Developmental roles of higher education with entrepreneurialism and engagement: Social welfare orientation

• In Event: Education Development, Policy and Education

Proposal

Higher education institutions have expanded their missions with more emphasis on developmental roles. Regarding these developmental roles, universities are expected to be more socially responsible, supportive of sustainable development and social innovation (Barth et al., 2015; Georghiou, 2018; Sørensen et al, 2019). As a recurring question, it is highly crucial to ask what and for whom values are generated at universities and what impacts those values have led to. Therefore, this doctoral study aims to provide an understanding of social and economic values created in the higher education context by keeping the public good as a wider discourse defining the role and responsibilities attached to higher education (Hazelkorn, 2018). For this study, public good entails civic engagement practices and collective benefit. Perception towards public good has changed over the course of time all through knowledge as a public good on its own rights, for economic growth and employability and for social inclusion and mobility. As public good has been lately reformulated as “the collective private gain”, social mobility and justice are embraced to resist the idea of private gain derived from a neoliberal understanding (Williams, 2016).

As one of the developmental pathways for higher education, this study provides an understanding of the third mission activities, which are entrepreneurialism and engagement for social and economic value creation to see the reality behind “re-integration of the economy in society” (Hochgerner, 2011, p.12). This doctoral study also aims to make sense of generative causal mechanisms of entrepreneurialism and engagement for social and economic outcomes in a cross-national comparative design. Two regionally engaged, entrepreneurial universities from the German and British higher education systems constitute the cases, which are chosen due to their high level of regional and local engagement in terms of the third mission.

In this comparative design, cases embedded in regional and national dimensions are compared vertically as the vertical analysis of the nested levels allows to connect regional demands with national policy (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017; Schweisfurth, 2019). As empirical systematic comparative cases for universities and regions across national contexts have been lacking (Kohoutek et al., 2017), the actorhood of entrepreneurial universities and people at these universities is discussed on the basis of imaginaries of social and economic development for regions across these two countries. While answering the research question of “how are developmental roles of universities interpreted and put into practice through the third mission for regions?”, the expanded actorhood of entrepreneurial universities for their locality and region is analyzed. This analysis focuses on how universities’ actorhood in regions are scripted on the material and discursive aspects and how internal stakeholders rationalise their third-mission related activities, which have potential to challenge the competitive and profit-oriented narrative in higher education.

There are two groups of people involved in this study. The first group, management-based staff and officers who take responsibility for engagement or entrepreneurship activities in the offices of entrepreneurship/technology transfer provide the administration level viewpoints. The second group, academics who have pursued entrepreneurship or engagement activities in their region provide their perspective focusing on practices. Regarding the data collection tools, the first tool is documents diversified with policy documents and university publications (e.g., mission, vision, strategy statements). For the triangulation purposes, document analysis is utilised to help the analysis of the same phenomenon, entrepreneurialism, and engagement (Bowen, 2009; Denzin, 2017). Additionally, semi-structured interviews are utilised as tools to discuss activities and reveal understandings. In both contexts, 10 people from each university belonging to these two groups participated in the study.

For data analysis, two clusters of thematic analysis were combined for this study as codebook thematic analysis and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). For the document analysis, first, a preliminary codebook is compiled from the literature and fitted to the analytical framework to lead the analysis. In the second phase, interviews are analysed with a reflexive thematic approach. As themes are multifaceted entities, this combination of two steps helps the themes to be analytic outputs more than created outputs.

In this analysis, neo-institutional concepts are integrated to guide the framework. The first concept is institutionalisation which refers to cultural persistence of an idea (Letendre, 2021). Institutionalised services, policies and programs behave as myths which are followed ceremonially (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). In entrepreneurial university context, entrepreneurial and engagement related activities signify taken-for-granted institutionalised elements. Also, the intertwined relationship between micro-macro gives insights for the comparison. In sociological neo-institutionalism, environments (macro) are depicted to be powerful enough to shape actors’ action- and structure-based viewpoints (micro) (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Actors, and their goals are socially constructed phenomena and “enacted scripts” which are understandable with the modes of reality.

After preliminary analysis with all these processes and help of these concepts, it is seen in both contexts that there is a shift towards the engaged university model which amplifies public good knowledge regime (Fredricks-Lowman & Smith-Isabell, 2020). Entrepreneurialism is interpreted and put into practice by the key people beyond commercial and marketized outcomes and attached to social welfare purposes, which prioritizes the regional development purposes with and for regional society (Moussa et al., 2019; Watson et al., 2011). In both contexts, community engagement in the shape of social innovation and social entrepreneurship is interpreted to be a tool to increase social visibility, institutional legitimacy, and development of civil society (Berghaeuser & Hoelscher, 2020). For example, in Germany, social innovation is functionalised for democratic purposes, inclusion and diminishing extremism which is on the rise due to right-wing politics. Although the characteristics of funding sources vary across these two universities, this material aspect is interpreted to be the key to facilitate economic and social outcomes for the regions and local areas. Despite the differences in the systems, political actors are seen as crucial stakeholders which could strengthen or mitigate the effectiveness of the third mission activities.

Author

• Bahar Cemre Karaagacli, University of Glasgow