Understanding the Regional Engagement of Universities from a Stakeholders’ Perspective: The Case of the University of Thessaly, Greece

Abstract

International literature pays vast attention to the role and the regional engagement of universities as a facilitator of sustainable regional development. Most papers use top-down approaches by looking at how well conceptual models of a university’s role fit any case study considered or by measuring predefined dimensions of university engagement. The present paper prioritizes the stakeholder views and provides a framework for revealing the critical dimensions of the university’s regional engagement from a bottom-up perspective. The region of Thessaly is selected as a case study, and the university’s engagement is conceptualized by a four-dimensional framework that considers the university’s contributions, student roles, beneficiaries, and barriers. Then, through a survey, relevant items are provided to stakeholders to formulate any potential engagement factors. The factors are extracted using the principal component analysis, and then the consensus of different stakeholders on their response patterns is then also evaluated with relevant statistical tests. In practical terms, the analysis shows that a capable number of factors could be formulated under each dimension of the framework and that there are not many significant differences in stakeholder perceptions, regardless of their institutional role. In theoretical terms, the identified factors may act as a baseline for any future relevant evaluation.