Aligning University Roles and Strategic Orientations: When Local Mandates and Global Aspirations Meet

Recent policy developments in Norwegian higher education, aiming to nurture world-class environments, have focused on the need to strengthen teaching quality and research excellence. However, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly under pressure to make local contributions (“impacts”), for example, in the form of job creation, technology transfers, local economic developments, and so on, which result in tensions and dilemmas at multiple levels, not least as regards strategic management. This chapter investigates how universities align education and research on the one hand and how they navigate the tensions between local demands and global aspirations on the other. Firstly, w…