Questions of governance and the stakeholders’ roles in the brazilian higher education environment

Abstract

This paper analyzes and aims to describe how the relationships that higher education institutions in Brazil nurture with their stakeholders impinge on their governance and affect their strategies. Such relationships work as mechanisms that help integrate and reproduce the interests of the stakeholders concerned, both within and out with the HEI (Higher Education Institutions). Such external counterparts, described as stakeholders, may be regulatory agencies in higher education (MEC), businesses, other government entities and professionals and corporate groups in society. Brazilian HEIs establish privileged relationships with external actors through which they manage to access or mobilize resources and coordinate actions with external actors, including regulatory agencies and auditors. HEIs may, in their practice, develop strategies according to the information they obtain through these stakeholders or key informants. Also, as concerned partners, the various stakeholders influence and sometimes determine the choices made by IESs e.g. the higher education courses they offer.

The object of study for this research (Yin 2010) has been a private HEI based in Sao Luis, State of Maranhão - Brazil, where data and information were collected and some stakeholders could be identified and observed, which provide the organization with information it needs and, in turn, benefit from that relationship in terms of reputation and accrued creation of social capital. The analysis used concept of social capital, as defined by Nogueira and Catani (2007), to make sense of the set of actual or potential resources which are linked to being part of or “having” a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of inter acquaintances and inter recognition or, in other terms, belonging to a group, as a set of agents that are not only endowed with domination of ‘common’ resources, but are also united by permanent and useful links [ ... ] the amount of capital that an individual agent “has” depends on the extent of the relationships he or she can effectively mobilize and on the volume of capital (economic, cultural or symbolic ) that each of those connected manages [ ... so that ] the benefits gained from belonging to a group sustain the solidarity [among its members].