The structuration of campus-community partnership: activities, contradictions, and organizational change

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Title The structuration of campus-community partnership: activities, contradictions, and organizational change
Publication Type dissertation
School or College College of Humanities
Department Communication
Author Rausch, Georgi Ann
Date 2012-08
Description In the United States, public universities must negotiate public responsibility with market interests, and are often under suspicion of being businesslike and detached from local community issues and concerns. Campus-community partnerships are gaining traction as a preferable way for public universities to bridge campus and community concerns. This dissertation is a qualitative case study of UPartner (UP), an organization that creates campus-community partnerships between a large public university and a community system identified by that university through a statistical analysis of zip codes that indicated underrepresentation at the university. In this dissertation, I explain my methodological perspective as an engaged advisor. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and historical research, I engaged with UP to understand how participants characterized their activities and strategized ways to change the university system. Using structuration theory as a framework, I explain how UP participants structure their activities and characterize the systems of campus and community. I discuss several discursive patterns and practices including Connection, Hopeland, Confusion, and Not Service/Outreach. I also discuss these patterns in light of their enabling and constraining qualities, and the extent to which they echo larger discourses concerning democracy and the market. I give particular focus to the activity of partnership, which is structured as Reciprocity, Sustainability, and Difficulty. Finally, I extend structurating activity theory's notion of contradictions to discuss several contradictions that UP participants encounter when trying to change the university system, including Deficit Discourses, The Marginalization of Community Based Research, and The Containment of UP. I explain each contradiction, and then show how UP participants attempt to overcome the contradiction through desired new discursive patterns.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Case study; Engaged; Organizational change; Partnership; Qualitative; Structuration
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name Doctor of Philosophy
Language eng
Rights Management Copyright © Georgi Ann Rausch 2012
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 1,112,252 bytes
Identifier etd3/id/1791
Source Original in Marriott Library Special Collections, LC8.5 2012 .R38
ARK ark:/87278/s6gf1892
Setname ir_etd
ID 195480
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6gf1892
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