DOI: 10.1111/beer.

12158

SPECIAL ISSUE

Tracing stakeholder terminology then and now: Convergence

and new pathways

Jennifer J. Griffin

Raymond C. Baumhart, S.J. Professor of
Business Ethics, Loyola University Chicago,
Quinlan School of Business, Chicago, Illinois,
USA
Correspondence
Jennifer J. Griffin, Quinlan School of
Business, Loyola University Chicago, 16 E.
Pearson Street, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
Email: jenngriffinva@msn.com
Over the past four decades, stakeholder research has united a chorus of voices from different dis-
ciplines using different terminology for different audiences all related to a seemingly similar topic:
those that affect and are affected by business. By juxtaposing a comprehensive review of the early
years of stakeholder research against more recent stakeholder research, we identify areas of com-
mon convergence (a focus on relationships and Freeman’s definition of a stakeholder) as well as
emergent scholarship (mechanisms underlying stakeholder relationships and solutions-oriented
impacts). We develop an organizing framework consisting of three stakeholder-related themes:
who or what is a stakeholder; mechanisms underlying stakeholder relationships; and outcomes-
oriented stakeholder research. Future research opportunities include: simultaneously examining
multiple stakeholders at multiple levels; multiplier effects along the value chain and across geogra-
phies; and net impacts (examining whether net positive benefits inclusive of negative outcomes
exist). We conclude by identifying how stakeholder research can “move the needle” on important
business issues such as: income inequality and CEO pay; human rights and building community
inclusion; disease alleviation; and food security in firms’ continuous quest to create value.

1 | INTRODUCTION for many management scholars and practitioners. Yet questions

In 1994 Archie Carroll documented the views, analyses, and research
topics of 50 experts on social issues in management (SIM) using a
modified Delphi panel to assess (a) current research topics and (b) the
most important research topics in the coming decade (Carroll, 1994).
The second-to-last current research topic, just above the ubiquitous
“other” category, was “stakeholder theory/issues.” Two out of 50
scholars identified stakeholder research as a current area of research
and just two scholars identified stakeholder research as an important
future research topic. Now, nearly 25 years later, stakeholder research
seems to be everywhere. It has been the focus of special issues in spe-
cialty and top-tier mainstream journals, including: Business & Society,
Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics: A
European Review, European Management Journal, Journal of Management
Studies, Academy of Management Journal, and Academy of Management
Review. Numerous textbooks, award-winning books, courses, cases,
business networks, conferences, and international standards have
inculcated stakeholder language into everyday managerial responsibil-
ities. Explicit calls-to-action for effective stakeholder management
abound from policy makers, non-profits, ranking and rating agencies,
and consultants. Quite unexpectedly given Carroll’s survey of experts,
stakeholder theory has become a significant mainstream research topic
abound regarding what, cumulatively, we as scholars have learned;
what we as scholars have contributed to creating value and improved
management practices; and where future scholarship is needed regard-
ing stakeholder-related research (Barney & Harrison, 2015; Donaldson
& Preston, 1995; Frynas & Yamahak, 2016; Griffin, 2016; Orlitzky,
Louche, Gond, & Chapple, 2017).
The purpose of this paper is to examine how stakeholder research
in the management literature evolved over the past 25 years. By
undertaking a comprehensive examination of the early years of stake-
holder research, we seek to first identify the early stakeholder topics,
highlighting which topics have grown or dwindled in importance. A sec-
ond contribution of this paper is to fast-forward to more recent stake-
holder research highlighting how the early strands of stakeholder ideas
did or did not coalesce and become more fully elaborated. In doing so,
we highlight how stakeholder research, a managerial theory (Donaldson
& Preston, 1995), has created new knowledge in terms of informing
managers how value is created, destroyed, or just merely redistributed
through stakeholder interactions.
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we focus on system-
atically examining the stakeholder topics scholars wrote about,
described, and struggled to make sense of, by explicitly examining the
word “stakeholder” in four scholarly publications from 1994 to 1997,

