Toward a Common Good Theory of the Firm: The Tasubinsa Case

Tasubinsa is a “Special Employment and Occupational Center” constituted in accordance with Spanish Law where 90% of the workers have mental, sensorial or physical impairments of at least 30%. Its positive experience of more than 15 years provides entirely different responses from mainstream neoclassical theory (transaction cost theory, agency theory, and shareholder theory) to basic questions such as “What is a firm?”, “What is its purpose?”, “Who owns a firm?”, and “What do a firm’s owners seek?”. The article discusses how these different premises give rise to a distinctive corporate culture centered on the handicapped person.     

Evaluating Stakeholder Theory

This paper is the third in a series of four that is directed at understanding and assessing stakeholder theory for the purposes of business ethics. It addresses the suitability and viability of the theory, rejecting objections of a moral and efficiency sort based (respectively) on claims about property rights and the economic superiority of the alternative stockholder approach, but accepting that implementation problems require limiting both the number of groupings admitted to stakeholder status and the degree of responsibility towards them. The conclusion looks forward to the construction of a suitably limited version of the stakeholder approach in a fourth paper drawing upon this one and the previous two.John Kaler teachers at the University of Plymonth Business School. He is the co-author of An Introduction to Business Ethics (Chapman and Hall, 1993; ITP, 1996) and Essentials of Business Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 1996), and co-editor of the ‘Teaching Business Ethics’ website hosted by the Institute of Business Ethics.     

Governance and the Common Good

The importance of corporate governance in ensuring reliable financial reporting is examined in this article, and the roles of individuals involved in the governance process are examined from the perspective of ensuring the common good. Initially, adopting the positivist tradition that dominates the academic literature in accounting, the relations between financial reporting quality and the activities of senior management, the board of directors and its audit committee, and external auditors are examined. Unlike much of the academic literature, this article also adopts a normative perspective and offers suggestions as to the proper roles of these parties. Finally, suggestions for future research are offered.     

Driven to Be Good: A Stakeholder Theory Perspective on the Drivers of Corporate Social Performance

Despite growing evidence of the benefits to a firm of improving corporate social performance (CSP), many firms vary significantly in terms of their CSP activities. This research investigates how the characteristics of the stakeholder landscape influence a firm’s CSP breadth. Using stakeholder theory, we specifically propose that several factors increase the salience and impact of stakeholders’ demands on the firm and that, in response to these factors, a firm’s CSP will have greater breadth. A firm’s CSP breadth is operationalized as the number of different sub-domains of CSR for which a firm has taken positive actions and is captured using a unique dataset from Kinder, Lydenburg, and Domini (KLD). This data set includes positive and negative firm actions across more than 35 different dimensions of socially responsible behavior. Findings based on a longitudinal, multi-industry sample of 447 US firms during the period from 2000 to 2007 demonstrate that firms which: (1) have greater sensitivity to stakeholder needs as a result of the firm’s strategic emphasis on marketing and/or value creation, (2) face greater diversity of stakeholder demands, and (3) encounter a greater degree of scrutiny or risk from stakeholder action have a greater breadth of CSP in response to the stakeholder landscape that they face.     

国内利益相关者理论应用研究回顾

利益相关者理论可以应用于企业管理实践。国内学者对利益相关者理论在企业管理中的应用研究,主要表现在公司治理、企业财务管理、企业绩效评估、企业伦理管理、企业价值链经营战略五个方面,但目前研究成果还不多。     

Problems of Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder theory diverts attention from creating business success to concentrating on who share its fruits. But what right have stakeholders to make the claims they do? Perhaps a new model is needed. T.F.J. Ambler is Grand Metropolitan Senior Research Fellow at London Business School, Sussex Place, Regent's Park, London NW1 4SA, where Andrea Wilson completed her MBA in 1993. She is now a consultant in New York.     

对利益相关者理论的再认识

利益相关者理论是现代企业理论、契约理论研究的核心问题之一.通过对利益相关者理论的界定、起源,发展、内涵、理论基础及其应用进行综述,期望对利益相关者理论形成一个清晰的框架.     

