Eric Lavigne

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education

Performance appraisal politics are driven by human behaviour, yet human behaviour is in turn facilitated by processual features. Processes understood as easily politicized are more likely to become so. Accordingly, beyond the role of individuals, organizations must understand the role of processes in facilitating organizational politics. Drawing fr...

This article reports on a study of 384 decanal appointments and reappointments and examines Canadian university deans' demographics and career paths. The study focused on four variables: gender, race, experience, and provenance; and analyzed variations across faculty and university types. The findings show that the great majority of Canadian univer...

Academic administrators are evaluated periodically. Thus, every decision comes with potential career consequences. This simple observation has important implications for understanding how higher education institutions are managed. This paper takes a step towards understanding how universities evaluate their academic administrators by investigating...

This paper examines how the stated roles and qualifications of Canadian university presidents and provosts have evolved over the past thirty years and the growing presence of recruiting firms. The study analysed 153 job advertisements published by 22 universities between 1987 and 2017. Roles were categorized according to aspects of organizational l...

Leadership in administration does not operate in a vacuum. Every decision comes with consequences for those tasked to make them, and foreseen career consequences, which often materialize during performance evaluations, may support or constrain administrators’ leadership. This article explores how and why administrators factor in foreseen evaluation...

This presentation investigates organizational change management in developing countries’ higher education, namely how external and internal change actors shape the factors that support and/or prevent changes. Through a systematic literature review, we analyzed 61 articles, and synthesized our findings, which offer theoretical and practical insights...

The paper explores Canadian academic administrators’ perspectives about leadership. Interview guides were used to collect data from fifteen participants. The findings indicate that administrators carry a certain individualized understanding of leadership.

This presentation discusses preliminary findings from an online study tracing the demographic characteristics (specifically race and gender) of presidential and vice-presidential appointments at Ontario colleges during the last 25 years. The study reveals the pervasive inequities that accompany the examined executive career trajectories.

The paper reports on a study of provosts' experience and sense-making of the decanal reappointments they oversee. It focuses on the conflicting roles provosts play and their layered understanding of reappointments' roles and challenges, in relation to their yearly evaluations.

This article introduces the Special Edition devoted to Canadian higher education administration and administrators. It situates its contributing articles within the context of the dominant themes noticed in the extant research literature: neo-liberal and managerial shifts, gender and race career asymmetries, macro-and micro-politics, and profession...

Drawing upon ideas of policy diffusion, transfer, and convergence, this exploratory study uses panel data to explore patterns of post-secondary policy adoptions in Canadian provinces, and identifies opportunities for further understanding explanatory factors associated with policy diffusion. The study examines the period from 1990–2015, focussing o...

This paper examines the research literature on organizational change in developing countries' higher education institutions.

This paper looks at who gets appointed to provostial roles in Canadian universities and examines their gender and race, previous work experience, and whether they were appointed internally or not.

In the last three decades, Canadian universities have grown in size and complexity and undergone deep transformations. Meanwhile, who should be appointed as highest-ranking administrative officers and what they ought to be doing once appointed has remained hotly debated. This paper examines how Canadian universities’ understanding and framing of th...

This presentation examines the increasing reliance of universities on recruiting firms in presidential searches over the last 30 years. Findings show a shift in presidential job advertisements, which coincides with the growing prevalence of recruiting firms. Presidents, first depicted as respected scholars, are now portrayed as charismatic heroes.

Editorial to the Special Edition celebrating the 50th anniversaries of the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education and the Canadian Journal of Higher Education.

As the Canadian Journal of Higher Education celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, this article takes the measure of the research published so far on higher education administration and reflects on future work. The study examined the 38 articles on higher education administration published by the Journal between 1971 and 2020 to characterize how admi...

This article reports on a study investigating the link between education and work. Instead of looking at the labour outcomes of graduates, the study examined the qualifications held by workers in technician- and professional-level jobs from three types of occupational fields: regulated, applied, and general. The approach shifts the focus away from...

This paper examines the experience and sense-making of fourteen reappointed and non-reappointed Canadian university deans. The paper clarifies whether reappointments shape deans’ leadership either during their terms, or through longer periods. The findings suggest that reappointments have a mild immediate impact on leadership, but a strong lasting...

How have the roles and qualifications of university presidents and provosts changed over time? The paper reports on a study of 153 job advertisements from 22 Canadian universities published between 1987 and 2017. It analyzes shifts in universities’ public discourses on the roles and qualifications of their presidents and provosts. More precisely, t...

This report observes several limitations of human capital theory, both as a description of the way qualifications are used in the labour market, and in severely limiting the potential roles of technical and vocational education and training (TVET). It proposes as an alternative the human capabilities approach which posits that the goal should be fo...

This paper draws from fourteen Canadian university deans’ reappointments to examine the unintended outcomes of performance evaluations. Reappointments had a mild impact on leadership, prevented non-reappointed deans from having a meaningful impact, and, in rarer cases, induced significant fatigue and psychological duress. Implications for theory an...

The paper examines the strengths and challenges of Technical Vocational Education (TVET) under the influence of Confucian tradition in paralleled structure of Taiwan’s education system. Through analysis of qualitative interview data, the paper investigates the whole-person education perspective and its disadvantage of low status under the social va...

The paper examines Taiwan’s technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system using a capabilities approach framework. Specifically, the paper investigates the system’s goals, achievements, resources, and challenges. Although findings suggest that Taiwan’s TVET meets various stakeholder needs, the system still faces challenges due to so...

