Bright Satanic Mills Universities, Regional Development and the Knowledge Economy

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis upon the need for universities to contribute to the economic, social and environmental well-being of the regions in which they are situated, and for closer links between the university and the region. This book brings together a cross-disciplinary and cross-national team of experts to consider the reasons for, and the implications of, the new relationship between universities and territorial development. Examining the complex interactions between the 'inner life' of the university and its external environment, it poses the question: 'Can the modern university manage the governance and balancing of these, sometimes conflicting, demands'? Against a backdrop of ongoing processes of globalization, there is growing recognition of the importance of sub-national development strategies - processes of regionalization, governmental decentralization and sub-national mobilization, that provide a context for universities to become powerful partners in the process of managing sub-national economic, social and environmental change. Allied to this, the continued evolution of the knowledge economy has freed up location decisions within knowledge-intensive industries, while paradoxically innovation in the production of goods and services has become still more 'tied' to locations that can nurture the human and intellectual capital upon which those industries rely. Thus cities and regions in which higher education services are concentrated have, or are thought to have, a competitive advantage. With universities facing ever increasing pressures of commercialization, which deepen the engagement between universities and external stakeholders, including those based in their localities, the tension between the university's academic (basic research and teaching) mission and external demands has never been greater. This book provides a long overdue analysis, bringing all the competing issues together, synthesizing the key conceptual debates and analyzing the way in which they have been experienced in different local, regional and national contexts and with what effects.

Contents: Introduction: Universities, 'relevance' and scale, Alan Scott and Alan Harding. Part 1 Local and Regional Engagement Strategies: Dilemmas and Options: External Engagements and Internal Transformations: Universities, Localities and Regional Developments, Beth Perry and Michael Harloe; Knowledge and Technology Transfer: Can Universities Promote Regional Development?, Morten Levin; Regional Development, Universities and Strategies for Cluster Promotion, David R. Charles; The International Network University of the Future and Its Local and Regional Impacts, Huib Ernste. Part 2 Knowledge Production, Management and the Academic Role: §1: University Governance: Actors and Identities: Who Are the Real 'Problem owners'?, On the Social Embeddedness of Universities, Davydd J. Greenwood; Regulation, Engagement and Academic Production, Tim May; Narrating the University: Values Across Disciplines, Dolores Byrnes; Academics in the 'Knowledge Economy': From Expert to Intellectual?, Todd Bridgman and Hugh Willmott. §2: Organising Engagement: Practices and Impacts: Building Bridges over Troubled Water – A Tale of the Difficult Cooperation between University and Region, Stephan Laske, Maximilian Egger and Claudia Meister-Scheytt; Community Engagement in Developing a New Campus: The Griffith University, Logan Campus experience, Christine Smith and William Lovegrove; Managing a University Merger in a Post-Industrial Context (the Ruhrgebiet), An interview with Lothar Zechlin, Founding Rector of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Bibliography; Index.

Alan Harding is Professor of Urban and Regional Governance in the School of Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute of Political and Economic Governance (ipeg) at the University of Manchester, UK. Alan Scott is Professor of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Stephan Laske is Professor in the Institute for Organization and Learning, and Dean of the School of Management at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Christian Burtscher is a Doctorial Student in Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.