Instrumental stakeholder theory considers the performance consequences for firms of highly ethical relationships with stakeholders, characterized by high levels of trust, cooperation, and information ...sharing. While research suggests performance benefits, an obvious question remains: If instrumental stakeholder theory–based stakeholder treatment is so valuable, why isn’t it the dominant mode of relating to stakeholders? We argue that the existing instrumental stakeholder theory literature has three shortcomings that limit its ability to explain variance in performance. (1) Little theory exists around how instrumental stakeholder theory–based stakeholder management could provide sustainable competitive advantage. (2) The literature has largely neglected the potential downsides (i.e., costs) associated with pursuing these sorts of stakeholder relationships. (3) There is a paucity of theory on the contexts in which the incremental benefits of instrumental stakeholder theory–based stakeholder relationships are most likely to exceed the costs. As our primary contribution, we develop a theoretical path from a communal sharing relational ethics strategy—characterized by an intention to rely on relational contracts, joint wealth creation, high levels of mutual trust and cooperation, and communal sharing of property—to a close relationship capability, which we argue is valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate and, thus, a potential source of sustainable competitive advantage. We also consider the potential costs of achieving this capability and identify contexts in which the resulting relationships are likely to have the greatest net value.
Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation, and Success,the culmination of twenty years of research, interviews, and observations in the workplace, makes a major new contribution to management ...thinking and practice. Current ways of thinking about business and stakeholder management usually ask the Value Allocation Question: How should we distribute the burdens and benefits of corporate activities among stakeholders?Managing for Stakeholders,however, helps leaders develop a mindset that instead asks the Value Creation Question: How can we create as much value as possible for all of our stakeholders?
Business is about how customers, suppliers, employees, financiers (stockholders, bondholders, banks, etc.), communities, the media, and managers interact and create value. World-renowned management scholar R. Edward Freeman and his coauthors outline ten concrete principles and seven practical techniques for managing stakeholder relationships in order to ensure a firm's survival, reputation, and success.Managing for Stakeholdersis a revolutionary book that will change not only how managers do business but also how they recognize and evaluate business opportunities that would otherwise be invisible.
This paper argues that the notion of value has been overly simplified and narrowed to focus on economic returns. Stakeholder theory provides an appropriate lens for considering a more complex ...perspective of the value that stakeholders seek as well as new ways to measure it. We develop a four-factor perspective for defining value that includes, but extends beyond, the economic value stakeholders seek. To highlight its distinctiveness, we compare this perspective to three other popular performance perspectives. Recommendations are made regarding performance measurement for both academic researchers and practitioners. The stakeholder perspective on value offered in this paper draws attention to those factors that are most closely associated with building more value for stakeholders, and in so doing, allows academics to better measure it and enhances managerial ability to create it.
The Business Roundtable, a large group of top CEOs, recently issued a statement defining the purpose of the corporation in stakeholder terms, a direct and intended reversal from an earlier statement ...that defined the duty of directors as serving the interests of stockholders. In this editorial, we briefly describe the major twists and turns in the stockholders-versus-stakeholders debate that make this statement so significant to management theory and practice. We then describe the implications of the statement for scholars and practicing managers. We end with a description of three specific research topics that require more research in light of this statement: firm boundaries, the nature of value creation systems, and theory regarding the destruction of stakeholder value.
With recent improvements in the treatment of end‐stage liver disease (ESLD), a better understanding of the burden of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is needed in the United States. A ...population‐based study using the US Census and national mortality database was performed. We identified the age‐standardized etiology‐specific mortality rates for cirrhosis and HCC among US adults ages 20 years or older from 2007 to 2016. We determined temporal mortality rate patterns by joinpoint analysis with estimates of annual percentage change (APC). Age‐standardized cirrhosis‐related mortality rates increased from 19.77/100,000 persons in 2007 to 23.67 in 2016 with an annual increase of 2.3% (95% confidence interval CI 2.0‐2.7). The APC in mortality rates for hepatitis C virus (HCV)‐cirrhosis shifted from a 2.9% increase per year during 2007 to 2014 to a 6.5% decline per year during 2014 to 2016. Meanwhile, mortality for cirrhosis from alcoholic liver disease (ALD, APC 4.5%) and NAFLD (APC 15.4%) increased over the same period, whereas mortality for hepatitis B virus (HBV)‐cirrhosis decreased with an average APC of −1.1%. HCC‐related mortality increased from 3.48/100,000 persons in 2007 to 4.41 in 2016 at an annual rate of 2.0% (95% CI 1.3‐2.6). Etiology‐specific mortality rates of HCC were largely consistent with cirrhosis‐related mortality. Minority populations had a higher burden of HCC‐related mortality. Conclusion: Cirrhosis‐related and HCC‐related mortality rates increased between 2007 and 2016 in the United States. However, mortality rates in HCV‐cirrhosis demonstrated a significant decline from 2014 to 2016, during the direct‐acting antiviral era. Mortality rates for ALD/NAFLD‐cirrhosis and HCC have continued to increase, whereas HBV‐cirrhosis‐related mortality declined during the 10‐year period. Importantly, minorities had a disproportionately higher burden of ESLD‐related mortality.
