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Abstract

One of the core elements of universities applied sciences (UAS) is its connection with professional fields. Lecturers establish relationships with private organizations and guide students in internships, projects, assignments and towards graduation. In this role, lecturers are confronted with developments in their field of expertise, thereby deploying their networks of relationships through their social capital. From these relationships, a certain reciprocity is created, resulting in possibilities for mutual support. We interviewed UAS lecturers via email about these relationships and the importance they attach to them. The theory of social capital is used to analyse the interactions between lecturers and companies or organizations in the professional field. Above all, these lecturers expressed interest in students’ learning processes and used social capital to achieve this aim, while indirectly recognizing its added value for the development of knowledge.

Keywords

Interaction knowledge exchange lecturer professional field social capital university of applied sciences

Introduction

With about half a million students, universities of applied sciences (UAS) are the largest supplier of highly educated professionals in the Netherlands (Vereniging Hogescholen, 2020). The special responsibility of Dutch UAS is that they contribute to the development of the professions they educate for (WHW Art. 1.3.3). Especially, lecturers play a crucial role in this development, as they are responsible for educating students. Lecturers generally recognize the importance of the relationship with the professional field. They understand that their role extends beyond delivering theoretical knowledge and that using this knowledge is a practical context, crucial for students' success. They appreciate the insights and expertise that professionals from the world of work bring to the classroom, and they often strive to incorporate real-world examples and case studies into their teaching.

Lecturers value opportunities for professional development that arise from collaborating with professionals. Engaging with the professional field allows lecturers to stay updated on industry trends, expand their own networks, and enhance their teaching methods by incorporating practical experiences into their curriculum. However, it's important to note that there may be knowledge gaps between educational and the application in professional field: the curriculum and content taught in higher professional education programs may not always align perfectly with the rapidly evolving needs of the industry. This origin of the knowledge gap can have different causes, from a time lag in updating curricula, the complexities of incorporating emerging industry practices into academic programs, or a lack of communication and collaboration between the involved parties. Addressing this knowledge gap requires ongoing communication, feedback loops, and collaboration between educational institutions and the professional field. A regular dialogue, joint research projects, advisory boards, and internships can help bridge this gap and ensure that educational programs remain relevant and responsive to the needs of the professional field.

How do lecturers use their interaction with the field and when do they find this interaction important and when successful. The theory of social capital can help explain the importance of these relationships. Social capital is about relationships, and social connections that individuals possess. In the context of higher professional education, social capital theory suggests that the relationships between educational institutions and the professional field contribute to the accumulation of social capital for both parties.

The knowledge gap, as research shows (Frederik et al., 2017; Hasanefendic, 2018) primarily addresses at university or program level, which is important and leads towards the question how this knowledge gap is addressed at the operational, meaning lecturers level

Theoretical framework

In the ever-changing landscape of higher education, universities are facing new challenges and old ones with greater urgency. As catalysts for development, universities play a crucial role in attracting well-educated individuals, facilitating knowledge transfer, and fostering the creation of new ventures, while also contributing to the competitiveness of established firms and organizations (Guerrero and Urbano, 2012). A university requires (visionary) managers who possess personal characteristics of leadership and are dedicated to fulfilling the institution's mission. These managers must navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing world and lead the internal transformation of traditional universities (Klofsten et al., 2019). Various initiatives, such as the HEI innovate community organized by the OECD and the European Commission, have been implemented to stimulate entrepreneurial development at European universities. These initiatives aim to cultivate entrepreneurial skills among students, faculty, and staff, and foster collaboration between academia and industry. By embracing the principles of the entrepreneurial university, higher education institutions can not only survive but also thrive in the face of uncertainty, contributing to regional development, and shaping the future of their communities. Cooperation, collaboration and interaction are key concepts in this, in other words: social capital. Social capital defined as ‘the networks, institutions, relationships and social customs that determine the quality of social interactions’ (Black et al., 2013, p. 203) in this sense, social capital constitutes both a resource and a measure of the value (Ramirez and Gordillo, 2014) or as the network of relationships between people in a particular society through which that society can function (Bourdieu and Richardson, 1986; Granovetter, 1973; Louis et al., 1996). It includes the effective functioning of social groups – lecturers and students in higher education – through interpersonal relationships (Coleman, 1986; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998), as mutual willingness and the ability to support each other is created (Sarkar et al., 2001). Granovetter (1973) showed that these networked relationships positively affect the diffusion of influence and information. Social capital is a valuable (re)source of social activity, providing its members with ‘capital owned collectively’ (Bourdieu and Richardson, 1986, p. 241; 258; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998).

