Conference Agenda

Recruitment participants constitutes a core element of organizational acting for the staff in adult and continuing education (Mania & Plechatsch, 2025). Against the background of voluntary yet highly selective participation as a characteristic of the field, recruiting participants represents a central challenge for educational providers (Caffarella & Daffron, 2013; Mania & Plechatsch, 2025). A range of factors are important in order to attract participants. In an educational field without curricular regulations, programs need to address individual needs while simultaneously responding to current topics broader and societal developments. Reaching different target groups is particularly relevant within ongoing discourses on unequal participation in adult and continuing education and on educational disadvantages.

Participant recruitment as a challenge, as highlighted by Mania and Plechatsch (2025) also applies to the field of financial (basic) education, whose overall relevance has increased significantly in recent years (Aprea et al., 2016; Lusardi & Mitchell, 2011). Financial education enables individuals to make informed financial decisions (Klapper & Lusardi, 2020). At the level of basic education, it comprises “the existential, basic, and immediately practical requirements of everyday action and life management in financial matters” (Mania & Tröster, 2014, p. 140). International studies point to overall low levels of financial literacy as well as to population groups with particular needs in the field of financial education (Klapper & Lusardi, 2020; Lusardi & Mitchell, 2011), including women, single parents and families, migrants and refugees, and adults with low levels of literacy (Arnold et al., 2018; Atkinson & Messy, 2011; Buddeberg et al., 2023). This primarily concerns individuals with low levels of education and low income. To date, little is known about how these target groups can be reached or which outreach strategies are effective in practice. We use the concept of vulnerability proposed by Grotlüschen (2021), which builds on Butler’s (2004) understanding of vulnerability as a fundamental human condition, while its “manifestations are unequally distributed”. Within this framework vulnerability is “not only about conceptualizing the self as relational, interdependent, and vulnerable, but always also about uncovering structural imbalances and making visible those groups that are particularly exposed to harm, marginalized, or rendered invisible” (Grotlüschen, 2021, p. 18). This paper aims to contribute to the systematization of participant recruitment and outreach strategies in adult financial education within the international (research) discourse. We focus on how target groups are constructed in the literature, whether they are described as vulnerable, how their need for (basic) financial education is defined, how programs and educational offers are described, and on the specific characteristics of recruitment strategies aimed at reaching these target groups. The theoretical framework for our analysis of our results is Brookfield’s (2005) “The power of critical theory: Liberating adult learning and teaching”. Brookfield builds on Marx’s analysis and adapts critical theory for adult education and organizational practices of adult education. He draws on concepts such as dominant ideology, ideology critique, and hegemony. Within this framework, ideology critique highlights how the constructs and categories used to make sense of everyday life can be understood as “ideologically framed” (Brookfield, 2005, p. 42). He combines the concepts with Freire’s (1994) critical pedagogy as well as with contributions from theorists such as Foucault (1980) and hooks (1994). Through analytical perspectives such as challenging ideology, contesting hegemony unmasking power or racializing and gendering criticality, his framework enables a critical examination of adult educational practices in relation to power, knowledge, and inequality. Against this backdrop, participant recruitment can be understood as a form of organizational acting that is informed by specific forms of knowing and underlying assumptions about target groups, needs, and vulnerability.

Department chairs occupy an intermediate position between faculty and central university leadership, managing issues of major concern for both groups and shaping the department’s future direction (Creaton & Heard-Lauréote, 2021; Degn, 2015; Nguyen, 2013). The academic leadership exercised by university department chairs has significant effects on institutional processes and outcomes (Akbulut et al., 2015; Álvarez-Álvarez, 2023; Hundessa, 2021). Universities often encounter difficulties in finding faculty willing to assume the role, given the substantial responsibility it entails (Kruse et al., 2020), usually without any specific prior training (Tietjen-Smith et al., 2020), and while simultaneously maintaining teaching and research responsibilities (Degn, 2015). This challenge has been even more pronounced for women, who continue to assume a considerable proportion of family responsibilities that may hinder their willingness or ability to take on leadership roles (Bystydzienski et al., 2017).

