Academic Internal Stakeholder Condition: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

European universities follow the Humboldtian principles to provide for research, teaching and learning. Students and academic staff are part of internal stakeholders and they participate in university governance by collective bodies such as universities senate and faculty councils. At present, the management and governance of the universities become complex and often there are divergent interests between external and internal stakeholders. New trends in organization of the management structures of universities prefigure the end of the democratic decision- making tradition in universities replacing it with management structures similar to market- based institutions or commercial companies. This change will strongly affect the traditional participatory institutional democracy of European universities. The aim is to maintain a balance between the internal and external stakeholders. This paper seeks to analyze the various factors influencing the power of internal stakeholders in the countries that participate in the EUROAC Survey from an international comparative perspective. In the present situation, when almost all internal stakeholders in the participating countries of the EUROAC Survey are loosing their power, it becomes necessary for us to discuss the problem from an international perspective. More specifically, the focus will be on the following topics: (1) internal decision making; (2) the role of internal stakeholders in university governance process; and (3) junior-senior relation.