Imperfections and Shortcomings of the Stakeholder Model’s Graphical Representation

The success of the stakeholder theory in management literature as well as in current business practices is largely due to the inherent simplicity of the stakeholder model––and to the clarity of Freeman’s powerful synthesised visual conceptualisation. However, over the years, critics have attacked the vagueness and ambiguity of stakeholder theory. In this article, rather than building on the discussion from a theoretical point of view, a radically different and innovative approach is chosen: the graphical framework is used as the central perspective. The major shortcomings of the popular stakeholder framework are systematically confronted with the graphical scheme to illustrate their visual impact. The graphical illustrations of the imperfections help explain the sometimes-oversimplified generalisation inherent to every graphical model. They also make some interrelationships easier to understand. The analysis demonstrates that, with the tacit but implicit acceptance of simplification of the discussed explanatory elements, Freeman’s framework remains a rather good approximation of reality. Only a few minor changes to the stakeholder model are consequently proposed.     

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。     

Stakeholder Perspectives and Business Risk Perception

Stakeholder theory calls for decision makers to balance stakeholder interests, but before this can happen, management must understand how other parties view its decisions. Effective stakeholder dialogues convened to reach this understanding require management to appreciate how others perceive the risks posed by their decision. Although understanding others’ risk perception is crucial for effective communications, we do not have a clear idea of how viewing a situation from multiple stakeholder perspectives affects risk perception. Based on a technique derived from risk perception studies of health and environmental issues, an experiment with 224 business students examined how an individual’s risk perception can account for both managerial and customer perspectives. Factors described as customer participation, extent of the effect, and management input, together with the respondent’s self-assessed understanding of the decision process, help categorize overall risk perceptions and are shown to be associated with behaviors based on the decision’s riskiness. Discussion includes implications for designs of business communications, including their content and transparency, and for understanding the audience for these communications.     

Corporate Ethical Identity as a Determinant of Firm Performance: A Test of the Mediating Role of Stakeholder Satisfaction

In this article, we empirically assess the impact of corporate ethical identity (CEI) on a firm’s financial performance. Drawing on formulations of normative and instrumental stakeholder theory, we argue that firms with a strong ethical identity achieve a greater degree of stakeholder satisfaction (SS), which, in turn, positively influences a firm’s financial performance. We analyze two dimensions of the CEI of firms: corporate revealed ethics and corporate applied ethics. Our results indicate that revealed ethics has informational worth and enhances shareholder value, whereas applied ethics has a positive impact through the improvement of SS. However, revealed ethics by itself (i.e. decoupled from ethical initiatives) is not sufficient to boost economic performance. Pascual Berrone is a PhD candidate of the Business Administration and Quantitative Methods Ph.D. program at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His current research interests focus on business ethics, stakeholder theory, and various aspects of the interface between corporate governance mechanisms and corporate social responsibility. His interests also include ethical, environmental and social issues and their impact on firms' overall performance. Dr. Jordi Surroca is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Department of Business Administration at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He holds a PhD in Business Administration and a Licentiate Degree in Business and Economics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests center on stakeholder management, firm strategy, innovation, and corporate governance. Dr. Josep A. Tribó is Associate Professor of Finance in the Department of Business Administration at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He has a PhD in Economic Analysis from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a Licenciate Degree in Theoretical Physics by Universitat de Barcelona. His research interests are Corporate Finance and the financing of R&D. His work has been published in journals such as Applied Economics, International Journal of Production Economics.     

Mediation as an Ethical Adjunct of Stakeholder Theory

A driving force behind the evolution of the stakeholder concept is the potential of negative outcomes for an organization as the result of conflict between that organization and its stakeholders. Where conflict does arise between an organization and stakeholder how might it be resolved in a manner compatible with stakeholder theory? Applying feminist ethical theory as a theoretical basis for stakeholder theory, mediation provides an appropriate process for resolving such disputes in comparison to traditional adversarial strategies. This paper discusses the attributes of mediation, and its potential benefits as a method to resolve disputes between businesses and their stakeholders.     

