Marko Turk

Academics and Community Engagement: Comparative Perspective from Three European Countries

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on academics’ community engagement by focusing on the nature, extent and the evaluation of academics’ community engagement in three European countries – Croatia, Germany and Ireland – and their different social, cultural, political and economic contexts. Differences in contexts can be reflected in differences in the involvement of the university with wider community. A qualitative inquiry was deemed appropriate for the research which was designed to examine the (I) the nature and extent of academics’/participants’ public engagement in the community/society with non-economic stakeholders (other than business and industry) and (II) the status of their community engagement in the frame of institutional commitment to value that kind of activities and academics’ public engagement.

Research Management Competencies: Croatian Academics’ Perspective

The research on the academics’ competencies, primarily teaching competencies, has been present for many years now. On the other hand, studies on academics’ research management competencies have been almost completely absent. The main research question of this study was: How do the academics in Croatia assess the importance of the research management competencies? The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse the assessment of importance of the research management competencies on a sample of Croatian academics. The applied research method was an on-line survey, and the research instrument used was a survey questionnaire. The research included 1130 participants from seven public universities in Croatia. This paper will further analyse the differences in assessment with respect to the independent variables of sex, academic rank and research field of the research participants. The results indicate that the junior academics assess the research management competencies as statistically significantly less important in comparison with the senior academics. Additionally, men assess these competencies as more important compared with women. It should also be noted that there are differences between the academics from different research field (humanities, social sciences and arts versus natural and technical sciences). The data obtained are indicative and interesting particularly in the context of current higher education policies in Croatia, which among other issues, discuss the promotion procedures within the academic profession. In this context, it seems that research management competencies are going to be one of the important promotion criteria.