Is the academic Ivory Tower becoming a managed structure? A nested analysis of the variance in activities of researchers from natural sciences and engineering in Canada

As an adaptation to its new environment, universities have engaged in various organisational innovations and taken a more active role in the orientation of the researcher. The emerging institutional management imposes specific constraints and opportunities for researchers. Thus, the impact of institutional membership, notably on the different institutional policies, is increasingly a dominant force in academic working lives. However, some scholars have argued that the context of researchers remains an Ivory Tower situation, where academic working life is defined through the twin discourse of academic freedom and professional autonomy. This article analyses the activities of research faculty members funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, in comparison to the theories that contribute to the explanation of researchers’ behaviour. By using intra-class correlation, which is based on a multi-level analysis of the variance distribution, we find that the grouping effect is still small. In other words, despite the emerging constraints and opportunities determined by their institutional context, researchers still exist in an Ivory Tower, where the explanation of their behaviour is still a matter of individual differences.