Stakeholder UnivPress

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Stakeholders, Service, and the

Future of University PressPublishing

r ic h ar d br own

Stakeholder theory is a useful framework for understanding any industry, and

I contend that university presses should focus their energies and attention onmanaging stakeholders and creating value for stakeholders. But while this focus

is necessary, it is not sufficient. I propose that a commitment to service through

entrepreneurship underlies university press relationships with primary stakeholders.

University presses should therefore (a) strategically seek the widest possible access

for value-added content through (b) creative delivery channels in order to help

scholarly communities of practice advance their teaching, learning, and research.

This will, I hope, (d) result in sufficient revenue to allow the organization to

grow and flourish (e) in order to serve communities of practice and the academyand society more effectively.

Keywords: stakeholders, R. Edward Freeman, value, communities of practice,

Georgetown University Press, Al Kitaab, first principles, service, aggregations,

entrepreneurship, vocation, purpose

The bungled near-closing of the University of Missouri Press played a

familiar tune: University press publishing is on life support; the business

model is broken; scholarly publishers are too slow to adapt to technology;and, really, what value do publishers add? Some of these strains were

off-key, but some contained painful elements of truth. University presses

really do need to reassess how we operate in a digital environment, how

we fit into the publishing landscape, how we can remain relevant, and

how we can best serve the academy and society in the years ahead.

One term I did not hear throughout the entire drama at Missouri is

this: stakeholders. I think that is a critical oversight, and I want to make

a case that those of us in university press publishing need to focus ourenergies and attention on stakeholders, both now and in the future.

Journal of Scholarly Publishing January 2013 doi: 10.3138/jsp.44.2.001


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Stakeholder theory is not monolithic, to be sure, but in this article I

will draw on one of the pioneers and leading lights of the field, R. Edward

Freeman at the Darden School of the University of Virginia. Freeman con-

tends that at the center of starting, managing, and leading a business is aset of stakeholder relationships which define the business, and he defines

stakeholders this way: Any group or individual who can affect or is

affected by the achievement of the organizations objectives.1 Freeman

argues that the purpose of business is not, as Peter Drucker famously

wrote, to create a customer; rather, in stakeholder thinking the purpose

of business is to create value for stakeholders.2

Create value for stakeholdersnowthatis an intriguing way to think

about a primary obligation of university presses (hereafter UPs). But justwho are our stakeholders?

I count eleven primary stakeholders for any given UP: board members;

administrators of parent institutions; academic associations such as the

Association of American Universities and the Association of American

University Professors; the Association of American University Presses;

teachers and learners, who constitute communities of practice;3 authors;

academic and research librarians and organizations such as the Associa-

tion of Research Libraries; wholesalers and retailers; suppliers, vendorsand freelancers; tech developers and online entrepreneurs who can

manipulate licensed content to our benefit; and, most significant, em-

ployees. Employees are the single most-important set of stakeholders

because it is only through managements commitment to creating an

organizational culture of meaning, community, communication, and pro-

fessional development that a UP can hope to maintain effective stake-

holder relationships.

UPs have secondary stakeholders as well: the media, including reviewoutlets, as well as blogs, electronic mailing lists, and social media sites;

competitors, including other UPs and commercial counterparts; com-

mercial publishing associations such as the American Association of Pub-

lishers and its Professional and Scholarly Publishing division; the federal

government and policymakers; and funding agencies, most notably the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

If one extends Freemans line of thinking, a UP has two primary

responsibilities toward its stakeholders. The first is to create value. Thisincludes creating value all along the publishing value chain: commis-

sioning projects and series and finding the right authors and editors to

108 Journal ofScholarlyPublishing


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manage them; providing high-quality editorial services; engaging in aggres-

sive marketing and promotion; exploiting various channels and platforms

to disseminate content; preserving and archiving; and so on. The second

primary responsibility is to manage stakeholders. This is not an easytask, and dealing with an array of stakeholders can often result in con-

flicts regarding expectations. It is up to the director of the UP to manage

stakeholders and not resort to trade-offsthat is, appeasing one stake-

holder while alienating another. Further, a director must work to ensure

that stakeholders come on board and develop a sense of confidence and

trust in the general direction of the publishing program.

