The stakeholder paradigm

Abstract

Both public and private organizations are increasingly employing stakeholder engagement as an important strategy for improving external stakeholder relations. As shown by stakeholder theory, incorporating stakeholders opinions is valuable for improving decision-making processes and project implementation (Deelstra et al., 2003). Successful engagement with stakeholders ensures legitimization of issues and facilitates a closer alignment between organizations and society. Currently, the prevailing practice domain for stakeholder engagement is largely characterized by complex and dynamic environments containing a wide range of stakeholders, from hostile to conciliatory, from obstructive to collaborative (Crocker, 2007). This diverse range of stakeholders with different interests and expectations requires flexible and indeed specialized engagement tools (Shandas & Messer, 2008). Yet the practise of classifying and categorizing stakeholders, a pre-requisite for successful stakeholder engagement (Clarkson, 1995; Reed et al., 2009), has been insufficiently explored. The predominant method for stakeholder classification is based on stakeholder salience, as offered by Mitchell et al. (1997). Salience, however, only represents one component of the complex entity that is a stakeholder. Other components are stakeholders frames of reference and stakeholder networks. Measuring these other components requires additional methods of investigation. At present, there is no integrated stakeholder analysis method that investigates all of the three mentioned stakeholder components. To arrive at an integrated stakeholder analysis methodology, Reed et al. (2009) have suggested investigating the potential for combining existing methods to derive more useful results in stakeholder analysis. This paper will therefore offer a new integrated stakeholder analysis, covering all components; stakeholder salience, stakeholder frames of reference and stakeholder networks.