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Stakeholder Engagement: Clinical Research Cases pp 139–166Cite as

The Strategic Cognition View of Issue Salience and the Evolution of a Political Issue: Landis & Gyr, the Hungarian Uprising and East-West Trade, 1953–1967

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Part of the book series: Issues in Business Ethics ((IBET,volume 46))

Abstract

Why do firms facing similar stakeholder issues respond quite differently? The recently introduced strategic cognition view of issue salience and firm responsiveness (hereinafter: issue salience model) seeks to tackle this core question of stakeholder theory. I extend the nascent theorizing with a historical case study in order to rethink the model’s firm-centric perspective. The firm under examination in this historical case study is the Swiss multinational Landis & Gyr (LG) during the Cold War period. Like many other Swiss export-oriented companies in the 1950s and early 1960s, LG was challenged by Swiss pressure groups, which were highly effective at putting an issue on the public agenda: the call to break off trade relations with the communist East. The empirically grounded explanation of issue interpretation and response mechanisms derived from this case study offers two key theoretical implications: First, it shifts our focus outwards, toward the social and political context, in which issues evolve and play out over time. This elaboration seeks to understand the role of the social and political surroundings in constituting firm-specific issue interpretation processes and response outcomes. Second, the findings suggest that the issue salience model emphasizes an overly homogenizing conception of the firm. By pointing towards the tensions and ambiguities in a firm’s collective sensemaking efforts, I start a critique of the theory in order to push this important stream of research further.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In LG’s perspective, the following countries belonged to the Eastern bloc, as a list compiled in 1967 shows: Republic of Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Soviet Union, Republic of China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Mongolia. Interestingly, communist Yugoslavia was not included in the list (Report, 30 June 1967).

  2. 2.

    All quotes are translated by the author.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Christian Stutz

  2. Institute for Strategic Management: Stakeholder View, HWZ University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration Zurich, Lagerstrasse 5, 8021, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christian Stutz

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  1. Christian Stutz
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Correspondence to Christian Stutz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

    R. Edward Freeman

  2. Faculty of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Johanna Kujala

  3. Institute for Strategic Management: Stakeholder View, HWZ University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Sybille Sachs

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7.3 Characteristics of Landis & Gyr and Swiss economy during the period of study
Full size table

Archival and Database References

  • The Archives of Contemporary History (AfZ) at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland (http://onlinearchives.ethz.ch/):

  • The archive of Landis & Gyr, collections from 1896–1996.

  • The archive of Schweizerische Handels- und Industrie-Verein („Vorort“), collections from 1870–2003.

  • NESTRO documentation on Eastern trade

  • The Swiss Social Archives in Zurich, Switzerland (http://www.sachdokumentation.ch):

  • Collection on Hungarian Uprising, 1956–1959.

  • Collection on Foreign Economic Policy: Eastern Trade, 1952–1966

  • Base de données des élites suisses au XXe siècle. University of Lausanne, Switzerland (http://www2.unil.ch/elitessuisses/)

  • Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland 1848–1989 (www.dodis.ch):

  • Collection on East-West-Trade (dodis.ch/T293).

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Stutz, C. (2017). The Strategic Cognition View of Issue Salience and the Evolution of a Political Issue: Landis & Gyr, the Hungarian Uprising and East-West Trade, 1953–1967. In: Freeman, R., Kujala, J., Sachs, S. (eds) Stakeholder Engagement: Clinical Research Cases. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62785-4_7

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