Social capital and UAS lecturers

In addition to delivering lectures, lecturers engage in various interactions: they guide students in their theoretical and practical assignments, and they have contacts with professionals (inside and outside academia) and interact with students during internships. Lecturers are role models and coaches for students and their professional networks serve the students’ learning objectives. In addition, research highlights the benefit of social capital for a lecturer’s professional development (Baker-Doyle and Yoon, 2011; Coburn and Russell, 2008). Comparing lecturers with and without social support, lecturers with such support from professional communities are likely to make changes to their teaching practice (Louis et al., 1996), resulting in increased student learning (Bidwell, 2001). Collinson (2012) points to social capital as an antecedent of lecturers’ values, attitudes and confidence. Social capital has become an important lens through which to study lecturers’ networks and the relationship between lecturers and the university management (Angervall et al., 2018; Leat et al., 2006; Örtenblad and Koris, 2014).

Networks are resources for people (lecturers) and organizations (universities) that help them remain competitive and cope with the consequences of today’s complex economic and societal challenges (Lindgreen et al., 2012). There exist different perspectives on social capital, in this contribution we have chosen Coleman’s (1986) three different perspectives on social networks: structural, cognitive and relational. The first perspective, focusing on structural social capital, demonstrates how capital is shaped (e.g. its density, connectivity and hierarchy) and who is connected to whom (Adler and Kwon, 2002; Carmona-Lavado et al., 2010; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). It describes the link between people and/or organizations. The second and third perspectives, relational and cognitive, describe the network’s quality. Here, the actors’ preferences tend towards trust, camaraderie and a shared vision, which promote the transfer of knowledge between members (McFadyen and Cannella, 2004). From these perspectives, external relations focus on how and to what extent individuals, groups and organizations connect and create value as new relations, information, power and alliances or partnerships because of common interests (Bourdieu and Richardson, 1986; Portes, 1998).

Structural social capital

The structural dimension is about the connections between network members: it considers the connectivity, hierarchy and appropriateness of relationships in a particular entity (Fandiño et al., 2015), such as a group, an organization or a community (Davenport and Daellenbach, 2011). This network of connections gives access to people and organizations and leads to mutual obligations and expectations. Social capital resides in relationships, and relationships are created through exchange (Bourdieu and Richardson, 1986). The pattern of connections and the relationships built through them are the foundations of social capital (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998).

Cognitive social capital

The cognitive dimension explains how community members communicate with each other; it is about common language and frequently discussed topics. Cognitive social capital is a dimension of social capital involving shared representations, interpretations and meaning systems between parties (Claridge, 2018; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998) and is shown in common vocabulary and stories (Davenport and Daellenbach, 2011; Gooderham, 2007).

Relational social capital

The relational dimension explains the kind of relationships members have with each other and the extent to which members identify with the community. Relational social capital focuses on the qualities of personal relationships, such as trust, obligations, respect and even friendship (Gooderham, 2007). It concerns trust and reliability, norms and sanctions, obligations and expectations and identity and identification (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998).

Method

The impetus for this paper was a campaign initiated by the rector of a Dutch UAS. In this campaign, entitled ‘I’ll make a point of this!’, he tasked his lecturers to write down their priorities for the university for the coming year. A wide range of priorities was identified. However, the most common priority was the relationship with the professional field. The result of the rector’s campaign and the UAS’s legal responsibility both highlight the essential relationship between education and the professional field. The rector’s campaign specifically focused on its value for the lecturers. Sixty-three lecturers responded to the rector’s challenge, e.g., to write down their priorities for the university for the coming year. That gave us the opportunity to contact these lecturers about what they think is important about interaction with their professional field.

This self-selected group of lecturers were approached by email. The COVID pandemic played here a role. The questionnaire consisted of nine semi-open questions and an open one, focusing on their interactions with their professional fields in the contexts of education, research and governance and management. These email interviews concluded with an open question as to whether there was other matters, they considered important (see Appendix 1).

In total, we received 171 statements/responses to our interview questions (out of a potential 230) from 23 lecturers, representing all the faculties in the UAS. The faculty background was as follows:

• Social sciences: n = 4 (S1–S4),

• Business Management: n = 2 (B1–B2),

• Education: n = 3 (E1–E3),

• Health: n = 4 (Η1–Η4) and

• Technology: n = 10 (T1–10).

