less by academics themselves, female academics report dedicating more time to administrative tasks and being more frequently evaluated, and senior administrative staff and external reviewers are perceived as being more involved in the evaluation of academic activities in 2017 than in 2007. Our interpretation is that accountability measures could increase professors' admministrative burden and grant more authority to non-academic staff.
 Key words: accountability; academic workload; academic profession; new public management; Canadian universities.
Highlights
At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sits the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations
In order to examine if variations were statistically significant, we proceeded to a betweensubject one-way MANOVA (Wilks’ Lambda) on the five dependent variables (DVs) and for which the year of the survey was the independent variables (IVs)
The objective of this paper was to examine how faculty workload and academic activities’ evaluation had evolved between 2007 and 2017, in a context marked by NPM and accountability in Canadian higher education
Summary
At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sits the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations. A managerial paradigm, the New Public Management (NPM), took hold in the public administration and universities with the implementation of accountability measures aimed at increasing institutional efficiency and faculty performance, and justifying their use of public funds. These measures have impacted institutional differentiation and governance, tuition fees and students’ role within institutions, and have been perceived to challenge academics, such as traditions of institutional autonomy, collegiality (Marini & Reale, 2016) and academic freedom (Marginson, 2009), as well as the traditional ethos of the academic profession (Enders et al, 2009). The conceptual framework for this article draws on the sociology of work, is anchored around the concept of accountability, and relies on an extensive literature review to operationalize the manifestations of this concept in the context of the higher education workplace
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