Higher Education Institutions and Multistakeholders’ Engagement: A Longitudinal Study of an Anchor Institution's Legitimacy and Dynamism

Higher education institutions (HEIs) often serve as the social glue of a community. They are place-bound institutions with strong regional ties that typically play a crucial role in shaping the socioeconomic development of local ecosystems. Although their role as anchor institutions—large institutions that impact community life and economies over generations—is clear, there are few studies on how these universities actually evolve. How do their structures change over time? And what, if any, are their strategies for maintaining their status as an anchor institution? This research presents a longitudinal case study spanning a seven-year period in the life of the University of Turin (UniTo), a large generalist university in Northern Italy. During this period, UniTo successfully transitioned from an ivory tower into an entrepreneurial university and a civically engaged institution embedded in its local region. Our analysis identifies the main challenges in evolving from one model to the other, along with the strategies used by UniTo to both face these challenges and maintain its status as an anchor institution. Our findings show that, in the HEI sector, an institution's organizational structures need to be dynamic. Structured, top-down relationships, such as those between the institution and the municipality, need to work in tandem with spontaneous, bottom-up one-to-one relationships. Overall, what emerges from this research is a new concept of legitimacy, called
anchored legitimacy
, that is built on both spontaneity and structuralism and persists over decades and centuries.