Quand être soi ne suffit plus. Les nouvelles modalités du travail identitaire des universités belges francophones

Abstract

This article seeks to document methods of incorporating the function of communication into universities as a reflection of their reactions and identitary adaptations to evolutions in the field of higher education. Focussed on French-speaking Belgium, our empirical investigation in particular highlights a dissonance between the objective in­vestment of the university authorities in communication activities and a lack of strategic orientations expressed by the services in charge of those activities. Beyond the tra­ditional interpretation based on organisational anarchy and the fragmentation universities are going through, a second interpretation relies on the concept of institutional anarchy : the universities may be said to be less in lack of a strategy than of elements enabling them to position themselves within an organisational field in full reconfiguration. The legitimate identitary dimensions are in the process of being defined and structured, a process largely imposed from the outside, and not yet mastered by the universities. The identitary work assumed by the communication services therefore consists in positioning themselves within a field, without mastering the codes.

Keywords

• university
• French-speaking Belgium
• organisational identity
• organisational image
• communication