ABSTRACT
Having employed the 12 years between 1983 and 1995 in the management of academic institutions, followed by a year-long sabbatical completing a research on organizational learning, publishing a book on the budgetary process in Switzerland 1 and catching up with the formidable task of reading the stack of books and articles that had accumulated on my shelves, I wondered what kind of new activity I might undertake for the concluding nine years of my appointment at the Department of Political Science of the University of Geneva. Managing academic institutions during that time was not a sinecure, as those were the years of serious budget cuts and of numerous renewals of tenure positions following the departure of those who were appointed at the end of the 1960s during the rapid and vast development of higher education in Switzerland and elsewhere in the West. Cutting budgets and replacing staff are rather difficult tasks to perform in an organizational environment where prima donnas abound and crimes of lèse majesté are too easily perpetrated. If you want to do this job well, the time left for other more rewarding activities is rather restricted. Not that I did not enjoy the job. On the contrary, I learned a lot about human nature, individual and collective strategies employed to advance private interests under the cover of the general good. Moreover, I developed a keen interest in that activity and was rewarded with great satisfaction in finding reasonable solutions to apparently insoluble problems. Probably my academic specialization in public administration and management helped me survive through this rather demanding and challenging period. Moreover, it gave me the opportunity to test, and to confirm in real and practical situations, the very academic results of my previous research on administrative behaviour.