Human footprints at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, reportedly date to between ~23,000 and 21,000 years ago according to radiocarbon dating of seeds from the aquatic plant
Ruppia cirrhosa
.... These ages remain controversial because of potential old carbon reservoir effects that could compromise their accuracy. We present new calibrated
14
C ages of terrestrial pollen collected from the same stratigraphic horizons as those of the
Ruppia
seeds, along with optically stimulated luminescence ages of sediments from within the human footprint–bearing sequence, to evaluate the veracity of the seed ages. The results show that the chronologic framework originally established for the White Sands footprints is robust and reaffirm that humans were present in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum.
Editor’s summary
Traditionally, researchers believed that humans arrived in North America around 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. Recently, however, evidence has accumulated supporting a much earlier date. In 2021, fossilized footprints from White Sands National Park in New Mexico were dated to between 20,000 and 23,000 years ago, providing key evidence for earlier occupation, although this finding was controversial. Pigati
et al
. returned to the White Sands footprints and obtained new dates from multiple, highly reliable sources (see the Perspective by Philippsen). They, too, resolved dates of 20,000 to 23,000 years ago, reconfirming that humans were present far south of the ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum. —Sacha Vignieri
New radiocarbon and luminescence ages confirm the antiquity of human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico.
A firm that manages for stakeholders allocates more resources to satisfy the needs and demands of its legitimate stakeholders than would be necessary to simply retain their willful participation in ...the firm's productive activities. We explain why this sort of behavior unlocks additional potential for value creation, as well as the conditions that either facilitate or disrupt the value-creation process. Firms that manage for stakeholders develop trusting relationships with them based on principles of distributional, procedural, and interactional justice. Under these conditions, stakeholders are more likely to share nuanced information regarding their utility functions, thereby increasing the ability of the firm to allocate its resources to areas that will best satisfy them (thus increasing demand for business transactions with the firm). In addition, this information can spur innovation, as well as allow the firm to deal better with changes in the environment. Competitive advantages stemming from a managing-for-stakeholders approach are argued to be sustainable because they are associated with path dependence and causal ambiguity. These explanations provide a strong rationale for including stakeholder theory in the discussion of firm competitiveness and performance.
The stakeholder perspective has provided a rich forum for a variety of debates at the intersection of business and society. Scholars gathered for two consecutive years, first in North America, and ...then in Europe, to discuss the major issues surrounding what has come to be known as stakeholder theory, to attempt to find common ground, and to uncover areas in need of further inquiry. Those meetings led to a list of “tensions” and a call for papers for this special issue to help address them. In this article, we introduce the resulting articles and provide some brief commentary on their importance. We end with a few of our own observations about the stakeholder perspective and stakeholder research.
Harmful Stakeholder Strategies Harrison, Jeffrey S.; Wicks, Andrew C.
Journal of business ethics,
03/2021, Volume:
169, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Stakeholder theory focuses on how more value is created if stakeholder relationships are governed by ethical principles such as integrity, respect, fairness, generosity and inclusiveness. However, it ...has not adequately addressed strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests and how this perception can even lead some stakeholders to view the firm’s strategies as unethical. To fill the void, this paper directly addresses strategies that stakeholders perceive as harmful to their interests, or what we refer to as harmful stakeholder strategies. Specifically, it identifies factors associated with stakeholder perceptions of harm that are likely to cause them to consider a strategy unethical, examines the negative implications for firms that pursue such strategies in terms of likely stakeholder responses and damage to stakeholder relationships, and provides theory to help explain how firms are likely to respond to stakeholder claims that a strategy is unethical, based on factors such as the strategic importance of the claim to the firm, how long the strategy has been in use, the costs of remediation, the risk of stakeholder mobilization or new regulation, and whether firms can reasonably rationalize their actions. Assessing harm allows a firm to make a more accurate estimate of the costs of a strategy and can assist managers in allocating resources intended to reduce or remediate harm.
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