Promoting Academic Engagement: University context and individual characteristics

This paper aims to explore the impact of organizational context on individuals’ industry activities in Chinese universities. Academic engagement, which includes collaborative research, contract research, consulting and other informal outreach activities, is posited as being jointly determined by organizational and individual level factors. Based on 564 Chinese scientists’ survey responses, our results show that scientists perceiving their university as having a strong entrepreneurial mission or supportive policy context are more active in academic engagement. This relationship is, however, moderated by individual-level factors. Specifically, entrepreneurially oriented university mission and supportive policy are more strongly associated with intra-individual differences in academic engagement for junior scientists, and for scientists with established personal networks to industry. Our analysis also shows that several individual-level predictors of academic engagement identified in studies set in Europe and the US carry over to the Chinese context.