A stakeholder theory approach to creating value in higher education institutions

Are universities on the right path to becoming sustainable? Perspectives of students during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic baffled the traditional educational system and the face-to-face educational process, shifting to the online environment. Almost all university activities were carried out online for a period of time, which put pressure on university strategies, including sustainability. To maintain the international ranking of universities applying a sustainability strategy, the largest and most representative university in Romania continued to implement the principles of sustainability in its activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus fostering a positive, strong, and trustworthy image amongst its main group of stakeholders, namely students.

Objective/Aim

The aim of this paper is to determine to what extent students related to the university's sustainable strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and to assess whether students could rely on their university to integrate sustainability-related strategies into the overall university strategy.

Methods/Instruments

The authors propose a conceptual model to generate trust in the sustainable practices, which is analyzed with the help of structural equations in SmartPLS.

Results

The results highlight the fact that the students continued to adopt sustainability principles during the pandemic, expressing their preference that the university continue to implement its sustainability strategy, although the focus was on the safety measures generated by the new context. This strategy focusses on sustainable practises, green mobility, and consumption, and, of course, on the sustainable initiatives that address them.

Conclusions/implications

The article presents research based on stakeholder theory, emphasizing the numerous implications for higher education institutions, which can adopt different good practices with a view to improving stakeholder trust and satisfaction.

Returns on library investment: seeking causative relationship between the library investment and the institutional research output

Purpose

This study aims to seek the causative relationship between the library budget and research output with the ranking of 20 leading medial institutes in India. More so, the study also attempts to find out whether the libraries associated with academic and research institutes in general and medical institutes in particular have turned redundant or irrelevant, or have become more relevant in the changing times by embracing technology in its every new form.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on the secondary data retrieved from the official website of the Ministry of Education, Government of India and research output against each institution under study has been retrieved from Scopus. The study is limited to Indian medical institutions that participated in the 2019 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), conducted by the Ministry of Education, India each year. The findings of the study can be generalized to all the medical institutions of the country.

Findings

On average, INR 160.90m were spent by each medical institute on the procurement of library resources at an average of INR 0.104m on procurement of resources against each individual published research article. Of the total research articles published by medical institutes under study, 26.39% of research articles were published by researchers from AIIMS, New Delhi, alone.

Research limitations/implications

Financial aid or funding is very vital for the survival, sustenance and excellence of research institutions, and this funding becomes more important when the investigation is aimed toward the furtherance of medical advances. Any medical advancement is hell-bent to influence the overall welfare and betterment of society at large, whereby the benefit of any investment made in medical science is bound to be reaped by one and all alike.

Originality/value

In India, a good number of studies have been undertaken on the NIRF data to dive deeper to assess the role and importance of libraries in the overall ranking of institutions like universities, management institutes, engineering and technology institutes, but no major study has been so far conducted covering leading medical institutes in India. The study is the original and first of its kind undertaken in India.

Building and rebuilding trust in higher education institutions (HEIs). Student's perspective

Purpose

The importance of trust in student–university relations is relevant not only for the quality of the educational process and the satisfaction with studying achieved by students, but also for the importance of positive evaluation of HEIs to others. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify the stages and mechanisms that build trust in student–university relations, the causes of trust violation and trust repair practices.

Design/methodology/approach

Public university students from Poland (16) and Germany (12) took part in the study based on semi-structured interviews. The research procedure followed an inductive approach. In addition, the critical events technique was used to identify trust violation and trust repair practices.

Findings

The study identifies the stages of the HEIs trust building process and the mechanisms upon which it is built. It attempts to catalogue trust violations, distinguishing three groups of “perpetrators” and categories of their differentiation in terms of their impact on trust. The study indicates ad hoc, informal methods of trust repair applied at HEIs and their conditions.

Practical implications

This study provides useful guidance for managers on how to build and maintain trust in HEIs.

Originality/value

The issue of trust building in HEIs is relatively new and therefore has not been sufficiently recognised to date. This study is the first to the author's knowledge to comprehensively address the problem of trust building, pointing out the mechanisms on which the formation of trust in HEIs is based. This study provides a novel contribution to the limited literature on trust violation and trust repair in HEIs.