Previous studies have identified several challenges associated with departmental leadership: transforming departmental culture (Creaton & Heard-Lauréote, 2021); promoting new ideas and defining policies that contribute to departmental development (Creaton & Heard-Lauréote, 2021; Dewes & Bolzan, 2018); managing conflicts empathetically (Crawford, 2021); and maintaining enthusiasm, competence and personal satisfaction with the various managerial tasks performed (Bellibaş et al., 2016; Castro & Tomás, 2019).

In this context, the present study investigates the complexities currently faced by university department chairs in Spain, exploring their assessment of the role, their managerial responsibilities, and interpersonal relations within their units. The aim is to gain first-hand insights into the subjective perceptions of department chairs in active service, with particular emphasis on the challenges they confront. To this end, a structured interview protocol was developed to collect testimonies regarding their daily experiences.

Although it is assumed that the organisational social capital of interorganisational networks can impact their effectiveness, there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how organisational social capital at network level affects the effectiveness of Dutch regional networks in education.

Social capital theory posits that social relationships provide access to resources, such as advice, support and information, which can be exchanged, borrowed and leveraged to achieve individual and collective goals (Bourdieu, 1986; Putnam,1993). Building on the notion that well connected social relationships within and between organisations are vital to the exchange of knowledge, learning, improvement and innovation in organisations (Cross and Parker, 2004), organisational social capital has been coined as an important source for organisational advantage. Research has shown that organisational problems of coordination can be overcome by facilitating the flow of valuable resources between individuals (i.e., Adler and Kwon, 2002; Leana and Pil, 2009; Tantardini and Kroll, 2015).

Also in educational settings, organisational social capital has proven a useful concept to understand how a collaborating community could stimulate effective governance and policy implementation (Fredette and Bradshaw, 2012; Hooge, et al, 2019; Saatcioglu et al., 2011), not only within individual organisations, but also in interorganisational networks (Adler and Kwon, 2002). Based on the concept of organisational social capital, interorganisational networks are viewed as a set of social relationships, interactions, and resources, which offers a fruitful perspective for research into the transfer and sharing of valuable resources affecting the functioning and performance of the network (Inkpen and Tsang, 2005; Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998).

The interorganisational networks our research focuses on are regional networks in the field of education in the Netherlands, composed of school districts and other organisations in and around education. Various types of these networks were involved in our research project, divided across three themes: professionalisation, educational innovation and advanced care issues, and across three education sub-sectors: primary education, secondary education and intermediate vocational education. Furthermore, these interorganisational networks differ in the way they were established (a) through incentives via subsidies from the national government; (b) on the initiative of school districts, or (c) on a mandatory legal basis.

Our research question was:

(How) Does the organisational social capital of Dutch regional networks in education affects their effectiveness?

Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) conceptualize social capital in three dimensions: 1) a structural dimension, involving the configuration of the network in terms of patterns of relationships between individuals; 2) a relational dimension, referring to socio-emotional characteristics of mutual relationships, e.g. trust or care for, and 3) a cognitive dimension referring to the mental connectivity between network members e.g. shared vision or knowledge exchange. Here, we have limited the operationalisation of organisation social capital to the relational and cognitive dimensions, investigating these in survey research. The structural dimension is not included because that would require a methodologically different approach, involving social network analysis and measures such as density, centrality and hierarchy (Hooge et al., 2019; Saatcioglu et al., 2011).

Drawing on literature on governance effectiveness and decision-making processes, effectiveness of interorganisational networks has been operationalized as the extent to which these networks succeed in jointly 1) deliberating and weighing up interests, 2) taking decisions, and 3) monitoring compliance with decisions (Dholakia & Bagozzi, 2022; Jackson & Holland, 1998; Van Popering-Verkerk & Van Buuren, 2016).