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Stakeholder Salience for Stakeholder Firms: An Attempt to Reframe an Important Heuristic Device

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Abstract

This work underscores the importance of answering the question: who are organizational stakeholders? It argues that stakeholder theory is a normative management theory, and there is a need to differentiate between stakeholder and non-stakeholder firms. It further argues that the overall organizational stakeholder orientation indicates how narrowly or broadly organizations define their stakeholders. Therefore, this work attempts to provide a stakeholder salience scheme for stakeholder organizations, i.e., organizations with accommodative and proactive stakeholder orientations. In the process, this work reviews key scholarly contributions and points out some potential weaknesses in these contributions with an aim to develop a new stakeholder typology. This work contributes to the existing literature by: introducing a contingent variable, i.e., organizational strategy, in a stakeholder typology scheme; reaffirming the normative aspect of stakeholder theory by placing normative considerations at the center of stakeholder salience typology; and improving the descriptive validity of stakeholder theory by adding a new stakeholder variable, i.e., organization, in the presented stakeholder salience typology scheme.

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Notes

  1. For detail read Neville et al. (2011).

  2. The works are Mitchell et al. (1997), Eesley & Lennox (2006), Neville et al. (2011), and Tashman & Raelin (2013). These works are considered “pivotal” not because there are no other important contributions but because these works are more relevant to the model presented in this paper

  3. A possibility acknowledged by Clarkson (1995) when he gives examples of Manville, A. H. Robins with reactive postures denying responsibility of their actions even towards their employees or customers, as opposed to Johnson & Johnson based on its proactive stance taking broader responsibility during the Tylenol crisis.

  4. One of the early owners of J&J, Gen. Johnson in his book titled “People Must Live and Work Together or Forfeit Freedom” (Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y., 1947) expressed these views. The views expressed in this book were the core around which a stakeholder J&J Credo was designed.

  5. For more detail read Neville et al. (2011).

  6. Stakeholders who do not have any contractual bond and/or any direct legal authority over the firm, e.g., community activists, advocacy groups, and NGOs (Clarkson, 1995)

  7. Here it must be added that some groups and their claims may be legitimate based on hypernorms, and in that case the continuum may represent institutional imperatives, as discussed by Tashlin & Raelin (2013)

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  1. School of Business Administration, Penn State University, 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA, 17057-4898, USA

    Mohammad A. Ali

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  1. Mohammad A. Ali
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Correspondence to Mohammad A. Ali.

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Ali, M.A. Stakeholder Salience for Stakeholder Firms: An Attempt to Reframe an Important Heuristic Device. J Bus Ethics 144, 153–168 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2819-6

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