Why Stakeholder And Stockholder Theories Are Not Necessarily Contradictory: A Knightian Insight

The normative foundations of the investor centered model of corporate governance, represented in mainstream economics by the nexus-of-contracts view of the firm, have come under attack, mainly by proponents of normative stakeholder theory. We argue that the nexusof- contracts view is static and limited due to its assumption of price-output certainty. We attempt a synthesis of the nexus-of-contracts and the Knightian views, which provides novel insights into the normative adequacy of the investor-centered firm. Implications for scholarship and management practice follow from our discussion. S. Ramakrishna (Rama) Velamuri is Assistant Professor at IESE Business School, where he teaches Entrepreneurship and Negotiation in the MBA and executive education programs. He is also a visiting professor at the Indian School of Business in India, the University of Saarland in Germany, and the University of Piura in Peru. His research has been published in both academic and practitioner outlets: Journal of Business Venturing, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance and Business Ventures (forthcoming), Universia Business Review, Financial Times Mastering Management Series, The Hindu, Business Line, Actualidad Economica, La Vanguardia, and Diario Financiero (Chile). He has also contributed several book chapter on enterpreneurship and strategy. He received a B.Com. degree from the University of Madras, an MBA from IESE Business School, and a Ph.D. from the Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia. Sankaran Venkataraman (Venkat) is the MasterCard Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Adminstration, University of Virginia, where he teaches MBA and executive level courses in strategy and entrepreneurship. He also serves as the Director of Research of the Batten Institute and is the Editor of the Journal of Business Venturing. He consults with Fortune 500 firms as well as several small companies. He is advisor to firms, universities and government organizations. He is a speaker for and advisor to the Entrepreneurial Forum, a program of the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce aimed at promoting trade through entrepreneurship around the world. He received his M.A. in Economics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India; his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta); and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.     

A Model of Business Ethics

It appears that in the 30 years that business ethics has been a discipline in its own right a model of business ethics has not been proffered. No one appears to have tried to explain the phenomenon known as ?business ethics’ and the ways that we as a society interact with the concept, therefore, the authors have addressed this gap in the literature by proposing a model of business ethics that the authors hope will stimulate debate. The business ethics model consists of three principal components (i.e. expectations, perceptions and evaluations) that are interconnected by five sub-components (i.e. society expects; organizational values, norms and beliefs; outcomes; society evaluates; and reconnection). The introduced model makes a contribution to the creation of a conceptual framework for business ethics. A few tentative conclusions may be drawn from the introduced model of business ethics. The model aspires to be highly dynamic. The ultimate outcome is dependent upon the evolution of time and contexts. It is also dependent upon and provides reference to the behaviours and perceptions of people. The model proposes business ethics to be a continuous and an iterative process. There is no actual end of the process, but a constant reconnection to the initiation of successive process iterations of the business ethics model. The principals and sub-components of the model construct the dynamics of this continuous process. They provide guidance on what and how to explore our common efforts to understand the phenomenon known as business ethics. The model provides opportunities for further research in the field of business ethics.     

Stakeholder management and the stakeholder matrix: Potential strategic marketing tools

This article examines how marketers may be able to apply the stakeholder management process and the stakeholder matrix to marketing strategy formation. Existing marketing theory does not utilize the stakeholder management process when undertaking strategic marketing planing, although most marketing theory implicitly identifies the need to develop strategies that address the needs of multiple groups or stakeholders. By understanding and applying stakeholder theory, marketers should be able to develop more effective marketing strategies. While there is extensive management literature examining stakeholder theory, there is little marketing literature in this area, and this article attempts to partially fill this gap.     

A Network Perspective on Stakeholder Management: Facilitating Entrepreneurs in the Discovery of Opportunities

The problem of opportunity discovery is at the heart of entrepreneurial activity. Cognitive limitations determine the search for and the analysis of information and, as a consequence, constrain the identification of opportunities. Moreover, typical personal characteristics – locus of control, need for independence and need for achievement – suggest that entrepreneurs will tend to take a central position in their stakeholder environments and thus fail to adapt to the complexity of stakeholder relationships in their entrepreneurial activity. We approach this problem by adopting a network perspective on stakeholder management. We propose a heuristic approach of stakeholder analysis, which requires two mappings of the entrepreneurial constituents. The first mapping focuses on current interactions between the entrepreneur and their stakeholders, while the second focuses on a specific issue and the stakeholders that constitute it. In effect, such a stakeholder analysis requires entrepreneurs to use the complexity of stakeholder relationships in order to go beyond their cognitive limitations and thus facilitate the discovery of new opportunities. As we will argue, this has clear implications for the ethics and activities of entrepreneurs.     

CSR Practices and Corporate Strategy: Evidence from a Longitudinal Case Study

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the largest producers of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate.     

