Stakeholder

Abstract

Stakeholders are frequently referred to by both practitioners and theorists of strategic communication. Yet the concept remains contentious and mired in definitional confusion. Identifying exactly who is a stakeholder is a problematic issue. There are three distinct strands of stakeholder theory—descriptive, instrumental, and normative. The stakeholder debate was initially couched in markedly instrumental terms, but more recently much of the literature has taken a decisively normative turn. This development has significant implications for the philosophical underpinnings of the theory. The stakeholder concept and corporate social responsibility (CSR) have experienced exponential growth in parallel since the 1980s. But whereas CSR was initially thought of as primarily a matter of corporate social performance (CSP), with a focus on social issues in business and corporate responsiveness to those issues, in more recent years stakeholder theory has become paradigmatic in the CSR field.