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Deploying systems-theoretical conceptuality, this paper improves understanding of the organisational consequences of the intensified societal engagement of a research university. Aligning its work with Luhmannian organisational analysis, it addresses the dynamic interplay between two modes of administrative decision-making communication, namely, the traditional professional administration and the New-Public-Management-oriented (NPM) managerial techniques. Our research observes how the politico-economic conditions of the society translate into the university's decisions concerning an initiative to engage in start-up entrepreneurship. The article contributes to higher education literature by showing that the university's professional administration is a discrete organisational function internally differentiated into specialised administrative branches, each of which operates according to a sense-making regime associated with its primary societal system reference, such as education, science and the economy. The article also demonstrates the structurally conditioned differences in branch-specific temporalisations of the entrepreneurial initiative during decision-making. Inspired by the Luhmannian view on temporality, we demonstrate how administrative decisions synchronise the varied structural time horizons within the university's professional administration. Focus on temporality in decision-making thus allows us to see how the NPM-inspired managerial techniques are operationalised in administrative communication at universities. Consequently, the paper argues that university administration is a complex dynamic entity, which varyingly aligns itself to national policy scripts, and only selectively enacts features of a global trend known as NPM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global university rankings influence students' choices and higher education policies throughout the world. When rankers not only evaluate universities but also provide them with consulting, analytics, or advertising services, rankers are vulnerable to conflicts of interest that may potentially distort their rankings. The paper assesses the impact of contracting with rankers on university ranking outcomes using a difference-in-difference research design. The study matches data on the positions of 28 Russian universities in QS World University Rankings between 2016 and 2021 with information on contracts these universities had for services from QS—the company that produces these rankings. The study compares the fluctuations in QS rankings with data obtained from the Times Higher Education rankings and data recorded by national statistics. The results suggest that the universities with frequent QS-related contracts had an increase of 0.75 standard deviations (~ 140 positions) in QS World University Rankings and an increase of 0.9 standard deviations in reported QS faculty-student ratio scores over 5 years, regardless of changes in the institutional characteristics. The observed distortions could be explained by university rankers' self-serving bias that benefits both rankers and prestige-seeking universities and reinforces the persistence of rankings in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University-industry (U-I) linkage is not a new concept. Although there are models for such linkage that have been tested or used, they may remain unsuitable in certain countries and communities. With the unique situation of the Palestinians, the existing models may fall short of meeting the specific needs and targets of establishing such a relationship. This paper aims at building a framework for stronger relationships between Palestinian universities and industries and entrepreneurial network of the Palestinian Diaspora based on a strong supporting platform of Science, Engineering, Technology & Innovation (SET&I). This would in turn strengthen the SET&I platform rendering it an enabled and enabling platform. Several interviews were conducted with people seen as experts and/or representatives in this field. University-industry collaboration, knowledge networks, Diaspora, researchers, investment, spin off, spill over, brain drain, Palestinian skilled immigrants and others are pieces of a puzzle. This puzzle can be put together in many ways. Looking through the eyes of Palestinian Diaspora entrepreneurs, U-I collaborations are a ready platform that could support their mobilization and movement towards challenge and socio-economic satisfaction in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses research leadership in public universities under change and the role of entrepreneurial strategies in research. Research leadership function today in situations where the New Public Management movement one the one hand have introduced management by accountability and control in the university while on the other hand open boundaries to other knowledge organizations, arenas and networks, and creation of resources are becoming more important than ever. Hence, an entrepreneurial strategy is more important than traditional managerial skills in order to produce new knowledge centres. By analysing two cases on the construction of new research groups, we will introduce new perspectives on research leadership, where dilemmas, uncertainty and complex relations to other managerial systems in the universities are in the forefront. The paper presents an important contribution to the understanding of a special form of creating new knowledge production in the university by means of organizational entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the intensification of university–industry relationships and its impact on university research. The paper consists of recent follow-up research to an international comparative research project conducted in the 1990s. It deals specifically with the Québec (Canada) situation. Twenty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted in the winter of 2003 with university researchers and an additional five interviews with technology transfer officers. The interviews were conducted in six francophone higher education institutions in Québec. With regard to university–industry relationships, the interviews revealed that university researchers in scientific and technological fields conducted innovation-oriented research, which benefits their graduate students and the institution itself. Freedom of publication is somewhat conditioned