I want to offer a concrete example about managing one set of stake-

holders. At Georgetown UP we think a lot about scholarly communitiesof practice. Scholarly communities of practice are those groups who

spend a significant amount of time in a given academic field of study,

who meet and collaborate and communicate and learn from each other,

who aim to further scholarship and solve problems in their discipline,

and who help teachers teach and learners learn. At Georgetown UP we

focus on just a handful of communities of practice, and we try to listen

to them and meet their needs; we engage these scholarly communities of

practice to advance their causes, and by extension, our own.Particularly significant for Georgetown UP are our efforts to engage

communities of practice in foreign-language instruction. We have pub-

lished language-instruction resources since our inception in 1964, and six

years ago we established a quasi-division within the press, Georgetown

Languages, to publish resources for a variety of less-commonly-taught

languages such as Arabic, Portuguese, Pashto, and Urdu. Today, George-

town Languages has its own dedicated staff, workflow, production sched-

ules, and capital budget. This is an important and growing revenue streamfor the press and is our technological leading edge, particularly in regard

to our materials in Arabic.

On the homepage of our Web site we have graphics and links to our

Arabic resources, such as Al-Kitaab,4 our textbook program that includes

books, disks, MP3 files, teachers resources, and book-specific destination

Web sites. These materials are aimed at students in the academymostly

college and grad school and also some high schoolsbut also at language

agencies within the Department of State and Department of Defense.On our Al-Kitaab sub-site is a link to companion Web sitesa critical

Stakeholders, Service, and the Future of University Press Publishing 109


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value-added feature of our program as we fully engage this community

of practice.

For the past seven years, we have worked with an educational Web

site developer in Palo Alto, California, to provide Web sites for severallanguage instruction programs in Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, and

Arabic. To receive eighteen months of access, students pay a fee of

US$24.95 in addition to the price of the printed book and disks. With

this access comes an array of interactive and self-correcting exercises

as well as audio files, video files, and voice-recognition technology that

allows users to see their intonation and pronunciation levels. We make

it easy for teachers and students to communicate through exercise types

that include drag-and-drop, click-and-listen, audio-visual matching, dia-logue completion, and fill-in exercises that allow students to type in

Arabic. These sites also include special course-management features and

online grading options for instructors, as well as instructor tools. Thus

far, teachers of Arabic have, overall, been extremely supportive of these

resources. In addition, Georgetown UP recently assumed publication of

Al-Arabiyya, the journal of the Association of American Teachers of

Arabic, further enhancing our relationship with the discipline.

This is just a small example of what I mean by engaging a communityof practice.

We are listening to these teachers and researchers, and we are asking

them what they need to do their work more effectively. It isnt perfect,

and not every teacher is ecstatic with our programs. We are always con-

scious of our competition. But we are adding value at various points

along the value chain and serving a primary stakeholder as well as we can.

So to reiterate: For UPs, the goal is to create value for stakeholders

and manage stakeholders. This is where we need to focus our attention,our resources, and our energies, and we need a strategy, individually and

collectively, to do this effectively. Because in the end, attending to stake-

holders is our ultimate priority.

Or is it?

I think there is more to the story. Creating value for stakeholders and

managing stakeholders is necessary, yes, but it is not sufficient. While

attending to stakeholders is a pragmatic approach to organizational respon-

sibilities, it is awfully thin gruel in terms of justifying a UPs existence,purpose, and future. Stakeholder satisfaction is simply too reactive, too

passive.5



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As business ethicists Kenneth Goodpaster and Michael Naughton and

others have suggested, mainline stakeholder theory implies a highly indi-

vidualist anthropology that interprets business as a society of individuals,

devoid of any larger sense of community or greater good.6

I agree with this assessment of stakeholder theorys shortcomings.

UPs need something deeper and more foundational than stakeholder

relationships to justify what we do. What exactly do we stand for? What

is our mission, our purpose? Why are we any different than our com-

mercial publishing cousins? What motivates us to get out of bed in the

morning, and what will keep us relevant in the future?

This leads me to wonder about first principles and fundamental prac-

tices of UPs. We envision content and we commission; we seek out out-standing scholarship; we make choices and take on risks of investment;

we improve content through editing; we disseminate; we market, pro-

mote, and publicize; we educate; we curate, we make knowledge public;

we inform; we sell and license; we manage permissions; and so on. And

if we are attentive publishers with an eye on the classroom, we discover

the needs of communities of practiceand we respond to those needs. In

some cases we create products and capabilities for these communities of

practice that they didnt even realize they wanted. And at this moment,various communities of practice are telling us they need digital resources:

flexible content, research tools, ancillaries, Web sites, apps, and, in some

cases, course-management systems.

