The entrepreneurial university and academic discourses: The meta‐synthesis of Higher Education articles

The innovative teaching, knowledge and technology production and societal service activities of academics are largely discussed within the entrepreneurial university discourse in Higher Education journals. Therefore, this research focuses on a meta‐synthesis of Higher Education articles to better understand the concepts of the entrepreneurial university and entrepreneurial academic. After the systematic elimination based on keywords and titles, 25 articles have been selected from the top 10 Higher Education journals in the SCImago Journal Rankings. Content analysis was performed on these articles to highlight the common operational areas in entrepreneurial universities and activities of entrepreneurial academics. The meta‐synthesis shows that, both for universities and academics, entrepreneurship is overwhelmingly characterised by the commercialisation of scholarly activities that enrich institutional income revenue as well as academics’ personal income. However, such an approach can distance universities from their mission of public good; so Higher Education administrators should create mechanisms that would allow both to take place in a balanced way.     

Faculty’s academic intellectual leadership: the intermediary relations with universities’ organizational components

In line with ‘the entrepreneurial university’ discourse, managerialism and performative culture brought new expectations to faculty such as developing online programmes/courses, carrying out training for professionals, obtaining research funds, leading projects in cooperation with industry/business, collaborating with colleagues from various disciplines, participating in international networks and representing their disciplines and institutions. These new duties and the traditional roles of academics, as knowledge producer and public intellectual, constitute their intellectual leadership. Given these new circumstances, it is important to investigate the influence of universities’ organizational components to understand how university managers can support academics’ intellectual leadership. This research aims to explore intermediary relations between communication, climate and managerial practice flexibility in universities and academics’ intellectual leadership. Quantitative data were collected from 937 Turkish faculty via an online questionnaire and analysed using Path analyses. Analysis revealed that faculty, by their intellectual leadership behaviours, contribute to the development of their disciplines, institutions and society, and that communication in universities has a strong impact on faculty’s intellectual leadership by mediation of the organizational climate and managerial flexibility regarding scholarly practices. Consequently, university managers should establish functional communication systems in their institutions to generate a positive atmosphere and to maximize the efficiency of institutional practices.