Taiwan is often held by scholars to be successful and they attribute the economic advantage and the rising prosperity of Taiwan to its system of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) (Chen & Shih, 1989; Yuen, 1993), which provides sufficient human capital for this economic prosperity (International Affairs Office, 2016). The distin...

This paper reports on an investigation of Canadian university deans’ reappointments, examining the experience and sense-making of thirteen reappointed and one non-reappointed deans from eight universities. More precisely, the paper examines evidence of political interference taking place during these reappointments. Open coding of deans’ interviews...

This paper contributes to the literature on academic leadership by clarifying how the roles and qualifications of Canadian university presidents and provosts have changed over the past thirty years. The study used 153 job advertisements from 22 Canadian universities, published between 1987 and 2017, to investigate how descriptions of presidents’ an...

This paper presents the results of a multiple-case study of thirteen reappointed and one non-reappointed Canadian university deans. The paper examines how deans make sense of their reappointments and clarifies their intended and unintended outcomes. The findings reveal that reappointments are political arenas where politics are embedded, essential,...

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/92104 Organizations tend to rely on performance appraisals to ensure that individual performance is improved and aligned with organizational goals. However, research suggests that these processes can be diverted from their intended use to further political agendas. In Canadian universities, deans undergo processes simil...

This report on further education in England was undertaken as part of a project funded by Education International to examine national case studies of technical and vocational education and training as a framework for social justice. The report applies the capabilities approach to technical and vocational education and training. The report argues t...

Universities in most countries have become more managerial, but in different ways, for different reasons, and with different results. This article explores the collegial and managerial roles and qualifications of Canadian university deans. The study analysed 223 job advertisements published between 2011 and 2015. The analysis distinguishes between...

This study presents a conceptual framework describing how and why policies interact with one another. The framework is developed based on the investigation of fourteen Canadian university deans’ reappointments and borrows from conflict management and biological interaction theories.

This paper examines the changing roles and qualifications of Canadian university provosts. The study uses job advertisements from 22 universities published between 1987 and 2017.

Performance appraisal politics are driven by human behaviour, yet human behaviour is in turn facilitated by processual features. Structural and procedural features of appraisal processes can be understood as political affordances, with the underlying assumption that processes that are easier to politicize are more likely to become politicized. Draw...

This paper presents the results of a multiple case study of thirteen reappointed academic deans. The preliminary findings show that reappointment processes are poorly and loosely structured, and unfair. Overall, their structure and the way they are conducted do little to support deans’ exercise of academic leadership in Canadian universities.

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of Canadian university deans’ appointments. It analyzes deans’ distributions by highest previous role, provenance, gender, and race. Previous work identified the differences between academic and non-academic units. This second phase analyzes the differences between university types, faculty types, and geo...

This study of 223 job announcements identifies the leadership role signals conveyed to future academic deans by Canadian universities. To do so, the study uses a framework conceptualizing academic leadership roles as either structural, human resources, political, or symbolic. It finds that leadership role signals are strong yet poorly defined. Over...

This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 290 Canadian deans’ appointment announcements. By focusing on gender, race, previous roles, and movement across institutions, provinces, and countries, this study identifies who the Canadian deans are and whence they come. Its results highlight a unique career ladder leading to the deanship,...

This paper presents the findings of a content analysis of 223 academic deans’ job announcements from Canadian universities, published between 2011 and 2015. It identifies central themes related to the description of academic deans’ roles. Its findings show that job announcements send incomplete and ambiguous role signals and depict academic leaders...

This double session presents, in the first part, data on transfer pathways of receiving and sending institutions, student transfer rates, and the geographical proximity of transfer partners. Findings suggest that most articulation agreements are being under used by students, and for the students who do transfer, most are coming from institutions wi...

Contributing to the four years of substantial research, knowledge building and reflection by ONCAT, this study synthesises current theories and research on student mobility, institutional partnerships and pathways, and presents the current patterns of student flows and institutional agreements in Ontario. The analysis and findings show unexpected r...

Deans’ performance assessments play developmental and decisional roles. They can potentially reinforce the university’s expectations regarding the management of its units and support the fulfillment of their goals. This paper challenges these taken for granted assumptions and argues that deans’ performance assessments are instead used as political...

This presentation summarizes findings from a research project funded by the Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer (ONCAT) on college to university transfer students. Bringing together data from four different datasets, it finds that the Ontario system provides students with a great number of pathways, but that further efforts should focus on...

This project examined pathways within and between fields of education, and between fields of education and occupations, in Ontario and Canada. Using the 2013 National Graduate Survey, the project found that links between qualifications within the same field of education were weak, as were links between fields of education and occupations.

The session reports new data from the 2013 National Graduates Survey on graduates’ progression to further postsecondary education and the methods used to access the data. Of interest for policy-makers and institutional researchers, the research group finds that the NGS can provide valuable information on student pathways to inform policy and that m...

This report tests these policy objectives by exploring the nature of educational pathways and the links between educational pathways and the labour market in Ontario, and it compares these outcomes with Canada as a whole. Its purpose is to inform policy and practices at the departmental level within PSE institutions, at the institutional level and...

This presentation reports on an Ontario government funded project on educational pathways. It explores whether graduates stay within the same field of study when they undertake a second postsecondary education qualification. It examines educational pathways within fields of study between educational institutions (college to college; college to univ...

This paper examines the relation between learning objectives and desired interactions. It presents a taxonomy of Web interactions harmonized with cognitivists and behaviourists taxonomies of learning objectives.

This paper reports the findings of an experimentation where students reported how they used their physics textbooks over the course of a semester. Two different pattern of usage were observed: the methodical and the strategic.