Context & rationale
Since 2018, Chilean universities have faced growing demands to evaluate and evidence the impacts and outcomes of University Community Engagement (Vinculación con el Medio, VCM). These requirements are reshaping how engagement is governed and organised, and they may also generate new tensions around institutional priorities and the everyday organisation of academic work.
GO (General objective)
GO: To understand and explain how Chilean universities have responded organisationally to the evaluation and measurement of VCM impacts and outcomes since 2018, and what effects these changes have had on academics’ community engagement work.
SO (Specific objectives)
GO: To understand and explain how Chilean universities have responded organisationally to the evaluation and measurement of VCM impacts and outcomes since 2018, and what effects these changes have had on academics’ community engagement work.
SO (Specific objectives)
- SO1: To characterise transformations in the political economy and governance of the Chilean higher education system before and after the 2014–2018 higher education reform, and to examine their implications for VCM.
- SO2: To determine how universities at the level of organisational structure and institutional culture adapt to the evaluation and measurement of VCM impacts and outcomes, with particular attention to how these changes are justified and implemented.
- SO3: To examine how academics understand and incorporate the requirements for evaluating and measuring VCM impacts and outcomes introduced since 2018, and to identify the strategies they deploy to address this new institutional environment.
- SO4: To analyse the tensions that have emerged since 2018 between requirements to evaluate and measure VCM impacts and outcomes, institutional priorities, and the relevant external environment, and how these tensions affect the organisation of academic work related to VCM.
Project products (ongoing)
Peer-reviewed publications, case-based evidence on organisational change, and practical institutional/policy guidance listed in the publications section below.
Peer-reviewed publications, case-based evidence on organisational change, and practical institutional/policy guidance listed in the publications section below.