Improving Society by Improving Education through Service-Dominant Logic: Reframing the Role of Students in Higher Education

Montserrat Díaz-Méndez, Mario R. Paredes and Michael Saren
Additional contact information
Montserrat Díaz-Méndez: School of Management, University of Extremadura, Av. Elvas s/n, 06071 Badajoz, Spain
Mario R. Paredes: School of Management and Business, Universidad del Rosario, Calle 200 Autopista Norte y Carrera 7, Bogotá 110141, Colombia
Michael Saren: School of Management, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 19, 1-14

Abstract: The role of higher education (HE) in the development of societies is an unquestionable fact, and its management has traditionally been a major concern of governments. Lately, there has been worldwide debate on whether universities should adopt traditional management practices as applied in any business sector. This paper questions the adoption of these practices, because they tend to simplify the complexity of this service, and argues that service-dominant logic (SDL) is a more appropriate approach to manage HE institutions. It envisions HE as a complex system where many actors interact to co-create value and focuses on the student–teacher dyad. Through a critical literature review, this paper states that the increasing established analogy of the ‘student–customer’ and ‘teacher–provider’, adopted to simplify the complexity of the HE service and thus allow the implementation of traditional management practices, jeopardizes the sustainability of social development due to its effects on the long-term quality of professionals’ training. Then, under the frame of SDL, we define students as co-creators of value (rather than customers) and teachers as value proposers, providing new insights to the debate and critical new recommendations for policymakers and universities to manage this critical relationship.

Keywords: students-as-customers; service dominant logic; value co-creation; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/19/5292/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/19/5292/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:19:p:5292-:d:270786

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().