by intellectual property constraints. Thus, a majority of university researchers adopt an “entrepreneurial ethos” which they find compatible with their academic values. The intensification of university–industry relationships may also have latent dysfunctional effects with regard to conflicts of interest, as some university researchers have created start-up companies which act both as research funding sources and as beneficiaries of research results. Thus, intellectual property and conflict of interest issues evolve in a grey zone and are often sources of stress and tension for researchers. However harsh some disputes may become over these issues, they are resolved, at least in the context analysed in this research, in ways that satisfy both the researcher and the institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinises organisational change in Japanese and UK universities which are engaged in entrepreneurial activities. The study focuses on recent changes in governance, management, leadership, and funding in these universities. The paper argues there are convergent trends between Japanese and UK universities in terms of increasing entrepreneurial activities, a review of institutional strategies, a review of the organisation, the application of market-oriented institutional policy, links with the industrial sector, the notion of a public financial crisis and changing external environment, strong leadership of the university President or Vice-Chancellor, and the notion of the accountability of the university to society as a whole. However, the application of particular institutional strategies, entrepreneurial culture, and the way in which an institution relates itself to the private sector significantly differs among institutions. The paper suggests that those differences are related to different institutional history and characteristics – including those between national and private universities in Japan, and old and new universities in the UK – as well as different government policies between Japan and the UK. The paper first proposes a theoretical model for the five types of entrepreneurial culture of the institutions. It then examines the model by using case studies: Nottingham Trent University (UK), University of Surrey (UK), University of Tokyo (Japan), and Waseda University (Japan). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to propose a framework to evaluate the entrepreneurship intensity (EI) of Iranian state universities. In order to determine EI, a hybrid multi-method framework consisting of Delphi, Analytic Network Process (ANP), and VIKOR is proposed. The Delphi method is used to localize and reduce the number of criteria extracted from a deep literature review, according to the social and economic conditions of Iranian state universities by using an expert panel, including sixty-eight country-wide academicians and practitioners. After that, a group approach to ANP was utilized as an evaluation method to derive the weights of each criterion. Next, the evaluation data were gathered through a questionnaire, and, finally, the compromise ranking of universities was calculated using the VIKOR method. Moreover, this study applies weight-variance analysis (WVA) to suggest improvement actions. The paper proposes an evaluation framework for determining the performance of entrepreneurship development initiatives in universities. By using this framework, twenty-two Iranian state universities are evaluated in terms of their EI, and the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at eight comparative case-studies on academic entrepreneurs in life sciences conducted in Europe in 2008. The interviewees were selected from the KEINS database that lists all academic inventors from Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands who have one or more patent applications registered at the European Patent Office, 1978-2004. The case-studies show that institutions largely influence the way in which scientists are coping with the normative uncertainty typical of science and technology systemic boundaries in the life sciences today. By exploring new local solutions, the entrepreneurial achievements of scientists are also establishing new institutional practices. Our empirical analysis helps to reconsider traditional dichotomies in the sociological, economic and institutional literature, such as publications versus patents and academia versus industry, and to illustrate the creative role of academic entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network-building activities of PhD students are an important area of study in furthering our understanding of academic entrepreneurship. This paper focuses on PhD students' participation in network-building activities defined as mobility and collaboration, as well as own interest in and perceived grade of support for commercialisation from various levels of the university hierarchy. The results of a large-scale survey (of 1,126 PhD students at Linköping University, Sweden, 41% response rate) presented here show that the majority of PhD students are engaged in collaborations with external organisations, though quite few (one quarter) have spent a part of their PhD education outside their home university. PhD students from all faculties are on average interested in commercialisation and in favour of it. However, PhD students from the faculty of Health Sciences state that it is difficult for them to combine research and commercialisation. Furthermore, interest in commercialisation of research results is relatively lowest amongst those PhD students who are undertaking mobility placements at other universities, thus pointing to an experienced incompatibility of research and academic entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several decades higher education scholars have conducted a significant amount of research aimed at understanding the implications of enhanced interactions between the academy and the private marketplace. Accordingly, a voluminous literature that includes conceptualizations and discussions of academic entrepreneurship has emerged. This paper used content analysis to examine how researchers have conceptualized entrepreneurship in five leading higher education journals. The analysis revealed notable patterns in the application of theoretical and conceptual frameworks of entrepreneurship to higher education phenomena, as well as observable distinctions in how entrepreneurial models are