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]

The paper is about formalizing contracts within universities, which at the heart of the New Public Management doctrine (Hood, 1995). A recent 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 for objectives and resources (CIOMs [1]) 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 within the departments. Last, there is a constraining aspect (Ragaigne et al., 2014) to using ICORs, although there is no prescription for their adoption or deployment.