ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the French system of research and higher education. Policy-makers and politicians never really questioned the autonomy of academia and its corporatist forms of self-governance. The chapter identifies how reforms may change the academic ethos and practices. For this, experience will be drawn from one year spent in British academia, where experimentation in neoliberal and neo-managerial reforms has predated those in France. The French national innovation system has been historically characterised by two main features: first, the congenital weakness of the institutions that elsewhere embody research and scholarship: the universities; second, the strong and recurrent intervention of the central State to reorganise the research and higher education system. The other effects that neoliberal and neo-managerial rationalisation of higher education and research have brought about are: the degradation of the feeling of professional collective belonging among researchers; and the development of a strong academic individualism.
