Purpose, passion and perseverance

Universities in a contested space: The dominance of calculative accounting practices and the development of a research agenda

“…A major focus of the Lindgren et al's (2019) book is also on the applicability of Public Value to universities, which includes consideration of social sciences (Kitchener, 2019), knowledge exchange, partnerships between universities and other agencies and organizations (Shortal et al, 2019), and the impact of business travel by researchers (Medway et al, 2019). However, although the classic concept of universities as centers of learning may appear to be an excellent fit for Public Value ideas, as discussed in the earlier section, much of the recent literature suggests that universities often eschew traditional academic values and favor the adoption of business values and practices that regard the university as a business corporation (Du & Lapsley, 2019;Hicks & Sweet, 2019). Although Lindgren et al (2019) set out a wide range of potential settings for the development and application of Public Value, much of their guidance contains a distinct managerial dimension in relation to the evaluation of its attainment.…”