applied in specific organizational, institutional, and geographical contexts. Results suggest that there is a paucity of attention paid to the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of entrepreneurship within higher education scholarship. We introduce a framework for strengthening the application of entrepreneurial models to higher education research that is grounded in the theoretical constructs of entrepreneurship as articulated in the economic and management literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imperatives of social democratization and global economic competition have opened a new phase of development for the Korean university and its scholarship. The increased social demands for knowledge creation and dissemination gradually extend the scope of professional practice beyond the conventional areas of academic work. This paper explores, based upon the findings of a case study, how Korean universities and their professors have been responding to these demands and what consequences are observable. It also explains how the new demands and responses are contributing to local development. Finally, it highlights several controversial issues in the discourse on entrepreneurial scholarship and discusses these in the Korean context as points for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An entrepreneurship movement has advanced into higher education. There is a growing expectation that universities demonstrate an economic contribution to the public good by instilling students with entrepreneurialism and providing guidance for starting businesses. In China, the state has launched a 'Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation' initiative as part of a national development strategy, which required universities to increase resources for entrepreneurial activities and for all students to complete an entrepreneurship education course. This article applies new institutionalism theory to illuminate how the mass entrepreneurship initiative filtered down to universities and students. Data were analysed from policy documents and interviews (n = 100) with final-year undergraduates in the social sciences and humanities at two public universities in Guangdong Province. The universities were found to conform ceremonially to the institutionally legitimated initiative, but entrepreneurship provisions for undergraduates remained limited. At the same time, mass entrepreneurship was found to be disconnected from student experiences. One group (the 'avoiders') perceived entrepreneurship as unfeasible or a remote possibility in their lives. A second group (the 'venturers') were unprepared for starting a business and described hardships resulting from their failures. The findings provide a counter-narrative to the entrepreneurship movement and raise ethical questions about the mass promotion of entrepreneurship to students without due consideration to the risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing entrepreneurial graduates is essential to the future of higher education and supply of quality human resources in developing countries. To address this issue in the agriculture sector, which is dominant in economic terms in most developing countries, an exploratory combined qualitative and quantitative research was conducted to understand entrepreneurial learning of agricultural graduate entrepreneurs. For the phenomenological study, 14 agricultural graduate entrepreneurs were purposely selected, and for the quantitative study, 92 entrepreneurs were selected through simple random sampling method. The phenomenological study revealed 12 themes on how graduates experienced entrepreneurial learning. Our study finds support for “experiential learning,” “learning by doing,” and “social learning” theories. Nine themes including previous business experience, risk-taking propensity, entrepreneurial persistence, use of various information sources, tendency to be self-employed, concerns about job or career, interest in practical courses and activities, passion for agriculture, and thinking outside the box are internal to the entrepreneur and could be seen as learner identity. The theme of “support from family and friends” could be seen as a significant external influence. The survey showed that entrepreneurial learning themes were generalizable to the studied population. Although different students can take different learning paths to become the best they can be, our findings suggest that the overall student learning experience can be designed to ensure that graduates are more likely to become entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what motivates junior researchers to engage in academic work and what questions are central for their academic identities. The context of the study is the entrepreneurial orientation of today’s university, which according to many leaves little space for the academic calling. The main argument is that the identity work of the junior researchers interviewed revolves around four key questions: What kind of research should I do? What kind of tasks should I prioritize? Am I good enough at what I am doing? What would be the right place for me in the future? Their answers to these questions show that while some elements of the traditional academic identity continue to appeal to the junior researchers, they also search for new interpretations and sources of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study probes recent developments in a number of academic and non-academic aspects of a private research university in response to current globalization trends. Under the name of internationalization, university administrators and external firms are emerging as powerful decision-makers shaping academic content and even academic governance. This is manifested in student recruitment and in the hiring of prestigious professors and researchers to increase university reputation and thus to appeal to more students and secure more research funds. Among disciplines central to economic and technological globalization, such as communication, business, and engineering, patterns of convergence are emerging. Rather than internationalism, internationalization is found to prevail, and internationalization is found to signify predominantly a search for student markets domestically and abroad rather than positioning the university’s knowledge at the service of others in less advantaged parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]