利益相关者理论研究现状综述

利益相关者理论现有研究主要集中在利益相关者参与治理的基础、利益相关者的界定和分类三个方面。现有研究重理论分析,实证支持不够;现有研究在对利益相关者界定及分类时未考虑企业所处的行业和生命周期;现有研究在对利益相关者利益的量化方面处于空白。     

Stakeholder Theory and Managerial Decision-Making: Constraints and Implications of Balancing Stakeholder Interests

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 we examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research.     

金融危机下富国银行生存之道——利益相关者理论视角

2007年7月出现的次贷危机快速演变成席卷全球的金融危机。而美国富国银行却在此次金融危机中逆势发展,以126.8亿美元成功并购美联银行。本文将运用利益相关者理论对富国银行在金融危机中的逆势发展做主要阐述和分析,并探讨其成功之道对我国银行业的借鉴和启示。     

SMEs, Social Capital and the Common Good

In this paper we report on empirical research which investigates social capital of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Bringing an international perspective to the work, we make a comparison between 30 firms located in West London and Munich in the sectors of food manufacturing/production, marketing services and garages. Here we present 6 case studies, which we use to illustrate the early findings from this pilot project. We identify differences in approach to associational membership in Germany and the U.K., with a greater propensity to "belong" to an official group in Germany. We distinguish clear sectoral similarities across the countries, and indications that certain personality types will seek out engagement and find time beyond busy work life schedules, often merging work/home/leisure life and friends. Some of our cases illustrate that formal institutions, networks and mutual relationships can develop social capital for the SME, although we should take care not to assume a universal win-win situation for those who are engaged and contribute to the common good. Some of the obstacles to co-operation and civic engagement are outlined.     

The Future of Stakeholder Management Theory: A Temporal Perspective

We propose adding a temporal dimension to stakeholder management theory, and assess the implications thereof for firm-level competitive advantage. We argue that a firm’s competitive advantage fundamentally depends on its capacity for stakeholder management related, transformational adaptation over time. Our new temporal stakeholder management approach builds upon insights from both the resource-based view (RBV) in strategic management and institutional theory. Stakeholder agendas and their relative salience to the firm evolve over time, a phenomenon well understood in the literature, and requiring what we call level 1 adaptation. However, the dominant direction of stakeholder pressures can also change, namely, from supporting resource heterogeneity at the firm level to fostering industry homogeneity, and vice versa. When dominant stakeholder pressures shift from supporting heterogeneity towards stimulating homogeneity in industry, the firm must engage in level 2 or transformational adaptation. Stakeholders typically provide valuable resources to the firm in an early stage. Without these resources, which foster heterogeneity (in line with RBV thinking), the firm would not exist. At a later stage, stakeholders also contribute to inter-firm homogeneity via isomorphism pressures (in line with institutional theory thinking). Adding a temporal dimension to stakeholder management theory has far reaching implications for this theory’s practical relevance to senior level management in business.     

An Optimally Viable Version of Stakeholder Theory

This article is the final one in a series of four papers investigating the stakeholder approach to running businesses. It argues that the optimally viable version of that approach is one in which employees have a co-equal status as stakeholders with shareholders (the maximum allowed for under stakeholder theory) while other groupings only have a minimal status as stakeholders and are generally restricted to just customers, suppliers, and lenders. This version is argued for on the grounds that it both overcomes the implementation problems attendant upon having to serve the interests of a range of groupings and is justified in terms of stakeholder membership being confined to those groupings with a claim on the services of a business in virtue of directly contributing to its economic functioning. The ranking of non-shareholder stakeholders in the recommended version and, in particular, the maximal ranking granted to employees is argued to reflect the scale of the various contributions as measured by the degree to which making it exposes those stakeholders to both financial risk and a non-financial “work-related” risk peculiar to employees. It is concluded that although this is the best available version of the stakeholder approach it may not be the best of all possible ways of running a business. John Kaler is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth Business School. He is the co-author of the books An Introduction to Business Ethics and Essentials of Business Ethics, and was co-editor for Teaching Business Ethics, a website hosted by the Institute of Business Ethics. He is an ex-member of the Executive Committee of the European Business Ethics, U.K., and has published on a wide range of business ethics topics.     