So it is our responsibility, as UPs, to get more content online and to

do so immediately. We must provide better, more discoverable content

that can help teachers teach, learners learn, and librarians serve their

institutions. We need to collaborate, aggregate, chunk, and enhance, all

while continuing to maintain standards of scholarly excellence and relia-bility. This is not about simply creating e-books that mimic the print

model of distribution; that is not particularly interesting and is certainly

not sustainable. I am talking about collaborating with teachers and online

educators and transforming how scholars and students conduct research

and learn digitally. That space is open for us, and we should not cede it

to commercial publishers.

With this responsibility in mind, and in light of the limitations of

traditional stakeholder thinking, let me propose the following: Universitypresses and all non-profit scholarly publishers should (a) strategically seek

the widest possible access for value-added content through (b) creative



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delivery channels in order to (c) help scholarly communities of practice

advance their teaching, learning, and research. This will, I hope, (d) result

in sufficient revenue to allow the organization to grow and flourish (e)

in order to serve communities of practice and the academy and societymore effectively.

These are at least some of the notes and chords in the key of our

larger purpose. Not simply creating valuewhich we must donot

simply managing stakeholderswhich we must dobut serving others.

This notion of serving others as a foundation for the publishing vocation

pushes us to acknowledge something deeper and more sublime than

profits and individual satisfaction; it pushes us in the direction of recog-

nizing fundamental obligations of being human and living in community.Serving others should not be confused with being service providers

that is, providing traditional publishing services (such as printing and

distribution) for universities and parent institutions. Providing services

is fine, and many UPs are engaged in those activities, but that is not

what I am getting at here.

Integrally bound up with this notion of service is the need to become

more nimble, creative, and entrepreneurial. Our critics are partly right:

We are moving too slowly, in the aggregate, and if we dont continue toevolve we will become irrelevant. That said, there is a sunrise of entre-

preneurial behaviour all around the UP landscape: open-access initia-

tives at the National Academies Press and RAND; digital aggregations

of content from the University Press Content Consortium and Project

MUSE, as well as Books at JSTOR and Oxfords University Press Scholar-

ship Online; the university presses of Colorado and Nebraska taking over

various publishing functions of smaller presses in distress; press-library

collaborations at Purdue, Pittsburgh, and Penn State; digital-shorts pro-grams at Columbia, Princeton, University of North Carolina, the Mu-

seum of Modern Art, and Stanford; and so on. These are new models

of scholarly publishing, and they are just the beginning. We must think

carefully and deeply, all of us, about what we can bring to the academic

enterprise, about useful ways to produce and disseminate scholarship,

about how we can inspire scholars and scholarly communities, about

building stronger relationships with communities of practice. Then we

must marshal our resources and act boldly and decisively.Service to the academy and society, yes, but service through entrepre-

neurshipthat is the appropriate context for stakeholder thinking. Not



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simply because it is pragmatically prudent to do so, but because this is

our unique contribution as UPs. That, I suggest, is our true purpose.

r i c h a rd b r o w n, PhD is the director of Georgetown University Press.

notes

1. R. Edward Freeman, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Andrew C. Wicks, Bidhan L. Parmar,

and Simone de Colle, Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art(Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press 2010), 291, 207

2. Ibid., 28; see also 2845.

3. Sociologist Etienne Wenger provides an overview of communities of practice at

http://www.ewenger.com/theory/.

4. Al-Kitaab means the book in Arabic.

5. In Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art, Freeman and his co-authors offer six

principles of stakeholder capitalism to undergird value creation: stakeholder

cooperation, engagement, responsibility, complexity, continuous creation, and

emergent competition. See 2814.

6. See Kenneth E. Goodpaster, Corporate Responsibility and Its Constituents, The

Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics, ed. George G. Brenkert and Tom L. Beau-

champ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Naughton, The

Logic of Gift: Rethinking Business as a Community of Persons (Pere Marquette

Lecture, 4 March, 2012).

http://www.ewenger.com/theory/http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

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