Developing Stakeholder Theory

Previous literature has led to a lack of appreciation of: the range of organization/stakeholder relations that can occur; the extent to which such relations change over time; as well as how and why such changes occur. In particular, extremely negative and highly conflicting relations between organizations and stakeholders have been ignored. Due to this lack of appreciation it is argued that current attempts at integrating the separate strands of stakeholder theory to achieve a convergent stakeholder theory are premature. A model is presented which combines stakeholder theory with a realist theory of social change and differentiation. This model is intended to highlight why it is important to distinguish different stakeholders. The model also enables an analysis of the organization/stakeholder relationship, which is not exclusively from the organization perspective and which is capable of illuminating why and how organization/stakeholder relations change over time. The history of Greenpeace is used as an example.     

Bringing computer power to the consumer market

Firms in m a y industrial sectors are seeking to capitalize on the promise of new information technology to generate new consumer products which can gain substantial markets. Where these are improved versions of familiar products, the marketing task is relatively easy, but many of the new product opportunities involve radically new types of consumer good and/or service. Drawing on studies of efforts to establish such radical innovations, this paper examines the problems that are confornted in attempting to define what sort of product is actually being created and how it may fit into consume life-styles. Though there is considerable discussion of these topics in industrial circles, it appears that until late stages of product development, little serious analysis of social issues is undertaken— if at all. Furthemore, such discussio of the nature and use of products are more intended to mobilize the group of actors who are needed to support the innovation than to feed substantial information about possible user reqquirements into the design process. The design process is much more liable to invorporate ideas derived from analysis of technological trends and the use of products in professional applications, than information derived from social scienc or market research.     

The effect of mergers on credit union performance

The motivation for mergers in the credit union industry differs from the commercial bank industry due to the lack of residual claimants to benefit from wealth gains. In the cooperative ownership environment of credit unions, the owners/members gain utility via the rates offered for loans and deposits. Credit union regulators also gain utility when mergers remove risky credit unions from the industry. We measure these utility gains using the event study method of Bauer [Bauer, K., 2008. Detecting abnormal credit union performance. Journal of Banking and Finance 32, 573–586] employing quadrant tests based on a multivariate test of equality of centroids. We find gains to the owners/members of the target credit union and to the regulators but not to the acquiring firm. We posit that the acquiring credit unions may encounter regulatory pressure to merge. In addition, the owners/members of the acquiring firm may avoid potential disutility in the cooperative insurance environment were the target firm allowed to fail.     

Contextualist Inquiry into Organizational Citizenship: Promoting Recycling Across Heterogeneous Organizational Actors

Although there is a significant amount of research on organizational citizenship behavior and its importance to individual and organizational outcomes (Podsakoff et al. 2000), relatively little research has explored the process by which such behavior emerges and is established within an organization. Against this backdrop, we combine the perspectives offered by contextualist inquiry (Pettigrew 1990) and actor–network theory (Latour 2005) to propose an integrative framework for investigating how organizational citizenship behavior develops in a large, heterogeneous organization. In order to illustrate the framework, we present a detailed case study of recycling at a large university. Like many other organizations, the university does not have a formal organizational structure to address sustainability concerns and the initiatives are therefore mainly voluntary and emerging in nature, and outcomes are, as a consequence, highly uncertain, and fragile. We argue that contextualist inquiry in combination with actor–network theory provides new and important insights into the emergence and establishment of organizational citizenship behaviors, and that outcomes are contingent upon interactions between the context, process, and content of the behaviors in question and the related networks of human and non-human actors.