The entrepreneurial university concept as a narrative of change in HEIs

Abstract

ABSTRACT The literature on entrepreneurial universities has grown exponentially over the past three decades. Concomitantly, the meanings attached to the terminology of entrepreneurial universities has proliferated, creating confusion amongst users. To fill this gap, an inductive analysis of entrepreneurial university conceptualisations from the term's first introduction to the literature in 1983–2021 was conducted. The results showed that, although conceptualisation approaches widely differed in their focus, normative appraisal, scope, and level of specificity, they tended to cluster around the core idea of change in higher education institutions that began to take shape in the early 1980s. The change process was found to be ongoing, context-sensitive, and contested, closely aligning with the framework of essentially contested concepts, as revised by Collier, Hidalgo, and Maciuceanu (2006, Essentially Contested Concepts: Debates and Applications. Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (3): 211–46). By showing the essentially contestedness of the entrepreneurial university concept, the current study not only offers a useful mechanism for understanding and explicating the proliferation of meanings but also interrogates the suitability of classical conceptual categorisation approaches commonly used in the entrepreneurial university literature. Furthermore, it calls for the use of flexible conceptual lenses, such as family resemblance and cluster concepts, and studies that establish a better link between the characteristics and context of entrepreneurial universities through individual and cross-case comparisons.