Faculty virtue and research capacity-building in the context of poorly funded universities: the case of the Royal University of Phnom Penh

Abstract

A nation's capacity to absorb and produce knowledge is increasingly linked to advancing its social and economic well-being. While the bulk of research attention has focused on knowledge management in the private sector, universities worldwide continue to play pivotal roles in developing the human capability to work with knowledge. This article draws on a qualitative case study of a public flagship, comprehensive university in a developing nation in Southeast Asia to identify existing research capacity strengths and the hopes some academic faculty and administrators have for the future in a resource-limited and politically constrained context. It points out that faculty virtue may be the basis on which research capacity can develop when gaps in organizational processes, physical resources, and outside support exist. The findings have relevance for richer and poorer nations alike, as rapidly changing economic conditions threaten levels of funding to universities around the world.

Keywords:

• research capacity-building
• virtue
• universities
• developing country
• Cambodia

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research came from a lecture-research grant from the US Fulbright Scholar Program. The authors want to thank the leaders of the Royal University of Phnom Penh for the opportunity to conduct this research. We are very grateful to the interviewees for their valuable time and reflections. Finally, we thank all other people who provided us with data for this study.

Notes

1. We consider culture to be webs of meaning that are both socially constituting and socially constituted. The webs of shared meanings that characterize groups of people are historically produced, so that each of us is the product of an individual history that is itself intertwined with larger sets of economic, political, social, and cultural processes. Thus, no cultures exist outside of history or without a history, and ‘no culture or society [exists] “with its own structure and history” to which world-historical forces arrive' (Roseberry 1989, 13). What is more, each of us is a part of multiple changing webs of meaning that overlap, meld, and contradict each other. The area now known as Cambodia and the Khmer people who predominate in that nation have been influenced over their long history by multiple religions, ideologies, and events.