Place-Building Theory: A Framework for Assessing and Advancing Community Engagement in Higher Education

Place-building theory, originally developed to assess corporate social responsibility, explains to what degree an organization values and invests in its geographical and social location. Different lines of inquiry - descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive - elucidate how the organization values place, which in turn suggests its type, its strategies for building place, and recommendations for how it might move in a desired direction between the ends of a place-building continuum that includes four organizational prototypes - exploitive, contingent, contributive, and transformational. In this paper, the authors introduce place-building theory, the notion of the placekeeper (place-based stakeholder), and apply the theory to assessing a university's community engagement. The authors then demonstrate how a university course can use the place-building method to discover perceptions of the university's place-building role held by students, staff, administrators, faculty, and community partners as a way to engage students and other placekeepers in assessing, advancing, and critically examining community engagement in institutions of higher education.