Entre logiques institutionnelles et pratiques individuelles. La recherche biomédicale dans l’espace académique suisse

Abstract

Today transformation of the ways of regulating universities is taking place in a multitude of different manners on the European academic landscape. In the context of this article, we propose analysis of their governance from the angle of the university admi­nistrators’ formulations of priority in research domains. If the strategic value they are supposed to express towards the exterior seems to be relatively clear, in being explicitly revindicated in the universities’ discourses, the function they fill with respect to the interior nonetheless remains more ambiguous and deserves to be studied more in-depth. That notably involves understanding both the sense of these categories for the actors in the universities and analysing the use they make of them. To do so, we propose an empirical analysis of the structuring processes at work in a research domain with an interdisciplinary nature, namely biomedical research, which, in the last fifteen years, has taken on a preponderant role in the agenda of several Swiss academic institutions. This new institutional logic is the end result of a process of co-construction of the scientific agenda of the universities led as much by the researchers themselves as by the universities’ administrators.

Keywords

• discourse
• Switzerland
• governance
• biomedical
• categorization
• scientific agenda