The existence of conflicting messages on the role and status of the university is linked to a wider paradox of values about science in society. Value is attributed to science and assumed by the university in the context of the move to knowledge‐based economies and societies, yet this has not been accompanied by a systematic and balanced debate about the values that should underpin socio‐economic change. Questions are then raised about both the effectiveness of public policy and the role of (...) universities in society. A reconnection between the application and production of knowledge is needed, as well as the reinsertion of a normative framework for guiding and shaping change within universities. Only under such conditions can a meaningful debate on the roles of universities as places of expectation and spaces for reflection be realized. (shrink)

This paper takes up the themes in the articles and examines not only the environmental changes that are taking place in relation to universities, but also the dynamics of their organizational implications. It argues that there are parallels between managerially and academic professionalism in that both deny context. Arguing for a context-sensitivity that is not dependant, issues of space and governance become important in order to understand forms of knowledge and the relationship between the contexts of production and the contents (...) of what is produced. Universities have different capacities to play at the game of scales and they are judged according to abstract indicators that provide little or no opportunity for learning. Instead of examining these relations, expertise is assumed to be spatial, whilst universities transform themselves in the slipstream of imagined futures as if they were separate from the present and past. Understanding is lost in the process and so too are the opportunities to adequately examine the differences in types of knowledge's that are produced for sustainable futures in contemporary societies. (shrink)