Academic Staff Research Orientations in Uganda: A Study of Makerere University

Academic staff research orientations have become subject to growing interest in the context of research-led universities. Whereas a number of studies have explored research orientations in higher education, research literature on the subject deals typically with the topic in the context of European and American universities. As such, studies delving in the way academics conceptualize research orientations across disciplinary fields remain few, at least in the context of Sub-Saharan African research-led Universities. This paper uses the institutional theory as the guiding theory to explore the conceptualization of academic research orientations at Makerere University. With the help of semi-structured interviews with 12 participants from 4 academic disciplines, the interpretive paradigm was preferred for this paper because the study phenomena are interpretive. As such, I chose to use qualitative methods, in which things are studied in their natural settings and to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of meanings people bring to them. The study results revealed that although academics engage in basic, policy-relevant, community-oriented, and entrepreneurial research, they as well seem to strongly understand research in terms of donor rules that exert conformance pressures and expectations. Based on the study findings, the conclusion is that research at Makerere University is largely conceptualized in terms of the donor-driven orientation. Among others, I recommend that the University should selectively collaborate with donors to ensure that locally generated research agendas are not overridden by the interests of the donors.