0000000001053470
AUTHOR
Karel ŠIma
University Complexity and Regional Development in the Periphery
Higher education institutions (HEIs) located in peripheral areas tend to struggle when it comes to attracting talented students, staff, and competitive funding, and they often lack in-house research capacity, which limits the developmental roles they can play in their host regions. This, in turn, generates a set of internal and external tensions that universities need to address in their quests for legitimate places in the increasingly competitive domestic and international higher education field, as well as in their immediate geographic surroundings. Building on earlier work in the field, combining seminal insights from organisational and higher education studies, this chapter provides a b…
Conclusion: University Ambiguities and Analytic Eclecticism
This volume has examined six cases of university engagement in peripheral regions. While these regions have often been overlooked in the mainstream literature on university-region dynamics because they do not readily offer up success stories, they do facilitate an exploration into the challenges and difficulties that arise at the intersection of the university and region. Beginning with a theory rooted in institutionalist literature that depicts the university as a set of five ambiguities rather than as a coherent whole, the chapters have sought to apply the ambiguities of intention, causality, history, structure, and meaning to their regional context. In this conclusion, we pull together a…