Between good intentions and urgent stakeholder pressures: institutionalizing the universities' third mission in the Swedish context

Abstract

There is a widespread recognition across Europe, amongst policy-makers, university managers and scholars, that universities’ societal roles (the ‘third mission’) are increasingly important. As universities become increasingly strategically managed, it is perhaps unsurprising that attention has turned towards the strategic management of this third mission. Universities risk becoming ‘overloaded’ with these missions and are forced to choose to dilute their strategic focus or only focus on a limited number of these missions. The third mission risks being regarded as a desirable but not an essential duty and therefore is unlikely to be an institutional focus.In this paper we therefore ask how can the third mission be meaningfully institutionalized given the pressures on university managers to focus on other areas. We explore this with reference to a detailed case study of a provincial Swedish university, Sjöstad University, with a long-standing commitment to creating a societal impact. We explore how Sjöstad University has created an impact, and then the tensions this raises for key university stakeholders, internally and with external partners. We then reflect on the institutionalization of the third mission and call for further consideration of how external stakeholders can provide universities with a strategic space to institutionalize the third mission.

Keywords:

• university missions
• university strategic mission
• university third mission
• engaged teaching and research
• university structure

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the time of the project supervisor at the funding institution, and the project team, as well as over 40 interviewees for their time, efforts and candour in supporting the overall research project. The authors would also like to thank Romulo Pinheiro for his encouragement in submitting the manuscript and his and the other guest editors’ comments on draft versions of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Jerker Moodysson, Deputy Director, CIRCLE, Lund University, for an illuminating correspondence. Any errors or omissions remain the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paul Benneworth is a senior researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

Harry de Boer is a senior researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

Ben Jongbloed is a senior researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

Notes

1. In this paper, we as authors construct a set of tensions which are in reality conceptual analyses, and there is a risk that they can be read as a criticism of real university and individual practices. To make it clearer that we are dealing with a stylised analysis, we have anonymised the case study and we use nicknames and omit details that make it easy to identify the university.

2. Interview comments in Section 5 have been reconstructed by the authors on the basis of contemporaneous notes.