Higher education and its communities Interconnect

Authors: Ben Jongbloed Jürgen Enders Carlo Salerno

Publish Date: 2008/04/18

Volume: 56, Issue: 3, Pages: 303-324

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Abstract

Universities everywhere are being forced to carefully reconsider their role in society and to evaluate the relationships with their various constituencies stakeholders and communities In this article stakeholder analysis is put forward as a tool to assist universities in classifying stakeholders and determining stakeholder salience Increasingly universities are expected to assume a third mission and to engage in interactions with industrial and regional partners While incentive schemes and government programmes try to encourage universities to reach out more to external communities some important barriers to such linkages still remain To fulfil their obligation towards being a socially accountable institution and to prevent mission overload universities will have to carefully select their stakeholders and identify the ‘right’ degree of differentiation For the university thinking in terms of partnerships with key stakeholders has important implications for its governance and accountability arrangements For the future of the universities we foresee a change towards networked governance and arrangements to ensure accountability along the lines of corporate social responsibility In order to further explore some of these concepts and to empirically investigate the tendencies suggested here this article proposes an ambitious research agenda for tackling the emerging issues of governance stakeholder management and higher education’s interaction with societyThis article reflects on the interconnections and interdependencies between higher education society and economy Higher education is interacting with an increased number and variety of communities and each of these has its particular demand on the higher education sector This has resulted in new and revised relationships between higher education institutions in short universities and their external communities or stakeholders These relationships have local regional national and international ingredients eg Dill and Sporn 1995 Castells 1996 Clark 1998 Huisman et al 2001 Enders 2004 OECD 2007 Such interconnections and interdependencies relate to both the external functions of higher education for example in terms of the economic and social functions it carries out and the services in terms of teaching research and knowledge transfer The economic expectations placed on higher education reflect both the knowledge and skills needs of workers in modern knowledgebased economies and the demands for relevance in research and knowledge creation that underlie the successful development of these economies Castells 1996 Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1997 Enders and Fulton 2002 The social expectations placed on the university reflect the centrality of educational credentials to opportunity and mobility structures in modern societies and the access to such structures among for example different social classes ethnic groups and geographical regions Shavit and Blossfeld 1993 Tight 2003We will place this topic within the discussion on the wider role and function of the university The discourse on the role—or the idea see Rothblatt 1997—of the university has shifted since the postwar years Geiger 1993 In order to secure their place in the modern knowledgebased economy universities everywhere are being forced to carefully reconsider their role and the relationships with their various constituencies stakeholders or communities This in turn translates into identifying stakeholders classifying them according to their relative importance and having done that establishing working relationships with stakeholders How a university or indeed its many constituent parts proceeds to identify prioritise and engage with its communities reflects the evolution of the university One may argue that the outcome of this process of stakeholder engagement will have important implications for the university’s chances for survival A careful study of such processes the forces that drive them and their impacts on the internal workings of the university seems to be both timely and warrantedSuch a study is also timely since the contemporary university suffers from an acute case of mission confusion Many universities are taking on similar ideals while suboptimally allocating their scarce human and physical capital The multitude of communities both traditional and emerging with which universities now engage demand a more clearly articulated strategy for understanding and managing stakeholder ie community relationships One plausible consequence is that such demands will require a new governance and accountability approach highly professional management and a rethinking of the university’s business concept—that is the way in which the university creates value and how it assesses its value de Boer et al 2007 Some evidence may be found in the many specialised functions and management systems that one sees emerging to handle the universities’ response to external demands Such functions appear to play a bridging role between the university and particular communities Understanding universities as complex social actors is key not just to build more efficiently functioning universities but also for identifying the unintended consequences and possible pitfalls that may emerge through the adoption of new approaches An engaged university may be a driver of innovation but it may also be one that fosters the commodification of higher education placing the private good character of higher education above the public good Enders and Jongbloed 2007As observed by Georges Haddad quoted in Neave 2000 p 29 the term university finds its origin both in legal Latin “universitas” meaning “community” and in classical Latin “universus” meaning “totality” These days the university’s communities indeed may be said to encompass a great number of constituencies Internally they include students and staff the community of scholars administration and management while externally they include research communities alumni businesses social movements consumer organisations governments and professional associations Geographically the university’s varied communities tended to be in near proximity to its physical campus Today though advances in information technology have made it possible for even the remotest higher education institution to tap into communities on the other side of or even dispersed around the entire globeImplicit in this description of communities are notions of relationships environment expectations and responsibilities A particular community is relevant for the university only if there is some expectation on both sides ie the university and the community that some service can be rendered or a mutually beneficial exchange a transaction can take place This illustrates that the concept of community is close to the stakeholder concept The stakeholder concept originates from the business science literature Freeman 1984 The concept may be traced back to Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” Its modern use in management literature comes from the Stanford Research Institute that in 1963 introduced the term to generalise and augment upon the notion of stockholder as the only group to whom management need be responsive Originally the stakeholder concept was defined as “hose groups without whose support the organisation would cease to exist” A more modern definition of stakeholders is “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm’s objectives” Freeman 1984 p 16 Freeman argues that business organisations should be concerned about their stakeholders’ interest when making strategic choicesThe communities—or stakeholders—that a university is expected to respond to consist of organisations and groups of individuals They will often posses a number of common characteristics Most stakeholders have a human scale the members of a group of stakeholders often share a common identity in the sense of belonging together or sharing a common culture or location with certain shared obligations both on the side of the members as well as on the side of the university In higher education the most important or core community would be the students Another important stakeholder is the government As the main funder of higher education it would like to ensure that higher education meets the interests of students and society in generalWhile we may agree that government is an important stakeholder this by no means suggests that government represents a welldefined and clearcut influence on higher education institutions While the basic function of higher education may be seen as being responsible for the transmission of knowledge to the younger generation and the advancement of fundamental knowledge the fact is that today higher education interacts with many other public policy domains This implies that ‘government’ represents many other communities of interest It is not a unitary stakeholder Next to the area of training and research higher education interacts with areas like health industry culture territorial development and the labour market Therefore other ministries next to the Education Ministry affect the higher education agenda Each of these ministries represents different stakeholder groups In fact one may argue that higher education is in the unique position of being the sector where the various demands are integrated—where it is all “joined up” Benneworth and Arbo 2006 p 91

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