Universities and Regional Engagement : From the Exceptional to the Everyday

Abstract

The study of universities’ role in regional engagement has traditionally been focusing on exceptional cases. This book presents a reconceptualision which embraces its underlying complexity, and proposes a roadmap for a renewed research agenda. Starting from the grassroots level of universities’ "everyday" engagements, the book delves into the manifold ways in which university knowledge agents build connections with regional partners. Through eleven empirical chapters, the authors not only chart the diversity amongst case institutions, engagement mechanisms and regional contexts, but also use that diversity to advance a novel conceptual framework for unpacking university-regions’ everyday activities, taking into account the dynamic, complex and co-evolving interplay between (a) key social agents and institutions, (b) the contexts in which they are embedded, as well as (c) the historical trajectories and strategic ambitions underpinning context-specific social- arrangements and interactions that are mediated by temporal and spatial dimensions. Drawing on evolutionary economic geography, innovation studies, management and organisation studies, and historical perspectives, the volume advances a new mode of understanding university-regional engagement as a form of extendable temporary coupling, which also helps to address perennial policy and managerial questions alike of what to do with universities that do not serve local labour market needs, and/or are located in regions suffering from brain drain. The book illustrates such dynamics from diverse national contexts: Brazil, Caribbean, China, Italy, Norway, and Poland. This book will be valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policy makers working in economic geography, regional development, innovation and higher education management.