Pressions et stratégies dans la formation professionnelle universitaire : le cas de la formation des directions d’établissement scolaire du Québec (1988-1989 à 2008-2009)

The multiplication of university professional training programs (UPTP) has generated some interest in the description of such programs. Their permeability to pressures is often cited as a characteristic of UPTP. Departments that offer UPTP deal with pressures that are both diverse and often contradictory. This phenomenon is well documented in the scientific literature, though said literature does not well inform researchers on how departments respond to these pressures. This doctoral research used various concepts taken from institutional theory (itself a branch of organizational sociology) to analyze the recent evolution of UPTP for educational leadership in the province of Quebec (Canada). This field of training has gone through major changes in the past 25 years. Using an embedded interpretative case study (Yin, 2003), this research studied the evolution of educational leadership training programs in two university departments: the Département d’administration et fondements de l’éducation at Université de Montréal and the Département de gestion de l’éducation et de la formation at Université de Sherbrooke. We analyzed the discourse from the two departments (from 1988-1989 to 2008-2009) and from other organizations involved in educational leadership training in Quebec. We compiled data from three distinct document sources and from a series of interviews (ten per department) conducted with key agents (deans, department chairs, program coordinators).  Results show that the two units tend to become isomorphic to their environment. They behave as such as a response to institutional pressures and organizational competition in a changing environment. These changes, often driven by a deeper transformation in the field of school administration, actually help create a more structured organizational field in which demands regarding UPTP for educational leadership were made more explicit. This had observable impacts on the evolution of training programs in both departments, where they went through several changes and were lead to share a ‘logic’ of professionalization, a training ‘archetype’ (a graduate continuing education program with, at its core, a graduate diploma) and some relevant institutional ‘tools’ (widened admissions policies and target student population, enhanced program flexibility, professionalized training activities, and teaching teams with diversified backgrounds).   Nevertheless, none of the departments appeared powerless when facing these pressures. Results show that these two units uphold their agency, through a variety of strategies in response to the pressures from the environment. These strategies evolved during the period under scrutiny and seem aimed at managing the ‘institutional pluralism’ that arises from the clash of external pressures (that push towards professionalizing educational leadership development programs) and internal pressures (that push towards a more “academic” model of development). Many of the strategies and tactics described by Oliver (1991) were used, including compromise and manipulation, both of which took more and more place as time went by. The quest for legitimacy seems to have driven the implementation of these strategies, with regards to the multitude of sometimes contradictory pressures. The nature of the institutional entrepreneurship also determines the choice of strategy used by each department. This entrepreneurship is the main driver of the evolution of the UPTP. Results show, however, that this entrepreneurship is both constrained and stimulated by historical institutional choices and, furthermore, by the ‘imprint’ and ‘path dependencies’ created by these choices.  These results shed an institutionalist spotlight on the way these two departments reacted to environmental pressures during the period under study. The complex portrait sketched by these results 1) enhances our understanding of this important characteristic of university professional training programs, 2) enhances our understanding of the recent evolution of educational leadership training in Quebec, and 3) confirms the analytical strength of many concepts that stem from institutional theory.

Keyphrases: Higher education, Educational administration, University professional training programs, Educational leadership training programs, Organizational theory, Institutional theory, Case study, Quebec (Canada)