European Business School Schloß Reichartshausen

Seminar paper within the scope of the seminar “Seminar zur Unternehmensentwicklung”

Managing Stakeholder Engagement: Reaching Beyond The Rhetoric

Alexander Lorch Date of submission 24.03.2005

Table of Content ... I

1 Introduction ... 1
1.1 Problem Definition ... 1
1.2 Course of the Analysis ... 1

2 Stakeholder Theory ...1

3 Stakeholder Identification ... 2
3.1 Need for Stakeholder Identification ... 2
3.2 Stakeholder Attributes ... 3
3.3 Stakeholder Salience & Stakeholder Classes ... 4

4 Stakeholder Collaboration ... 5
4.1 Need for Stakeholder Collaboration ... 5
4.2 Tools for Stakeholder Collaboration ... 8

5 Problems in Stakeholder Collaboration ... 9

6 Outlook and Conclusion ... 11

References ... 13

1 Introduction

1.1 Problem Definition

Freeman published his book „Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach” in 1984. Since then, stakeholder theory has been severely discussed and has dominated the literature of business ethics as organizations are more and more in the focus of the media and society.¹ Stakeholder theory suggests that managers cannot limit their attention to the needs of stockholders only. Instead, today’s manager has to attend to the needs of a vast variety of stakeholder groups and has to meet all sorts of social, environmental, economic and ethical expectations. A lot of research addresses the problems resulting from the vague term “stakeholder”, but little research goes beyond the mere recognition of this fact. ² As the concept alone leaves many questions unanswered, this paper tries to explore the difficulties and possibilities stakeholder management might posses.

1.2 Course of the Analysis

For a better understanding, the background and the requirements of stakeholder theory will be discussed in the beginning. After that, means of stakeholder identification will be illustrated and the identification with the help of a framework derived by Mitchell and his colleagues will be introduced. Once stakeholder groups are identified, they have to be approached; therefore stakeholder engagement will be discussed next. After that, the paper will explore some of the problems that might occur in terms of stakeholder theory in general and stakeholder engagement in particular. At the end, a conclusion will be drawn and a short outlook for future research will be given.

1 See Reed (1999), p. 453.

2 See Unerman/Bennet (2004), pp. 685f.