I’m delighted to announce that Organizational Legitimacy and Identities in Canadian Post-Secondary Education: Investigating Students’ Perceptions, a research paper I  co-authored with Dr. Kai Lamertz (Concordia University) and Dr. Alex Kondra (Athabasca University), has been named Best Paper in the Organization Theory division of the 2012 Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC) Conference.

In a few weeks, I’ll write a more detailed blog entry about the paper, and the larger research project it is part of. But briefly, the paper involved a survey of post-secondary students to find out about their perceptions associated with the descriptors “college” and “university”,  and whether the difference between the two made any difference in their post-secondary education choices. And we were surprised to find that despite the evolving broader usage of those two words in the Canadian context, students still had fairly traditional ideas of what a “college” or a “university” was.

The program for the conference is here. ASAC always has some very good presentations, and the conference itself doesn’t get the media attention it deserves. So I will also be blogging later on about some of the more interesting research that will be presented at the conference.

My co-authors are wonderful to work with, so to get the recognition for this work is very gratifying when it’s also been so much fun to carry out. And we’re all looking forward to presenting the paper at the conference and getting some more feedback on it there.