Reconfiguring collegiality in transforming higher education systems: academics’ sensemaking in the French context

Collegiality – encompassing collaborative relationships, participatory governance, and the collective shaping of academic norms and professional identities – has long been a cornerstone of higher education. Yet, the sector’s transformations over the past four decades have challenged traditional collegial structures and practices. This study investigates how French academics interpret and enact collegiality amid these systemic changes, and the sensemaking dynamics they mobilise. The findings outline collegiality’s conceptual ambiguity and intuitive understanding and highlight its dual nature, integrating governance and social dynamics, and the fragmented experience shaped by contextual and systemic cues. They show that HE transformations can be regarded as a catalyst for the erosion of the meaning of collegiality as well as a source of more transparent and enhanced collegial practices. Finally, they reveal how academics engage in diverse sensemaking strategies, such as sensegiving, sensebreaking, sensehiding, sense-exchanging, and sensedemanding, to influence collegiality’s form in response to evolving institutional and environmental pressures. By applying a sensemaking lens to academics’ approach to collegiality, this work clarifies and enriches the concept, highlighting its emotional and cognitive dissonances, its critical voices, and emphasising the need for a renewed form that safeguards higher education’s organisational credibility, social cohesion, and scholarly authority.