Tues 5th March 2013 12.30-2.00pm
Dr. Pamela Yeow and Dr. Alison Dean, Kent Business School
Communities of Practice in UK Higher Education: A case study on networks and group effectiveness
UELT seminar room
Canterbury Campus
Many changes have taken place within the UK Higher Education sector recently, including decreases in government public funding, increased targets for widening participation, pressures for enhancing contributions to the ‘knowledge society’, introduction and increases in student tuition fees and research funding cuts suggesting that universities are under increasing financial pressure and limited resources to achieve a multitude of activities. We argue that university departments need to work collaboratively to meet these expanding and intensifying demands. This paper applies the ‘communities of practice’ approach to explore how informal and formal networks within the knowledge-intensive setting of the UK HE environment are organised. Such networks need to take on the ‘communities of practice’ approach in order to increase organisational performance. We explore how academic departments in a university can use their internal networks to address the challenges at work. One key challenge is bridging the perceived gap between teaching and research activities which are associated with different performance measures. The personal and positional power of leaders within academic groups can have an influence on the effectiveness of how these academic communities function and perform.