ABSTRACT
This book has taken as its theme how, in the early twenty-first century, universities in Europe and the US are increasingly driven by political normative agendas that have innovation and economic development at their heart. It has shown that, although universities have long been involved in innovation and economic development, what is recent is their role as territorial actors. The rhetoric of the discourse around the economic agenda is revealing, not all of it having favourable connotations. Academic observers have used such epithets to describe universities’ current place in innovation and economic development as ‘mechanistic’ and ‘instrumentalist’ position, as ‘academic capitalism’, as ‘factories’. The book explores the changes within higher education and is critical of the normative agenda behind the growing convergence in orientation between institutions and industry. It highlights how pressure both from the state and from industry has produced new paradigms of accountability that now include responsibilities for regional development. It argues that one of the weaknesses of the current policy agenda is the focus on the elite or research universities, misattributing directions of causality and unrealistic expectations. Only recently has there been more debate on the long-term adverse consequences of some aspects of the current agenda, particularly the sustainability of high-quality research in the context of an increasing reliance on industry funding for research.
