Abstract:

Stakeholders may be defined as any individual or group of individuals either impacted upon by the company or able to impact achievements of its objectives. Over the first decade of the 21st century, numerous international and national declarations have highlighted the need for greater involvement of universities in their social context and an increased accountability to society. The application of social responsibility in the field of higher education implies identification of the expectations of different stakeholders and establishment of means of dialogue with them. While performing their social functions, universities are forced to interact with more numerous and more varied stakeholders and to be aware of their expectations and requirements. These expectations need to be reflected in universities’ mission, vision, as well as primary and specific strategic goals and objectives in their strategies. The university strategy requires special devotion to explicit identification and mapping of stakeholders, their classification and their potential interests and requests towards the university.

This paper is concerned with identification of primary, secondary, and key university stakeholders, also proposing how they should be segmented and prioritized. In addition, the paper details factors that determine stakeholders’ priorities, their requirements and expectations both in the short run and the long run, as well as their different interests and satisfaction from interaction with the university. These tasks were performed with particular highlight on stakeholders from “business” category. In addition, stakeholder mapping was completed, as a way of determining who among stakeholders can have the most positive or negative influence on an effort, who is likely to be most affected by the effort, and how universities should work with stakeholders with different levels of interest and influence. The stakeholder analysis relied on the most frequently used method in the literature, which divides stakeholders into one of four groups, each occupying one space in a four-space grid: Apathetic (low influence, low interest), Defender (low influence, high interest), Latent (high influence, low interest) and Promoter (high influence, high interest). Methods used include systematic literature review and case study method, i.e. qualitative analysis of results of the interviews conducted in several European countries.

Keywords:

Stakeholder, university, identification, mapping.