Universities and regional development: reflecting on two decades of research

1. Universities and regional development: reflecting on two decades of research David Charles

2. Where do we stand? • Focus on measurement and description of impacts – economic and innovation impacts • Documenting engagement activities • Justifying public investment • Evaluation and benchmarking • Need for a more conceptually driven approach

3. Three questions • How do we theorise the strategic context - how does regional engagement fit into the mission of the university? • If there is an engagement with place, then what determines the right spatial scale? • The role of the individual is central to engagement, but how do we conceptualise good individual engagement?

4. Strategy

5. What drives mission change in universities? • Policy driven change – financial crisis of the state, growing focus on science in economic development, consequences of massification of HE, globalisation • New public management / Enterprise university (Marginson)/Entrepreneurial university (Clark) • Triple Helix (Etzkowitz) • New Production of Knowledge (Gibbons) • Questioning the mission and the social contract (Kellogg) • Leadership/stewardship of place (AASCU) • Isomorphism (Dimaggio and Powell)

6. Critique of regional mission • Resistance to any erosion of the traditional missions, particularly the notion of research excellence • Balancing excellence and relevance – need there be a regional dimension to this? • ‘Assuming that universities should be incorporated into systemic regional policy frameworks runs the risk of undermining the excellence their contribution is supposedly built upon. However, it may be that some universities can turn such anchoring into a resource by using local funding to build areas of international excellence they could not find funding for from other sources.’ (Power and Malmberg2008, p241-242)

7. But engagement does not always mean regional innovation systems • Much university research has little to do with regional innovation, but may still benefit from engagement • Research that is spatially agnostic still has potential users or affects the physical environment – interaction with local users or test sites may still be mutually beneficial • The use of research is wider than the simple economic exploitation of technology • A strategy of local engagement may be part of a strategy of supporting research excellence, even if local impact is not the objective • In reality there are not many regions in developed nations in which a university can make a realistic claim of international excellence where there is no local excellence in some form of industry • How sustainable is a world class university in a region with no industrial infrastructure?

8. What are the key questions for institutional level research? • Calhoun on 4 sense of the ‘public’ • Where does the money come from? Who governs? Who benefits? How is knowledge circulated? • University as a source of esoteric knowledge for experts and accessible knowledge for public debate • How to further develop and retain a public role for universities at a time of greater globalisation of HE and increased reliance on private funding? • Research on regional engagement should be at the centre of the debate on the purpose of the university

9. We store knowledge in inaccessible academic journal articles written for the approbation of a handful of colleagues or simply for a line on a vita. We treat our opportunities to do research not as a public trust but as a reward for success in previous studies, and we treat the research itself too often more as a new examination to pass in order to enjoy additional career benefits than as an opportunity to benefit others. We rely on vague notions of the ‘accumulation’ of knowledge to justify research that often lacks much point (beyond its place in individual careers or institutional prestige) and we denigrate research oriented to practical social problems or current public discourse as less than ‘pure’. Too often we invest heavily in the autonomy of disciplines at the expense of both the advance of knowledge in interdisciplinary projects and the circulation of knowledge more widely. (Calhoun 2006)

10. Spatial scale

11. On which spatial scale should engagement be focused • Local/ city based • Regional – who defines the regions? • National • International • All may be relevant, but value judgements are placed on these

12. Spatial scales • If the funding of HE is devolved to a regional scale (eg Scotland) does it make sense for that administration to demand local engagement? • So why would this be logically different if funding were not devolved? • So is it the level of devolution of funding or some other rationale that determines the scale at which a university should engage? • Or are we confusing a value judgement about the ambition of a university as being internationally relevant with a spatial scale at which it may develop mutually beneficial partnerships?

13. 4 dimensions of spatial engagement • Historical contexts – university towns, origins in a local mission, civic identities vs place-traversing institutions • Impact assessment scales – footprints, labour markets and commuting zones • Service territories – defined by specific engagement activities, or by the territorialisation of public services such as health • Strategic decisions on the local mission – does the university receive a regional designation or define its own region – with potential competition over lucrative markets

14. Need for more nuanced research into the interactions between scales of engagement • Attitudes to scale of engagement depends usually on context of HE systems and significance of funding by origin • HE as a multi-scalar system with different universities having distinct and overlapping territorial footprints • Research on territorial systems as well as discrete universities • Little work on patterns of engagement in new global universities with satellite campuses

15. Individual engagement

16. The role of the individual • Many engagement activities are driven by individuals • Even in corporate engagement projects individuals matter in developing the personal links that make knowledge exchange work • Knowledge exchange operates between individuals rather than between organisations • HE-business interactions depend on personal trust built through previous projects and relationships between graduates and their teachers • Yet we tend to ignore the individual and focus on the university and its partners as actors • Meanwhile the real actors (the academics) are reluctant to share their links with other colleagues or the wider institution (and take their links with them when they move)

17. Individuals – multiple proximities • A focus on individuals needs a better conceptualisation of proximity – not just spatial but also organisational and cognitive – but allows a richer understanding than taking an institutional perspective • Cognitive proximities may mean that an academic has stronger links with a network of people in another region or another country • We need to see individual network linkages as a product of career path, time, nature of interaction and absorptive capacity of local and alternative regions • University pattern is a combination of individual and institutional decisions and history. The institution is more than just the sum of the individuals, but also more than just institutional strategy

18. Conceptualising individual engagement • Scholarship of application/engagement (Boyer) • ‘To be considered scholarship, service activities must be tied directly to one’s special field of knowledge and relate to, and flow directly out of, this professional activity. Such service is serious, demanding work, requiring the rigor – and the accountability – traditionally associated with research activities.’ (Boyer, 1990) • Compare with Mode 2 knowledge production which focuses on dynamics of science system and integration of disciplines and forms of scholarship • Understanding of scholarship and practices need to acknowledge socialised nature of learning and importance of communities of practice (Wenger) • Engagement CoPs cut across standard academic tribes – cross discipline, including non-academic staff and partners outside of the university

19. Communities of practice • Conceptualisation of socialised learning • People learn through interaction in social groups, such as the workplace or associations • Development of shared experiences, language and meaning • Assimilation of people into communities and socialisation into the ways of the group • Reification of shared and tacit knowledge into products, scripts, routines, stories etc • Emphasis on sharing existing knowledge and practices

20. Example of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships • Gertner, D., Roberts, J. and Charles, D.R. (2011) ‘University-industry collaboration: a CoPs perspective on KTPs’, Journal of Knowledge Management, 15, 625-647.

21. Travel time from each KTP company to the University of Strathclyde

22. CoPs and community engagement • Effective knowledge exchange depends on co-production and shared understanding of practices • Considerable case study material on community engagement but mainly focused on practical aspects and often focused on special engagement units rather than individual academics • Little conceptualisation on the processes of developing shared understanding and reification of knowledge • Does university policy on community engagement (and allocation of workload) recognise the time involved in the assimilation into communities of practice?

23. Conclusions • Future work on engagement needs to draw on more conceptually rich understanding of process • Greater emphasis on the changing mission in the context of a revolution in university funding • Recognising a greater complexity of scales and interactions within a university system • A greater focus on the role of individuals in communities of practice • But also need for better analysis of national and indeed regional variations in institutional context