Access Provided by Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana at 02/24/13 4:13AM GMT

Stakeholders, Service, and the Future of University Press Publishing

richard brown
Stakeholder theory is a useful framework for understanding any industry, and I contend that university presses should focus their energies and attention on managing stakeholders and creating value for stakeholders. But while this focus is necessary, it is not sufcient. 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 sufcient revenue to allow the organization to grow and ourish (e) in order to serve communities of practice and the academy and society more effectively. Keywords: stakeholders, R. Edward Freeman, value, communities of practice, Georgetown University Press, Al Kitaab, rst 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 t 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 our energies and attention on stakeholders, both now and in the future.
Journal of Scholarly Publishing January 2013 doi: 10.3138/jsp.44.2.001

108

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

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 eld, R. Edward Freeman at the Darden School of the University of Virginia. Freeman contends that at the center of starting, managing, and leading a business is a set of stakeholder relationships which dene the business, and he denes 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 stakeholders now that is an intriguing way to think about a primary obligation of university presses (hereafter UPs). But just who 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 Association of Research Libraries; wholesalers and retailers; suppliers, vendors and freelancers; tech developers and online entrepreneurs who can manipulate licensed content to our benet; and, most signicant, employees. 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 professional development that a UP can hope to maintain effective stakeholder relationships. UPs have secondary stakeholders as well: the media, including review outlets, as well as blogs, electronic mailing lists, and social media sites; competitors, including other UPs and commercial counterparts; commercial publishing associations such as the American Association of Publishers 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 rst is to create value. This includes creating value all along the publishing value chain: commissioning projects and series and nding the right authors and editors to

Stakeholders, Service, and the Future of University Press Publishing

109

manage them; providing high-quality editorial services; engaging in aggressive 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 easy task, and dealing with an array of stakeholders can often result in conicts regarding expectations. It is up to the director of the UP to manage stakeholders and not resort to trade-offs that is, appeasing one stakeholder while alienating another. Further, a director must work to ensure that stakeholders come on board and develop a sense of condence and trust in the general direction of the publishing program. I want to offer a concrete example about managing one set of stakeholders. At Georgetown UP we think a lot about scholarly communities of practice. Scholarly communities of practice are those groups who spend a signicant amount of time in a given academic eld 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 signicant for Georgetown UP are our efforts to engage communities of practice in foreign-language instruction. We have published 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, Georgetown Languages has its own dedicated staff, workow, production schedules, and capital budget. This is an important and growing revenue stream for 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 les, teachers resources, and book-specic destination Web sites. These materials are aimed at students in the academy mostly college and grad school and also some high schools but 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 sites a critical

110

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

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 several language 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 les, video les, 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, dialogue completion, and ll-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 community of 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 conscious 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 stakeholders 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 sufcient. While attending to stakeholders is a pragmatic approach to organizational responsibilities, it is awfully thin gruel in terms of justifying a UPs existence, purpose, and future. Stakeholder satisfaction is simply too reactive, too passive.5

Stakeholders, Service, and the Future of University Press Publishing

111

As business ethicists Kenneth Goodpaster and Michael Naughton and others have suggested, mainline stakeholder theory implies a highly individualist 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 commercial 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 rst principles and fundamental practices of UPs. We envision content and we commission; we seek out outstanding scholarship; we make choices and take on risks of investment; we improve content through editing; we disseminate; we market, promote, 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 practice and 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: exible 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 reliability. 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: University presses and all non-prot scholarly publishers should (a) strategically seek the widest possible access for value-added content through (b) creative

112

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

delivery channels in order to (c) help scholarly communities of practice advance their teaching, learning, and research. This will, I hope, (d) result in sufcient revenue to allow the organization to grow and ourish (e) in order to serve communities of practice and the academy and society more effectively. These are at least some of the notes and chords in the key of our larger purpose. Not simply creating value which we must do not simply managing stakeholders which we must do but serving others. This notion of serving others as a foundation for the publishing vocation pushes us to acknowledge something deeper and more sublime than prots and individual satisfaction; it pushes us in the direction of recognizing 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 ne, 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 to evolve we will become irrelevant. That said, there is a sunrise of entrepreneurial behaviour all around the UP landscape: open-access initiatives 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 Scholarship 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 programs at Columbia, Princeton, University of North Carolina, the Museum 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 entrepreneurship that is the appropriate context for stakeholder thinking. Not

Stakeholders, Service, and the Future of University Press Publishing

113

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.
richard brown, 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: Cambridge 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. Beauchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Naughton, The Logic of Gift: Rethinking Business as a Community of Persons (Pere Marquette Lecture, 4 March, 2012).