Morality and Strategy in Stakeholder identification

Definitions of what it is to be a stakeholder are divided into "claimant" definitions requiring some sort of claim on the services of a business, "influencer" definitions requiring only a capacity to influence the workings of the business, and "combinatory" definitions allowing for either or both of these requirements. It is argued that for the purposes of business ethics, stakeholding has to be about improving the moral conduct of businesses by directing them at serving more than just the interests of owners. On that basis, influencer definitions are eliminated on the grounds that they only concern morally neutral strategic considerations and combinatory definitions on the grounds that the combining of ethical and strategic considerations they promise can be less confusingly achieved through an exclusively claimant definition. It is concluded that for the purposes of business ethics, stakeholders are claimants towards whom businesses owe perfect or imperfect moral duties beyond those generally owed to people at large.     

Evaluating the Ethics of Inversion

In the last five years, a number of U.S. companies have either moved their locus of incorporation to countries with more favorable tax laws, or announced such moves. Given this trend toward “inversions”, and the polemics that have accompanied it, we offer two ways in which the ethics of such a move can be evaluated. We provide multinational executives with two applications of ethics to inversion: Kant’s deontological theory and the consequentialist perspective of utilitarianism.     

Living in Agreement with a Contract: The Management of Moral and Viable Firm–Stakeholder Relationships

In a contractual firm–stakeholder relationship the participants are expected to act according to the agreement and for mutual benefit. By acting against the agreement at the expense of the other participant, however, may result in higher individual profits within a short period of time. Building on the unlocked iterated prisoner’s dilemma (PD) setting, Scanlon’s [Scanlon, T.␣M.: 1998, What We Owe to Each Other (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass)] version of contractualism, and the social dilemma literature, this article considers what types of behaviors should be followed by both parties in an established firm–stakeholder relationship in order to reach an outcome that is defensible both in terms of morality and viability. It is argued that a normative foundation, which advises firms and stakeholders to ground their behavior on principles that could not reasonably be rejected by others, forms a basis for moral and viable behavior that can be expressed in the form of a strategic rule that excludes defection and utilizes the option to exit in response to the other participant’s defection. Then, a set of testable propositions is developed that describe how a firm and its stakeholders can further promote moral and viable relationships.Kalle Pajunen received his Ph.D. in strategic management. His current research interests include research methodologies, turnaround processes, stakeholder theory, strategic leadership, and business ethics. His recent articles appear (or are forthcoming) for instance in Advances in Strategic Management, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, and Leadership.     

The Struggle Against Sweatshops: Moving Toward Responsible Global Business

Today’s sweatshops violate our notions of justice, yet they continue to flourish. This is so because we have not settled on criteria that would allow us to condemn and do away with them and because the poor working conditions in certain places are preferable to the alternative of no job at all. In this paper, we examine these phenomena. We consider the definitional dilemmas posed by sweatshops by routing a standard definition of sweatshops through the precepts put forward in the literature on justice and virtue ethics. We conclude that fixing on definitions is pointless and misleading and that we are better off looking at whether or not a workplace violates the basic human rights of workers and whether or not the working conditions there cohere with situations on which we have already rendered judgments. In the end, we suggest guidelines for businesses that operate in the global workplace to help them avoid charges of running sweatshops. These recommendations account for the harsh living conditions in certain developing and emerging countries as well as the norms of societies in developed countries. * A summer research grant from the Frank G. Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University contributed toward making this research possible. Tara J. Radin is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School and Assistant Director of The American College Center for Ethics in Financial Services. She earned a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. in Management from the Darden School at the University of Virginia. Her research encompasses topics such as employment, global labor practices, technology, privacy, corporate governance, and stakeholder theory, and includes publications in journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and American Business Law Journal. She is also co-author of Employment and Employee Rights, published by Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. Martin Calkins is Assistant Professor in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He earned a Ph.D. in management from the University of Virginia, M.Div. and Th.M. degrees in theology from the Weston School of Theology, and an M.I.M. in international management from the American Graduate School of International Management. His academic interests include moral theory (in particular, casuistry and virtue theory) as well as contemporary international business issues such as international codes, whistleblowing, sweatshops, and the impact of computer and Internet technologies on societies.     

