A Conceptual Model of Listening and Responding to External Stakeholders

In this chapter, we introduce a conceptual model of organizational listening and response to external stakeholders emphasizing four facets of a listening system. Three of these—orientation, scale, and sustainability—provide the foundation for a listening system, while the fourth focuses on a proposed four-step closed-loop listening process itself. After discussing each of the four facets in detail, we introduce a third illustrative case study in which the system is implemented by a community college as the basis for listening and responding to a variety of that institution’s external stakeholders and communities.