Strategic Stakeholder Integration: Reimagining Business School-Community Partnerships Beyond the Consulting Model

Business education confronts a pedagogical paradox: widespread endorsement of stakeholder capitalism rhetoric alongside curricula that rarely provide authentic stakeholder integration experience. This article examines how reciprocal university-community partnerships can serve as pedagogy for stakeholder management—teaching students to navigate complex stakeholder environments by operating within them rather than analyzing them abstractly. Drawing on stakeholder theory, organizational partnership scholarship, and social value creation frameworks, the analysis develops a business school-specific model distinguishing reciprocal engagement from the extractive consulting paradigm that shapes student expectations. The framework synthesizes evidence on partnership approaches across business disciplines (accounting, finance, marketing, operations, entrepreneurship), revealing how each creates distinctive value propositions for community organizations while developing domain-specific competencies. Organizational implementation strategies address tensions unique to business schools: managing corporate and community partnerships simultaneously, navigating capitalism critiques, leveraging alumni networks and executive education as partnership infrastructure, and measuring multidimensional value in analytically rigorous ways. The article positions business schools as civic economic development actors whose community partnerships can demonstrate stakeholder capitalism in practice while building regional prosperity, challenging the assumption that business education must choose between academic rigor and public purpose.