The Barriers to Academic Engagement with Enterprise: A Social Scientist’s Perspective

Abstract

This paper explores the barriers to academic engagement with enterprise from a social scientist’s perspective and in relation to United Kingdom post- 1994 universities in particular, expanding key themes from previous literature to consider both progress and the limiting factors which still face university managers in their attempts to implement their ‘change’ agendas.

The current strategy of re-orienting and branding universities as professional, managerial and efficient organisations, within which knowledge must be generated in a deliverable and transferable form to external recipients, is unpopular with many social science and humanities academics in particular, owing to the prevailing view among the latter that their identity is under threat. Hence the apparently widespread academic disengagement discussed in this article, which is explored in the context of the reluctant academic pressured to extend their role into often unfamiliar business-speak, commercial enterprise and industrial environments by a university strategy that assumes all academics are capable of incorporating academic enterprise into their day to day activities. The paper concludes that for universities to successfully rebrand as professional and commercially successful institutions they must adopt a more business like approach requiring first that they overcome the fear prevalent among many UK social scientist academics, at least, that their managers, and the higher education sector at large, have shed essential values which, since Humboldt’s time, have underpinned the very purpose of higher education institutions.