The responses were coded by identifying content related to the three different types of social capital using the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software program ATLAS Ti. Coding the interviews using this qualitative method revealed overlap in terms and patterns. Word choices sometimes indicated differences, sometimes similarities, and many informal terms, codes and categories emerged. Therefore, three-step coding was used in the analysis. In the analysis of the first order, the focus was on the respondent's term. This led to a huge number of categories. As the analysis progressed, the similarities and differences between the many categories were focused on (similar to Corbin and Strauss, 2014) axial coding). The main categories were distilled from this and encoded with five main codes:

• Structural social capital

о Contact (lecturers connecting with others)

о Professional relations (lecturers connecting to share intellectual capital)

• Cognitive social capital

о Shared stories (lecturers sharing common perspectives on how to interact)

• Relational social capital

о Culture (lecturers sharing language, narratives, values, attitudes and beliefs)

о Trust (identification and expressing connections as trust of others)

The final aspect we inventoried is the purpose of the use of social capital by the lecturers. Is this education oriented, or management or research oriented. This process led to 536 coded content fragments (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Operationalization of social capital: Coded content fragments.

Structural social capital	n	Cognitive social capital	n	Relational social capital	n
Contact	134	Shared stories	68	Culture	113
Professional relations	203			Trust	18
Total	337		68		131

Results

This study worked with a self-selected group of respondents, who indicated that the interaction and connection with the professional field is considered to be of great importance to them. This can be regarded as a group of pioneers in this field. This draws our conclusions, but does not make them less important, because it is precisely this group that shows a number of striking features. As our data derive from written responses to topics communicated by email, no check in the understanding of the topics – as was meant by the researchers – could be carried out. The written answers were used as input for the analysis.

The results show that the lecturers use and build their social capital with respect to the professional field, mainly in the domain of education and for their students’ benefit. We observed hardly any mention of social capital in relation to research and governance. When the lecturers did mention research and governance, they described it in relation to education. The following examples illustrate this:

(research) ‘The research centre works with the study programmes, whereby students conduct research at companies/institutions in the context of graduation or other educational projects and contribute this knowledge to educational innovation’. (T5)

(governance) ‘Consultation in the Programme Advisory Council has certainly led to the acquisition of knowledge, which has resulted in a partly renewed vision. Units of study have been updated’. (T10)

(governance) ‘The Field Advisory Board is an advisory body in which we test educational developments and discuss specific training themes’. (H3)

Most of the lecturers’ responses concerned structural capital – contacts and relations with the professional field (Table 1). Regarding the other two aspects of social capital, responses about the relational aspects rather than the cognitive aspects of social capital were most frequent.

Structural social capital

Most of the content of the responses related to the lecturer’s role as an intermediary between a company and a student. First and foremost, reference was made to contacts and professional relations, thus the structural social capital elements These contacts were the most frequent content of the responses regarding this type of social capital. We distinguished two types of contacts/professional relations: at the individual (e.g., ‘The contact with one of the companies where I supervise graduates is structural’ – T8) and the programme level (e.g. ‘Within the framework of Together Training, there is frequent contact with the professional field, both at the policy and the operational level and both horizontally and vertically’ – E1). It was concluded that all type of contact with the field are valuable. Multiple interviewees addressed this in their questionnaire.

Cognitive social capital

Common language and stories were mentioned in 12% of the responses and recognized as cognitive social capital. Lecturers shared ‘stories’ on various aspects of educational practice with the professional field.

• On aspects of the curriculum

‘The management of all training courses maintains an intensive relationship with the professional field. This has been formalized in an Opleidingsadviesraad [OAR; education advisory council] in which a professional field committee is regularly consulted to coordinate developments within the programme, for example, in curriculum adjustments or vision development’ – H2.

• On Evaluation

‘Educational advisory councils have led to knowledge acquisition, which has resulted in a partly renewed vision of whether education/units of study have been updated’ -T6

• On programme success

‘Advisory boards have certainly led to the acquisition of knowledge, which has resulted in a partly renewed view on whether education/units of study have been updated’ – T6

• And on pedagogical approaches

‘This has been formalized in an OAR (education advisory council) in which a professional field committee is regularly consulted to coordinate developments within the programme; for example, in curriculum adjustments or vision development’ – H2.

Relational social capital

In 24% of the lecturers’ responses, the relational aspects of social capital concerned ‘trust’ and ‘culture’. Most coded fragments referred to ‘culture’, addressing both differences and similarities between the professional field and the educational world (e.g., ‘There are also other forms of intensive collaboration with the professional field. e.g., various communities of practice have been established in which education is also offered at the faculty itself in close collaboration with the professional field’ – H2). Trust between lecturers on the one hand and students and representatives from the professional field on the other was mentioned only in a few coded fragments (e.g., ‘I see contacts over the years with the Logistics Management Association; this creates a relationship of trust and depth of the conversation and reasonable insights’ – T3). Another example of relational social capital came from teacher training: ‘In recent years, training for practicality has shifted to training in practice in the form of training in the secondary school. The programme has many contacts with the trainers in the school who supervise and assess the students, and teacher educators fulfil the role of the institute. Training Together in Amsterdam has been developed together with the field’ (E1). Technology yielded the following example: ‘This training is successful because the distance between trainer and student is minimal. After all, the trainer works as a teacher in the school’ (T2).