Contrasting the Behavioural Business Ethics Approach and the Institutional Economic Approach to Business Ethics: Insights From the Study of Quaker Employers

The article suggests that in a modern context, where value pluralism is a prevailing and possibly, even ethically desirable interaction condition, institutional economics provides a more viable business ethics than behavioural business ethics, such as Kantianism or religious ethics. The article explains how the institutional economic approach to business ethics analyses morality with regard to an interaction process, and favours non-behavioural, situational intervention with incentive structures and with capital exchange. The article argues that this approach may have to be prioritised over behavioural business ethics, which tends to analyse morality at the level of the individual and favours behavioural intervention with the individual’s value, norm and belief system, e.g. through ethical pedagogy, communicative techniques, etc. Quaker ethics is taken as an example of behavioural ethics. The article concludes that through the conceptual grounding of behavioural ethics in the economic approach, theoretical and practical limitations of behavioural ethics, as encountered in a modern context, can be relaxed. Probably only then can behavioural ethics still contribute to raising moral standards in interactions amongst the members (stakeholders) of a single firm, and equally, amongst (the stakeholders of) different firms. Dr. Sigmund Wagner-Tsukamoto is researcher in business ethics, organisational economics and economic issues that concern the Old Testament. He is placed at the School of Management of the University of Leicester, UK. He holds two doctorates, one in social studies from the University of Oxford, UK, and one in economic studies from the Catholic University of Eichstaett, Germany. He has widely published on green consumerism and institutional economic issues that concern organization theory, business ethics theory and an economic interpretation of the Old Testament. His publications include the books Understanding Green Consumer Behaviour (Routledge, 2003) and Human Nature and Organization Theory (Edward Elgar, 2003).     

制造业的下游战略及其商业运营模式探讨

分析了近年来制造业发展滞后于其它商业的主要原因,从战略角度提出了制造业新的经营战略——下 游战略,在阐述其核心理念的基础上,针对下游战略应采取的商业运营模式进行了探讨。     

中国社交网络商业模式发展及影响因素分析

在将社交网络划分为以博客为代表的社交网络萌芽阶段,以人人网为代表的社交网络娱乐化阶段,以微博、微信为代表的微信息社交网络阶段,以及代表未来主流发展方向的垂直社交网络应用阶段的基础上,本文以“六要素商业模式”模型为研究视角,并将平台战略中的付费方、被补贴方、同边网络效应、跨边网络效应、转换成本、平台覆盖等概念引入到分析框架中,针对博客、人人网、新浪微博、微信进行定位、业务系统、关键资源和能力、盈利模式、现金流结构、企业价值六个要素的对比,揭示中国社交网络在不同发展阶段商业模式的发展变化,并对可能的影响因素进行分析,对未来发展进行展望。     

业务-IT战略匹配成熟度模型的框架与内容

在文献法研究的基础上,拟将在国内首次介绍美国Jerry Luftman 2000年提出的业务-IT战略匹配成熟度模型(Business-IT Strategic Alignment Maturity Model)的起因、研究过程及其框架与内容,并对模型进行了分析。分析结论认为业务-IT战略匹配是一个共同适应和共同演化的匹配过程,是基于关系和过程的,其成熟度模型是组织评估匹配成熟度和获取匹配的方法和工具。     

The Application of Stakeholder Theory to Relationship Marketing Strategy Development in a Non-profit Organization

Non-profit (NP) organizations present complex challenges in managing stakeholder relationships, particularly during times of environmental change. This places a premium on knowing which stakeholders really matter if an effective relationship marketing strategy is to be developed. This article presents the successful application of a model, which combines Mitchell’s theory of stakeholder saliency and Coviello’s framework of contemporary marketing practices in a leading NP organization in the U.K. A cooperative enquiry approach is used to explore stakeholder relationships, dominant marketing practices, and to surface differing perceptions about the organization’s marketing strategy. Resolving these differences sets the scene for developing choices in marketing strategy for the future. Simon Knox is Professor of Brand Marketing at the Cranfield School of Management in the UK and is a consultant to a number of multinational companies including Levi Strauss, DiverseyLever, BT and Exel. Upon graduating, he followed a career in the marketing of international brands with Unilever plc in a number of senior marketing roles in both detergents and foods. Since joining Cranfield, Simon has published over 100 papers and books on strategic marketing and branding and is a regular speaker at international conferences. He is a Director of the Cranfield Centre for Brand Management Development in the School and is currently looking at the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Brand Management. He is the co-author of two recent books, "Competing on Value", published by FT Pitman Publishing in the UK, Germany, the USA and China, and "Creating a Company for Customers", FT Prentice-Hall, in the UK, Brazil and India. Colin Gruar is currently studying for his Doctorate of Business Administration at the School. His thesis is concerned with developing marketing strategy across stakeholder groups in the Not-for-Profit sector.Formerly Head of Marketing at a major UK medical research charity, Colin has also had senior roles in sales, marketing and operations management in a range of sectors including manufacturing, financial services and energy supply.