Abstract
Charter schools in the United States form alliances with external actors by granting them seats on their boards of directors. In this chapter, we document the extent of such alliances formed with for-profit and non-profit sectors, review various theories about how stakeholders add value to the schools, and seek to relate their presence to academic outcomes. Our descriptive results provide some support for resource dependence theory in that charter school governing boards are dominated by a narrow set of actors from specific industries in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors as strategic response to resource-based pressure. Further research is needed to examine the degree of dependency of charter schools on these external actors and to identify what specific skills, experiences, and forms of social and cultural capital these actors have leveraged to influence or control charter school board decisions and organisational performance.