Abstract
This paper adopts a multilevel, longitudinal case study approach to analyze universities’ institutional role and their contributions to society. It explores third mission policies and practices enacted within the University of Bologna from 1996 to 2016, presenting a detailed account of their interaction within the university and with regional and national regulatory initiatives. The aim is to highlight the relevance of a joint analysis of three dynamics. The first dynamic relates to how norms and practices oscillate between formal and informal codification and how strategic initiatives, either led from the top down or driven from the bottom up, develop in a non-linear fashion. The second dynamic describes the ways within which the structural definition of roles falls short in providing a full understanding of the changes in policies and attitudes related to knowledge transfer activities and their need to be complemented by a process analysis of the relationships among actors at different levels. The third dynamic relates to how multiple institutional logics evolve and change over time through a combination of dedicated structures and spaces of interaction in which the logics meet, sometimes aligning, sometimes compromising, and sometimes clashing. This three-pronged approach offers a novel contribution to the understanding of how universities interact with close and distant environments and their impacts on society.
Highlights
Studies have analyzed the role of universities and their contributions to society according to three main dimensions
The structural definition of roles falls short of encapsulating the changes in policies and attitudes toward knowledge transfer activities—it must be complemented by an analysis of the relationships among actors at different levels
Universities can contribute to society in several ways, but any full understanding of their role must consider their embeddedness in a complex set of relationships
Summary
Studies have analyzed the role of universities and their contributions to society according to three main dimensions. The linear view, in which publicly funded institutions produce basic science and transfer it directly to companies for commercial exploitation, or transform, adapt, or promote it through various intermediaries, is the classic model of spatial economic analysis According to this view, universities are critical components of local economic systems and regional policies; they promote and sustain clusters and spatial aggregation (Anselin et al 1997). We draw attention to universities’ leaders, their abilities to form reference groups, and the targets of their strategic actions To address these various elements, we employ a historical case study of the evolution of KTT policies and practices at the University of Bologna from 1996 to 2016. Our empirical approach is based on a multilevel (country, region, and university), longitudinal, historical case study in a Continental European setting, offering an additional specific geographical contribution to the growing international evidence of knowledge transfer policies and practices.
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