Vulnerable Stakeholders’ Engagement: Advancing Stakeholder Theory with New Attribute and Salience Framework

Abstract

Stakeholder engagement is a central tenet for understanding and solving sustainability challenges. Given the existing stakeholder knowledge base and the fact that practitioners mostly focus on the engagement of high-power and salience stakeholders, the interests of low-power and vulnerable stakeholders are often manipulated. Therefore, this research is devoted to the engagement of low-power and vulnerable stakeholders. Grounded in the stakeholder theory and the results of two illustrations, we demonstrate how the physical proximity of vulnerable stakeholders influences salience patterns in a multi-stakeholder engagement context. The contribution of the study is the conceptualisation of proximity as a stakeholder attribute, in addition to power, legitimacy, and urgency, to help managers identify and appropriately engage with vulnerable stakeholders. Thus, we extend stakeholder typologies by incorporating proximity into the existing attribute model. The proposed model addresses the paradoxical nature of stakeholder salience and engagement theories and furthers the sustainability agenda.