Introduction

The literature on the entrepreneurial university has taken substantial shape since the 1980s but in a paradigm that places disproportionate emphasis on organisational change and evolution, while maintaining unexamined assumptions of competitiveness, innovation, and rationality. Little is known about how the entrepreneurial paradigm of university policies and practices is transmitted to the lifeworld of academics, alongside diverse voices and critical insights from dialogues within the academic profession. This paper re-examines ‘academic entrepreneurialism’ (AE) by exploring the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ in universities on the everyday work life of academics at flagship universities in three East Asian global cities. Dialogical interviews were conducted with 52 academics from various disciplinary, institutional, and generational backgrounds, supplemented by rigorous pre-interview documentary research on 100 official documents revealing how AE manifests in the institutional contexts of the three universities. The findings uncover competitive emulation leveraging AE for resources, advancement, legitimacy, and stability. However, organisational innovation convergence juxtaposes with academic profession differentiation. As sensemakers, individual academics navigate changing academia by adapting values, identities, professional learning, and career choices—potentially transitioning institutions, systems, or leaving academia. Academics experience and perceive academic meaning, life, and higher education changes variably by context, suggesting a ‘post-entrepreneurial university’ conceptualisation.

Research Objectives and Questions

This paper addresses two research questions:

(1) How does academic entrepreneurialism manifest in East Asian flagship universities’ institutional contexts and policies?

(2) How have these policies and practices impacted everyday work of academics from different disciplinary and institutional backgrounds?

Analytical Concept of the Research

The study employed sensemaking (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020; Weick 1995; Weick et al. 2005) to analyse how academics experience, interpret, and give meaning to their changing profession. Distinct from understanding or interpretation, sensemaking focuses on generating world interpretations. It involves continual reality construction through retrospective sense of situations (Weick 1995), via immersive sociomaterial practice worlds imbuing actions and identities with meaning (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020). Sensemaking constructs, filters, frames, creates facticity, and tangibilises subjectivity (Weick 1995: 14).

We propose academics as ‘sensemakers’ for AE-related changes in higher education. It involves identity, retrospection, social contexts, cues, information, and plausibility over accuracy (Weick 1995), understanding AE ‘practice worlds’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2020). Young academics perceive academia as meaningful wholes; experienced ones renew work meaningfulness for action. Sensemaking draws on social cues, communications, expectations, beliefs, and experiences, often post-event via reflection for future decisions. It seeks plausible narratives, not accuracy.

An iterative three-stage thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) examined AE’s impact. First: open coding of documents and transcripts for AE-related issues, concerns, debates, tensions. Second: organising codes into categories capturing voices and silences (Nowell et al. 2017). Final: broader themes encompassing insights and perspectives. First author coded with assistants; refinements via author discussions. Authors independently analysed final codes/themes, compared for >90% consensus; discrepancies resolved through discussion.

This study drew on the novel method of dialogical interview (Tanggaard 2009; Wells 1999; Wells et al. 2021) to research the dialogic relations between institutional change, academic life, and what it means to be an academic. The methodological philosophy posits that ‘truth’ is never finalised (Bakhtin 1986) but continually evolving through ongoing dialogue among participants with diverse perspectives. This approach emphasises a shift from seeking a singular explanation to a sensitivity to the distinctiveness and perpetual nature of interactions, dialogues, and the constructions of meaning. Engaging in deep listening to voices, as well as silences (Stauber 2017), the method is instrumental to offering a rich, comprehensive, and detailed description of intricate phenomena through diverse, decentred, and deliberate conversations about the powerful trends of academic entrepreneurialism (AE) and collaborative meaning-making. Rather than simplifying data into variables, the method was used to cultivate a dialogical space and persuasive discourses that recognise a multitude, complexity, and depth of voices (polyphony) with varied meanings (heteroglossia) and without imposing authoritative dominance (Bakhtin 1981: 343). The study is guided by a set of key principles for the iterative data collection and analysis processes: (1) creating a reflective ‘dialogical space’ that does not privilege any specific perspective a priori, allowing for the emergence of new meanings within the interplay of diverse voices; (2) deep listening to the voices of various discourse communities, and maintaining dialogicity throughout the gathering, documentation, and interpretation of interview data; (3) enabling each perspective to be voiced, and meanings to be constantly evolving through the ongoing dialogue of research interviews, data organisation, and analysis; (4) centring reflective practice at the core, with member checking, cross coding, and ensuring methodological rigour. By adhering to these principles, the researchers aimed to de-centre themselves, resist typology, and foster a significant shared space among the multiplicity of voices. We employed purposive sampling to recruit academics in different academic ranks and from different disciplinary fields or epistemological communities from the three universities for the dialogical interviews. Following ethics approval, the first and second authors invited academics to take part in online semi-structured interviews in 2022 and 2023. 52 academics participated in the interviews. The interviews lasted for 60 to 100 minutes. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The interview research was supported by a systematic review on 100 official documents examining how academic entrepreneurialism manifests in the institutional contexts and policies of the three case-study universities.

Documentary analysis revealed that East Asian flagship universities extensively incorporate border-crossing as organisational innovation, involving inter-field and inter-sectoral collaborations across (1) academia and external environments, (2) disciplines, and (3) public-private dichotomies. Competitive emulation (Levine and Mitchell 2024) and isomorphic changes respond to academic entrepreneurialism as these universities advance. Despite diverse voices, silences, and critical insights in the academic profession, as uncovered in interviews, these universities function as ‘innovative learning organisations’ within the university’s history (Frank and Meyer 2020). The study shows they embody an ‘assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984) amid entrepreneurial ‘winds’, intensifying dynamics of knowledge, ideational, material, discursive, and relational elements. Assemblage involves matching components or ‘agencer’ (DeLanda 2016) through alliances, symbiosis, and sympathy (Deleuze and Parnet 2002), making universities differentiated and pluralistic (Tsao et al. 2024). As assemblages, they host ‘small worlds, different worlds’ (Clark 1989) and academic tribes/territories (Becher and Trowler 2001), forming a ‘multiversity’ (Kerr 2001) of heterogeneous terms unified by co-functioning via a dynamic profession. This research illustrates a ‘post-entrepreneurial’ paradigm embodying a ‘carnival sense of the world’ (Bakhtin 1986), transforming academia through entrepreneurialism. The dialogical space fostered free interaction, revealing latent academic selves and reimagining dualisms. Entrepreneurial paradigms do not uniformly impact academics’ experiences; paradoxically, they differentiate and assemble the pluralistic profession. Yet universities remain united by purposes: advancing knowledge, education, societal progress, sustainability.

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