Public university research engagement contradictions in a commercialisation higher education world

Abstract

This paper aims to critically assess the impact of public university commercialisation on research engagement and practice relevance. Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in university environments, identities and missions, as well as in government and private sector funding and involvement. As increasingly commercialised and corporatised organisations, universities have increasingly mimicked private sector hierarchical organisation structures, professionally managed and subject to performance management via proliferating management control systems. From accumulated prior research, this paper finds university research now primarily conducted for the private rather than public good, researchers being subject to and tailoring their endeavors to conform with proliferating metrics focused university management control systems. External engagement appears as a university impression management strategy, while internally, researchers are still compelled to pursue a contradictory focus on high-status self-referential journal publication venues. This contradictory environment is found to have produced an increasing distance between university research and professional practice and between research and professional communities.