A Stakeholder Approach to the Study of Management Education

A STAKEHOLDER APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION:

EXPLAINING THE THEORY AND CONCEPT

Abstract Submission for the Working Paper Track

4th Conference on HRD Research and Practice Across Europe

Toulouse, 23rd and 24th May 2003

Lynda M Stansfield

Bradford University School of Management

Emm Lane

Bradford BD9 4JL, UK

Tel: +44(0)1274 234335

Fax: +44(0)1274 235680

Email:

Jim Stewart

Nottingham Business School

Nottingham Trent University

Burton Street

Nottingham NG1 4BU, UK

Tel: +44(0)115 941 8418

Fax: +44(0)115 848 6512

Email:

This paper will examine the utility of adopting a stakeholder approach to the study of management education. Most management education research is conducted from a specific viewpoint, for example, identifying the advantages of a particular initiative to an organisation or the benefits of management education to individual managers. Taking a stakeholder approach means that a phenomenon may be viewed from the perspective of several parties simultaneously.

“Stakeholders” can be defined as those that have an interest of some sort or another (not necessarily financial) in the object of study. The stakeholder approach to research is multi-vocal in the way it provides an opportunity to hear the voices of a number of different parties who impinge upon, and are impinged upon by, a particular experience.

Stakeholder theory is not new. It has its origins in law, migrated to the field of strategic management and today has a pivotal place in the study of business ethics. It is a term that has become widely used, by politicians, industrialists and academics in areas as diverse as the environment, corporate governance and even state pensions. In this paper, the development of stakeholder theory, its main strengths and criticisms will be summarised. Difficulties with defining the term “stakeholder” will be examined (for example, Key, 1999, Clarkson, 1995), and the concepts of the “direct”, “indirect”, “primary” and “secondary” stakeholders will be introduced (Frooman, 1999, Jones, 1995). In particular, it will be demonstrated how the concept has been applied in the field of management development and now more recently in management education.

The paper will therefore describe the stakeholder approach, its use in empirical research, and its theoretical underpinning and background. It will explore the stakeholder concept’s relationships with individual psychology (for example, theories of motivation and perception), social psychology (expectations and attitudes), role theory, the “arena thesis” (Burgoyne and Jackson, 1997) and the emerging field of management learning. The stakeholder approach has already been applied successfully to studies in training and development and the evaluation of management development initiatives (for example, Mabey and Salaman, 1995; Thomson et al 2001; Burgoyne, 1994). In this paper, it is extended to the study of issues encountered in management education, for example, the examination of the tensions around its purpose, how it should be designed and delivered, who by and to whom, and indeed what outcomes should be expected. It will present a new model of the key stakeholders in management education, focusing on the dynamics between four main stakeholders: “commissioners”, usually organisations who sponsor management education programmes, often as part of the development of a “corporate university”, “consumers”, usually participants on those programmes, “providers” of programmes, be they educational or commercial entities, and “verifiers” of programmes, usually educational or vocational accrediting bodies. Empirical evidence to support this model will be presented, drawn from two recently conducted case studies, one set in a manufacturing organisation headquartered in mainland Europe and the other set in a members’ services organisation operating in the UK, as described in the following brief summary.

The Case Studies

Recently, we have conducted a pilot research study into the use of different styles of management education programmes based on two case studies, using the stakeholder approach. Details of these studies are reported elsewhere (Stansfield, 2002). However, below is a brief description of the stakeholder aspects of the study and summaries of the main findings, as an illustration of the application of the stakeholder approach to the study of management education.

Organisation X is a medium sized manufacturing organisation operating in the textile sector in the north of England. It is part of an international group that has headquarters based on continental Europe. It employs about 350 people on the British site in a range of capacities, including management, technical and shop-floor workers. A management education programme was devised, delivered and initially assessed by an independent provider and verified by an academic institution. The organisation sponsored the participants completely in terms of finance and time off to attend classes. The management education programme targeted junior to middle managers, those, in the opinion of the directors, “with potential for senior management in the future”. Participants were invited by the directors to take part. All participants were interviewed and fully briefed by the provider before signing up to the programme. The provider had conducted two prior meetings with the main board directors explaining and discussing the programme in detail and gathering enough information to customise and adapt the “core” programme to suit the client’s business needs.

Students went through a Certificate level programme first. There was a group size of about 12, and participants attended one day-long session every month for eight months. Following this programme, participants submitted their portfolios, which were assessed by the tutor and verified by a senior member of the university’s management department academic staff. Successful participants were then awarded a university Certificate in Management. Those successful students who wanted to progress moved on to the Diploma programme.

Organisation Y is a members’ advisory organisation. Members are small businesspeople, and the purpose of the organisation is to offer advisory and lobbying services to around 100,000 member organisations. This is a national organisation, organised through regional representation, with a headquarters in the north-west of England. It employs around 100 people, principally professionals and support staff. The management development programmes were at both Certificate and Diploma levels. The format of the programmes differed little to those designed for Organisation X, apart from the fact that case studies and examples were slanted towards a service sector organisation rather than a manufacturing one. Around 30 students went through the Certificate programme. As in the case above, successful students wishing to progress went on to the diploma programme.

