Doing and Valuing Research at Universities of Applied Sciences

Within the last decades, scholars depicted significant transformations of cultures, practices, and contexts of contemporary research (Gibbons et al. 1994; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1992; Ziman 1996; Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1998). At the core of these changes is an increased orientation of research towards the needs of industry and society (D'Este et al. 2018) and a changing role of universities and higher education in society. The idea of an “entrepreneurial university” with an increasing emphasis on its “third mission” (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1998) emerged. In Austria, the universities of applied sciences (UAS) sector was established to address the interface between the academic and the economic world. Given their focus on teaching and research that is oriented towards applicability in professional fields and industry (Kastner 2014, Hackl 2008), UAS match this ideal of the entrepreneurial university in many respects. However, 25 years after foundation, UAS are still often perceived as “second-tier institutions” (Hallonsten 2012, p. 79) with a certain lack of academic reputation. Today, the challenge is to find a sustainable identity between application and scientific orientation, to strive for scientific reputation and to fight against marginalization, without losing the connection to local industry and vocational fields (Kastner 2014; Bobik 2013; Prisching 2013; Paier 2012).

This projects applies and STS perspective that puts UAS researchers as agents of knowledge production in the centre of its analysis. At the core of the project will be the question of how the epistemic settings of UAS shape researcher’s interests, their ways to produce knowledge and their actions in social contexts in science. Further, it stresses how UAS researchers themselves re-construct the context of UAS research, its structures, rationales, actors and values. By addressing these issues, it may contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of academic research in understudied non-elite, non-university environments (Fochler 2016; Lam 2010; Hallonsten 2012). These environs are of particular interest as they are charged with conducting economically and societally relevant research embedded in a complex system of societal imaginaries, policy discourses, normative expectations, symbolic orderings and institutional structures (Felt 2009a).

Ansprechperson: Stefanie Sterrer

Projektaktivitäten

Publikationen & Konferenzbeiträge

Sterrer, S. (2024): Competition of Narratives: Deciphering the Debates on Research at Universities of Applied Sciences in Austria, fteval Journal for Research and Technology Policy Evaluation, Vol. 56, pp. e2, 1-23.

Sterrer, S. (2023): How do stories about research tacitly govern epistemic realities, EAIR 45th Annual forum 2023, Linz.