TY - JOUR EP - 108 JF - Policy Reviews in Higher Education AV - public ID - discovery10108671 N1 - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions. VL - 5 N2 - Reforms in higher education have been passed in many European countries in the last decades, mostly trying to adapt national systems to new European and global challenges. This study examines some consequences of such major reforms in France and Spain. Specifically, these reforms introduced new agencies whose remit was inter alia to provide evaluation of research and to make such assessments pivotal for academic career progression. The paper investigates empirically whether, and to what extent, these new forms of authority have been capable of engendering the expected change to the system of academic career evaluation. The respective policy approaches and policy implementation in France and Spain reveal that these reforms triggered a reconfiguration of powers at various levels of academic life ? affecting strategies for successful career development. Policy-making implications are relevant when these two countries are compared, suggesting that more radical policy approaches (coercive isomorphism, the French case) do not result in more change to academic evaluation practices than mimetic ones (the Spanish case). It is also important to note that coercive isomorphism encountered more frictions in its implementation. KW - Reform KW - career KW - coercive and mimetic isomorphism KW - France KW - Spain TI - Coercive and mimetic isomorphism as outcomes of authority reconfigurations in French and Spanish academic career systems SP - 89 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2020.1806726 Y1 - 2021/// PB - Informa UK Limited A1 - Marini, G IS - 1 ER -