We then proceeded to adopt a stakeholder approach to the research (for a detailed description of the stakeholder approach as a research method and for guidance in its application, we found Burgoyne’s 1994 chapter particularly useful). We started off by composing a general stakeholder map of the programmes. We then focused on the primary stakeholders (i.e. the organisation as commissioners, the students as consumers, the university as verifier, and the independent consultancy as provider). We then gathered data by in-depth long interviews with each of the stakeholder groups. The evidence taken from both case studies was analysed in order to identify key themes and issues. Here follow brief summaries of the main outcomes of the study from the perspective of each set of stakeholders.

To the Commissioner, the particular style of management education studied increases considerably the amount of influence and input that organisations have over that which they would normally have in respect of more conventional management education programmes. It gains the advantage in that work-related projects can be used as the learning vehicle. Not only do their staff learn using real live issues, the issues themselves may well become resolved as a result of the attention afforded to them. If the impact of the programmes on the organisation’s effectiveness is more overt in this way, then the organisation may find it easier to evaluate the investment it has made and politically the programme may well gain a greater degree of regard amongst the key organisational stakeholders than might otherwise be the case with open programmes.

To the Consumer, this style of programme gives them a way of using a way of learning that is more suited to the mature adult experienced manager. There is a greater degree of immediacy and relevance to learning that is work-related and work-based. The methods of assessment may well be better suited to adult learners, especially for those not experienced in more traditional methods, for example, examinations. The increased emphasis on personal lifetime development has proved to be particularly useful for mature adult learners. The portfolios have, for example, in many cases become “living documents” that are regularly revisited, revised and utilised to facilitate future development.

To the Verifier, the main advantages seem to have been to provide ways of extending a traditional management education offering in a novel and innovative manner. In the particular cases studied here, the university received an income stream by way of a licence fee for very little academic and administrative time and effort. The Provider did everything to do with the programme, including the marketing, apart from the essential quality control procedures. This is a very cost-effective way of delivering part of a business school’s portfolio. It also makes staff with the right mix of academic and commercial skills available to it without the need to employ them directly.

To the Provider, the approach makes available a strand of business that would be otherwise unavailable to the commercial consulting community. Several people who have the necessary academic and commercial skills do not wish to be formally employed in an academic institution but would like to do this kind of work. This style enables them to do so. The principals of provider organisations have the freedom to market, design, deliver and assess the programmes in their own ways without undue interference from academic bodies. However, they can avail themselves of necessary quality assurance processes to enable their programmes to have desirable and transferable qualifications attached to them. This is a very powerful marketing tool.

As can be seen, the various stakeholder groups had very different perspectives on the same phenomenon (the management education programme), and each has legitimacy through the use of a stakeholder approach. It is beyond the scope of this particular paper to go into the detail of the behavioural aspects of the study (i.e. how potential conflicts between the perceptions, expectations, rights and obligations were resolved and the way in which the parties achieved their objectives), but these issues will be the subject of future papers as the research is ongoing. However, these case studies provide an example of just how useful a stakeholder approach can be when studying management phenomena.

Finally, the paper will discuss the implications of the stakeholder approach as a research tool within the field of management education. In essence, stakeholder mapping can be a useful tool for any of the parties to use when considering a management education initiative, especially in the planning stages or for the evaluation of a programme. The process can help to elicit important perceptions of key stakeholders from several perspectives and their expectations, roles and responsibilities, providing a pluralistic framework to guide thinking and deliberation.

References

Burgoyne, J.G. (1994). Stakeholder Analysis. In C. Cassell and G.Symon (Eds). Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research. London: Sage.

Burgoyne, J. and Jackson, B. (1997). The arena thesis: Management development as a pluralistic meeting point. In J. Burgoyne and M. Reynolds (eds.) Management Learning. London: Sage.

Clarkson, M.B.E., (1995). A stakeholder framework for analyzing and evaluating corporate social performance. Academy of Management Review, 20, 92-117.

Frooman, J. (1999). Stakeholder influence strategies. Academy of Management Review, 24, 191-205.

Jones, N. (1995). Supply chain management. Brewer, 81, 194.

Key, S. (1999). Toward a new theory of the firm: A critique of stakeholder “theory”. Management Decision, 37, 317-328.

Mabey, C., and Salaman, G. (1995). Strategic Human Resource Management. Oxford: Blackwell.

Stansfield, L.M. (2002). An innovative three-party approach to management education: A case study. Paper presented at the Third Conference on HRD Research and Practice Across Europe, January, Edinburgh.

Thomson, A., Mabey, C, Storey, J., Gray, C., and Iles, P. (2001). Changing Patterns of Management Development. Oxford: Blackwell.

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