Discussion

Lecturers establish relationships with private organizations and guide students through internships, projects, assignments and graduation. In this role, they are confronted with developments in their field, which creates opportunities. In general, UAS lecturers focus mainly on education and students in their interactions with their professional fields. The student’s learning experience comes first. Social capital acts as a stimulant to enable and enhance students’ learning outcomes or academic success. Surprisingly, none of the respondents mentioned professional learning about developments in the field by supervising students, as also observed by other researchers (Gooderham, 2007; Sandefur and Laumann, 2009).

Our study shows that lecturers’ contacts and professional relations are used for the benefit of students. Lecturers of teacher training courses explained their interaction with the field as a fixed pattern: training in practice takes the form of training in the school, where the in-school trainers supervise and assess the students. Students do an internship for one or more days every week for 4 years.

Structural social capital (i.e. having access to relationships, persons and organizations) is a significant aid to UAS lecturers in gaining experience in their fields (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Sandefur and Laumann, 2009). From the lecturer’s perspective, the student’s professional experience, internship and encounter with the work environment are cited as reasons for the success of the relationship with the work field.

Virtually no difference was found in characteristics between the various educational sectors, whether social sciences, business management, education, health and technology. For their interactions with their fields, lecturers use a cognitive social capital position. Our data shows that examples and concepts from their practice build and share ‘common grounds’ (Davenport and Daellenbach, 2011). This refers to the development of cognitive elements that allow communication and contribute to a group ‘identity’ between lecturers and professionals (Claridge, 2018; Fandiño et al., 2015).

Relational social capital is used for organizational purposes and vice versa. In addition, the relational characteristic of social capital, in the form of group norms/culture, identification (belonging) and mutual trust (Claridge, 2018; Lindgreen et al., 2012) was recognizably present in the lecturers’ responses. The responses show that the value of ‘trust’ of the interaction with the professional field lies in accessibility for students in that field. Above all, the interaction is meant to allow the student to gain experience and learn through exercises and encounters with the professional environment.

Social capital is the value a network has for a person or organization (Coleman, 1988). This value was acknowledged by the respondents as an important factor in UAS education. Assembling a network build on many contacts that often last for many years.

Lecturers use teaching language and an educational approach to share their experiences with students. Relationships are also sometimes used to improve the curriculum. How identification with the professional field plays a role differs per education sector. Its role in technology and economic education is limited, while in teacher training and healthcare it is an important characteristic of the social relationship. As mentioned, the answers showed a certain overarching theme in the use of social capital, that it is mainly about the student’s experience of success in professional practice. Surprisinlgy, virtually no other added value was mentioned in the answers.

Another striking element in the answers was that lecturers only sporadically exchange knowledge with the professional field. When this was mentioned at all, this led to little or no dissemination of acquired knowledge within the courses or with fellow lecturers.

A required characteristic of a UAS programme is that lecturers provide up-to-date education. Yet the lecturer’s knowledge enrichment was mentioned as an added value in only two of the 171 answers received. This is a topic for further research.

Conclusion

This study set out to assess the value for lecturers of their interactions with their professional fields. The results show that the value is associated with the students and the educational programmes. The lecturer is an intermediary between the student and the professional field. They build relationships and bridge cultures between the educational world and the professional field by sharing and communicating stories about the curriculum and the learning process of the students.

Nonetheless, some limitations must be mentioned. This study interviewed a limited group of lecturers from an urban UAS with wide-ranging curricula. The discussion topics arising from our results cannot therefore be extrapolated to specialized UAS or UAS outside large Dutch metropolitan areas.

As our results show, the lecturers do not use their interactions with their professional fields for research and management purposes. Since lecturers at UAS have little research experience (Hasanefendic, 2018), this aspect should be further explored among professors at UAS, who do have a research role. Additionally, our results indicate that managing the interface between education and the professional world is not seen as a responsibility for lecturers. This finding suggests that there is potential for further research to investigate and address the challenges and opportunities associated with bridging the gap between academia and the professional field.

Overall, the paper highlights the importance of lecturer interactions with the professional field, emphasizes the role of lecturers in building relationships and cultural bridging, identifies limitations of the study, suggests avenues for further research, and underscores the need to explore the research and management roles of lecturers and the responsibilities of managers in higher education.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - The interaction of lecturers and their professional fields - a social capital approach

Supplemental Material for The interaction of lecturers and their professional fields - a social capital approach by Hans Frederik, Peter van der Sijde in Industry and Higher Education.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Hans Frederik

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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