Finer Student Engagement via Quality and Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Education

Stakeholder Approach In Education

The notion of stake holding has recently come up more frequently – not only in management literature, but in policy studies in general and education in particular (Maassen and Cloete 2002, Marstein 2003, Neave 2002). The Norwegian political scientist Johan P. Olsen mentions stakeholders as a part of the service enterprise model, and points out that the education institution is dependent upon external actors (Olsen 2000). However, the core issue remains ‘quality in education’. Moreover, this stakeholder approach may actually threaten university autonomy and academic freedom, which are the true genesis of ensuring quality in education. Hence, the need for a holistic review of this much welcomed approach to quality of education. Theoretically, the term stakeholder in management literature has had two main consequences for how companies and their relations with the surrounding world have been analysed. First, the number of actors and groups of actors has increased, i.e. stakeholders that the companies have to take into consideration. Second, the companies have to pay attention to the stakeholders’ values and beliefs (Neave 2002). The subject of stakeholder theory has traditionally been the company. When the theory is applied to education institutions, this implies that the term itself expands to take other important external actors and networks into account (Maassen 2000). Much of the literature on stakeholders in education is on the one hand closely related to strategic management and concentrates on the importance of stakeholders (Burrows 1999, Goedegebuure et al. 2006, Goedegebuure and Lee 2006). On the other hand, stake holding is perceived to be part of the increasing managerialism in education and thereby perceived as something new (Neave 2002, Maassen 2000, Amaral and Magalhães 2002). The motivation to explore the stakeholder concept over time – as applied to a education– is, to see whether any difference in quality is made due to stakeholder influence. Applied to education, stakeholder theory can clarify how these HEI relate to their environment and shed light on the changes taking place in education.