Identifying Stakeholders in a Portuguese university: a case study

The Stakeholder Theory proved highly useful to some specific organisations with dispersed powers, such as is the case of universities. This theory may serve to explain the focus on varying communities in the environments surrounding these organisations as well as the relationships between organisations and communities. However, identifying and prioritising the different stakeholders to a university has not proven an easy question to resolve. Given the effective management of university stakeholders necessarily requires the correct identification of just who they are, this article seeks to identify, classify and rank the stakeholders of a university based upon a case study. To this end, we reviewed previous studies sharing similar objectives. After finding that university stakeholders have rarely been identified by empirical means, we carried out a case study on a Portuguese state university that sought to identify and qualify the importance of the respective stakeholder through such means. A series of interviews were held with fifteen individuals, connected with the institution, three from each hierarchical university level. Following content analysis of these interviews, a list containing 21 stakeholders was resulted, duly classified by importance. The final results found students, the teaching and/or research staff and employers identified as the main stakeholders. Furthermore, findings pointed to stakeholders connected to research are gaining greater importance in the contemporary university environment. Indeed, the list clarifies the complexity of universities in identifying 21 distinct groups of stakeholders making this type of organisation a managerial challenge. Given this, stakeholders need to be attributed priorities, with some prevailing over others as it would seem impossible to attribute equal attention to them all.