MAKING A DIFFERENCE: TAKING COMMUNITY STAKEHOLDERS SERIOUSLY.

Most research to date on the societal impact of business school activities has focused on assessing the scholarly influence of our research on practice or the pedagogical impact of our teaching on students and alumni. Using a stakeholder theory lens, we turn the attention instead on the value that business schools can bring to an overlooked stakeholder group: our community partners. We focus on a specific example of a “recordable occasion of influence”—the community service-learning (CSL) project—and investigate not only how CSL projects deliver value to not-for-profit organizations, but also what business schools can do to deliver more value to, and hence have a greater impact on, this important stakeholder group. While we find that community partners derive engagement value from both the content and the process of the CSL projects, we also uncover many opportunities where business schools can make a more meaningful difference through deeper institutional engagement with community organizations in the long term. We discuss these findings in light of recent calls for greater accountability on how business schools create societal impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]