Exploring Stakeholder Relationships in a University Internship Program: A Qualitative Study

This study explores stakeholder relationships between the key stakeholders of a public university, private employers, and university students in a marketing undergraduate internship program. By exploring these relationships through the process of stakeholder analysis a deeper understanding of the power dynamics between key stakeholders emerged. Attention was taken to understand the student's voice in the undergraduate marketing internship process and the issue of transferability of experiential learning to improving programs, coursework and how it benefited student's professional career development. Building on a literature review of work that surrounded internships; this paper utilizes a qualitative approach that combines a top-down, bottom-up approach to theory to explore this study. The top-down, macro view of the general business community uses the field theory of Bourdieu while the bottom-up, micro approach to the study uses constructivist grounded theory (CGT) to explore the internship experience of an undergraduate marketing internship program. This study provides a two-fold solution to engaging the student stakeholder with the other two key stakeholders of a public university and private employers with the delivery of the undergraduate marketing internship experience. The solution involves (1) the student voice informing the university and employers about the internship process and (2) an analysis of the data on how students inform the internship decision makers from both the university and employers to strengthen and improve the delivery of internships. These two solutions improve practice between the university and employers in mutual wins of conducting high quality marketing undergraduate internships. Value from this study contributes to marketing educators through the recognition that a more complete and inclusive delivery approach for internships requires collaboration to create innovative ways to connect the objectives of all key stakeholders. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]