Higher education and its communities: Interconnections, interdependencies and a research agenda

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 society.

[1]  Mark Considine,et al.  The End of the Line? Accountable Governance in the Age of Networks, Partnerships, and Joined-Up Services , 2002 .

[2]  S. Garlick Engaging Universities and Regions: Knowledge Contribution to Regional Economic Development in Austra , 2000 .

[3]  Y. Lee The Sustainability of University-Industry Research Collaboration: An Empirical Assessment , 2000 .

[4]  Arvids A. Ziedonis,et al.  The growth of patenting and licensing by U.S. universities: an assessment of the effects of the Bayh–Dole act of 1980 , 2001 .

[5]  R. Freeman Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach , 2010 .

[6]  H. Brooks The fragile contract , 1997, Nature.

[7]  Peter Maassen,et al.  Inside Academia: new challenges for the academic profession. , 1996 .

[8]  D. Dill,et al.  Emerging Patterns of Social Demand and University Reform: Through a Glass Darkly , 1995 .

[9]  J. Enders,et al.  Blurring Boundaries and Blistering Institutions: An Introduction , 2002 .

[10]  H. Blossfeld,et al.  Persistent Inequality: Changing Educational Attainment in Thirteen Countries , 1994 .

[11]  Limits of change: cognitive constraints on “postmodernization” and the political redirection of science , 2000 .

[12]  M. Castells The rise of the network society , 1996 .

[13]  Guy Berger,et al.  The University and the Community: The Problems of Changing Relationships. , 1982 .

[14]  J. Enders,et al.  Higher education in a globalising world : international trends and mutual observations : a festschrift in honour of Ulrich Teichler. , 2002 .

[15]  Daniel Alpert,et al.  Performance and Paralysis: The Organizational Context of the American Research University. , 1985 .

[16]  D. Watson Universities and civic engagement: a critique and a prospectus , 2003 .

[17]  David Charles,et al.  Evaluating the Regional Contribution of an HEI: A Benchmarking Approach. Good Practice. , 2002 .

[18]  J. Enders Higher Education, Internationalisation, and the Nation-State , 2003 .

[19]  J. Goddard,et al.  Higher education and regions: globally competitive, locally engaged , 2007 .

[20]  S. Schwartzman,et al.  The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies , 1994 .

[21]  Jürgen Enders,et al.  Public-private dynamics in higher education : expectations, developments and outcomes , 2007 .

[22]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  A Triple Helix of University—Industry—Government Relations , 1998, Scientometrics.

[23]  Lawrence J. White,et al.  The Analytics of the Pricing of Higher Education and Other Services in Which the Customers Are Inputs , 1995, Journal of Political Economy.

[24]  Gordon Vinston,et al.  Subsidies, hierarchy and peers: the awkward economics of higher education , 2005 .

[25]  Terry Shinn Change or mutation? Reflections on the foundations of contemporary science , 1999 .

[26]  G. Neave Redefining the Social Contract , 2006 .

[27]  B. Clark Creating entrepreneurial universities : organizational pathways of transformation , 1998 .

[28]  J. Enders,et al.  Higher education, internationalisation, and the nation-state: Recent developments and challenges to governance theory , 2004 .

[29]  De tuinen van het hoger onderwijs. Scenario's voor 2010 , 2001 .

[30]  B. Kahin,et al.  The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and University—Industry Technology Transfer: A Policy Model for Other Governments? , 2006 .

[31]  Paul Chatterton,et al.  The Response of Higher Education Institutions to Regional Needs , 2000 .

[32]  Christian Rammer,et al.  Benchmarking industry—science relations: the role of framework conditions , 2001 .

[33]  P. Weingart From “Finalization” to “Mode 2”: old wine in new bottles? , 1997 .

[34]  D. Mowery,et al.  The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and University–Industry Technology Transfer: A Model for Other OECD Governments? , 2004 .

[35]  Jürgen Enders,et al.  PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM IN DUTCH HIGHER EDUCATION: THE ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE UNIVERSITY , 2007 .

[36]  Y. Lee,et al.  'TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER' AND THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY : A SEARCH FOR THE BOUNDARIES OF UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION , 1996 .

[37]  Robert Gradeck,et al.  Universities and the Development of Industry Clusters , 2004 .

[38]  Paul Stephen Benneworth,et al.  Understanding the Regional Contribution of Higher Education Institutions: A Literature Review , 2007 .

[39]  B. Jongbloed,et al.  From the entrepreneurial university to the stakeholder university , 2001 .

[40]  J. Enders,et al.  Higher Education in a Globalising World , 2002 .

[41]  Mark Warschauer,et al.  The information age: Economy, society and culture. , 1998 .

[42]  Ronald K. Mitchell,et al.  Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and What Really Counts , 1997 .

[43]  M. Castells The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture , 1999 .