Participating in the Common Good of the Firm

In a previous essay (Sison and Fontrodona 2012), we defined the common good of the firm as collaborative work, insofar as it provides, first, an opportunity to develop knowledge, skills, virtues, and meaning (work as praxis), and second, inasmuch as it produces goods and services to satisfy society’s needs and wants (work as poiesis). We would now like to focus on the participatory aspect of this common good. To do so, we will have to identify the different members of the firm as a community, drawing from corporate citizenship literature and stakeholder theory. Afterward, we will explore both the manner and the intensity of these different members’ participation and its impact on the firm’s common good.     

Behavioral Economics,Federalism, and the Triumph of Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder theorists distinguish between normative stakeholders, those who gain moral standing by making contributions to the firm, and derivative stakeholders, those who can constrain the corporate association even though they make no contribution. The board of directors has the legal authority to distinguish among these stakeholder groups and to distribute rights and obligations among these stakeholder groups. To be sure, this stakeholder formulation appropriately seizes on the firm’s voluntary, associative character. Yet, the firm’s constituents contribute assets and incur risks to participate in market, economic activities. And, as such, the firm’s “stakeholders” must share an imperfect language to assist in making two key economic decisions: (1) who are the legitimate and who are the derivative stakeholders; and (2) who should sit on the board? Still, stakeholder theorists have good reason to be skeptical of neoclassical economics. Its assumptions that all act opportunistically and that all can calculate rationally and fully hardly correspond to studies on the managerial experience of corporate coordination. However, advances in behavioral law and economics now provide a cogent economic logic that readily fits into a stakeholder mode. In brief, we argue that (1) the firm’s economic purpose designates legitimacy to core stakeholders, to those who add value, assume unique risk, and can incur harm; (2) the board serves as the principal who coordinates these core stakeholders to sustain competitive advantage and new wealth creation; and (3) state incorporation law, Delaware in particular, reinforces the board’s function. These, in turn, supply selection criteria for board membership. We aim to synchronize concepts from behavioral law and economics with stakeholder theory.     

Stakeholder Management Theory, Firm Strategy, and Ambidexterity

Stakeholder theory scholars have recently addressed two crucial calls: the first is for the integration of strategy and ethics, of stakeholder theory and strategic management, and the second call is for the development of a dynamic approach to stakeholder management. I have attempted to answer these calls by developing a theoretical framework that links together stakeholder management, stakeholder commitment to cooperate with the firm, key decision makers?? ethical commitment, and firm strategy. Starting from the basic assumption that managers cannot meet all stakeholders?? demands immediately and in a tailored manner, I contend, first, that an ambidextrous approach to stakeholder management is conducive to stakeholders?? commitment to cooperate for the sustainable well-being of the firm and, second, that firm strategy and key decision makers?? ethical commitment moderate the relationship between an ambidextrous stakeholder management and stakeholder commitment to cooperate. Furthermore, drawing on this theoretical framework, I attempt to address the call for the integration of strategy and ethics by proposing a three-level conceptual model that distinguishes the objectives, the field, and the levers of integration. Finally, I outline a set of propositions that, taken together, represent a first attempt to develop a dynamic approach to stakeholder management.     

Stakeholder Theory and Public Policy: How Governments Matter

The Social Issues in Management Division has had a long history of research into various aspects of governmental influences on business. Recent years, however, have seen stakeholder theory sort of sweep the field, and under a stakeholder theory of capitalism, governments will matter less then they have in the past as stakeholder principles are implemented throughout the corporate world. This article will examine the nature of this claim by discussing problems with the implementation of stakeholder theory and examining the role of public policy in our society.