Bringing together engineering and equestrian sports: Exploring how a university initiates academic engagement with society

• Within the extensive literature on university-industry interactions, one recent and influential stream of literature defines academic engagement with industry, and differentiates it from commercialization. This paper examines academic engagement with society and industry in a broad sense, by focusing on an area where interaction did not previously exist and where stakeholders do not have a tradition of interacting with universities. Bringing together engineering and equestrian sports in a European university constitutes the case study. The empirical material used includes 15 interview transcripts, field notes from 9 observations and document studies of 426 newspaper, articles and press from the period 2011-2017. We focus on how academics create the engagement with society, and the stakeholders, e.g. the process of developing the actual knowledge-related collaboration. Contrary to expectations, the main activities are related to education, but organized by individual researchers, and the university embeds what was initially an informal organization into a more formal organization, because the initiative attracted much public attention and potentially a target group for recruitment (e.g. female students interested in the overlap of engineering and equestrian sports).

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

academic engagement

equestrian sports

engineering

universities

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)