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GRIFFIN | 327

inclusive. We examine years when a relatively small set of researchers

were struggling to understand this emergent concept (most notably,
who or what is a stakeholder?). Explicitly tracing the early use of the
term “stakeholder” provides a glimpse at the attempts to clarify the
concept and map divergent trajectories of stakeholder-related research
(most notably, a shift toward focusing on relationships rather than who
or what is a stakeholder, per se).
Our findings suggest a very rich stakeholder vocabulary as models
have been advanced (Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Freeman, 1984;
Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997; Rowley, 1997), theories proposed FIGURE 1 Stakeholder terminology, 1994–1997 [Colour figure
(Brenner, 1993; Brenner & Cochran, 1991), and suggestions for manag- can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
ers identified (Clarkson, 1993, 1995). Yet more work is needed as
(1984) seminal book. We examined articles, research notes, and com-
researchers call the phenomenon variously a paradigm (Jones, 1995), a
mentaries1 in two top-tier mainstream journals, a specialty journal, and
perspective (Barney & Harrison, 2015), a paradox (Calton, 1996), a con-
proceedings from an annual conference dedicated to exploratory
cept (Freeman & Reed, 1983; Rowley, 1997), a method of depiction
research on business and society: Academy of Management Journal
(Carroll, 1994), or a minefield (Mitchell et al., 1997).
(AMJ), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Business & Society, and
Considerable debate remains about whether there is a stakeholder
the annual Proceedings of the International Association for Business and
theory or not, partly because the variety of terms in use continues to
Society (IABS) conference. We excluded non-peer reviewed content
grow, resulting in yet another Tower of Babel wherein “many different
like dissertation abstracts and book reviews. We also excluded the
disciplinary voices, (are) talking in different languages to different issues
Business & Society (1996) special issue on the first 5 years of the IABS
and audiences” (Shrivastava, 1993, p. 33). Debates continue in large
conference proceedings as including it would have created
part due to the existence and persistence of narrow and broad concep-
duplications.
tualizations of stakeholders (Evan, 1966; Freeman & Reed, 1983; Grif-
We did not limit ourselves to titles, abstracts, or keywords that
fin, 2016). We find a large body of early research focused upon
used the term “stakeholder,” rather we searched the entire body of
identifying characteristics of individual stakeholders (e.g., attitudes, per-
each article for the term “stakeholder.” Focusing on the use of the
ceptions, policies toward, interests, etc.). We also focus on the adjec-
word “stakeholder” in the management and SIM fields allows sorting of
tives used with the term “stakeholder” as well as how the term
stakeholder terms into useful classifications within management, ethics,
“stakeholder” is an adjective for other nouns (e.g., “primary” stakehold-
business, and organizational research. Some articles used the term
ers, “inside” stakeholders, “external” stakeholders or “stakeholder”
“stakeholder” once, twice, or thrice whereas most articles used many
model, “stakeholder” concept, “stakeholder” theory, “stakeholder” map).
unique stakeholder terms, often with seemingly little consistency. As
In doing so, we find that early research on stakeholders per se has
Figure 1 illustrates, some stakeholder terms were used by just one or
increasingly been overshadowed by a focus on stakeholder relation-
two articles whereas a few stakeholder terms (e.g., theory, manage-
ships and, only recently, an emphasis on stakeholder relations’ impacts
ment, groups, interests, relationships) were repeatedly used by many
and outcomes. authors across multiple publications.
We conclude by speculating on prospective gaps for productive The period of time examined, 1994–1997, provides a baseline con-
stakeholder research in the coming decades, and we assert stakeholder temporate with Carroll’s (1994) article and a decade after the “stake-
research is now far beyond the ubiquitous “other” category for man- holder” term emerged within the management context (Freeman,
agement scholars, even though many organizations still fail to imple- 1984; Freeman & Reed, 1983). Frequently cited stakeholder research
ment stakeholder practices that stakeholder research suggests is published before 1994 (e.g., Freeman & Reed, 1983) were included as
effective. Regardless of whether “stakeholder theory” is a theory or not, these articles reflect the earliest and sporadic, but growing, uses of the
understanding the basis of why a stakeholder relationship exists, what stakeholder term in management and ethics research.
value is being created, and how to effectively create value is part of mod- In total, 171 published articles out of a total of 874 articles, or
ern management. Complex business problems featuring mutually benefi- 20%, used the word “stakeholder” at least once. Table 1 lists the
cial outcomes solved through unilateral firm-only practices are not likely articles. Overall, 352 different terms associated with stakeholders were
to be effective, or to be sustained over time (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012a, used by 173 different authors writing about stakeholders in these 171
2012b; Griffin & Prakash, 2014; Prakash & Griffin, 2012). articles. Given Carroll’s (1994) findings that only two scholars identified
stakeholder research as an important future research topic, we would
2 | METHODS: EXAMINING THE not have expected stakeholder research to become a major topic, yet it
“STAKEHOLDER” TERM, 1994–1997 did. Rather, stakeholder research grew from 1994 to 1996 with a slight
tapering occurring in 1997, as shown in Figure 2. As expected, special
We started by identifying articles that used the term “stakeholder” and issues on stakeholders in the top-tier management journals, AMJ and
were published between 1994 and 1997, a decade after Ed Freeman’s AMR, created episodic spikes in mainstream management publications.
328 | GRIFFIN
FIGURE 2 Number of articles using the term “Stakeholder” in
selected journals, 1994–1997 [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
Yet the baseline growth in stakeholder research came from a slow,
steady set of conversations reflected in the annual Proceedings of the
IABS conference and a management journal sponsored by IABS, Busi-
ness & Society.
Interestingly, stakeholder research took off in the 21st century. Cita-
tions of Freeman’s (1984) seminal book, for example, increased from 178
annual citations in 2000 when Google Scholar first reported citations, to
a high of 2,437 annual citations in 2013, as shown in Figure 3.
3 | CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE,
1994–1997
Examining the usage of the stakeholder term across 171 articles, our
results from 1994 to 1997 confirm what has been reported elsewhere
(Matten & Crane, 2005; Phillips, Freeman, & Wicks, 2003): both broad
and narrow conceptualizations of stakeholders exist (e.g., Freeman &
Reed, 1983; Griffin, 2016; Mitchell et al., 1997). Table 2 highlights
some of the early definitions of stakeholder and stakeholder-related
topics. Numerous, potentially conflicting understandings of
FIGURE 3 Google Scholar citation counts for Freeman (1984), 2000–2015 [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
stakeholders persisted as early research grappled with stakeholder rela-
tionships (Jones, 1995; Lerner & Fryxell, 1994), interests (Weber,
1992), needs (Freeman & Reed, 1983), claims (Donaldson & Preston,
1995), demands (Toronto Conference, 1994), expectations (Rowley,
1997), orientations (Jones, 1980), responsibilities (Clarkson, 1993;
Donaldson & Preston, 1995), behaviors (Hill & Jones, 1992), strategies
(Pasquero, 1996), and goals (Rowley, 1997). Stakeholders require satis-
faction (Clarkson, 1995; Donaldson & Preston, 1995) while exerting
influence (Freeman & Reed, 1983) and pressure (Hill & Jones, 1992)
when participating (Logsdon, 1996) and interacting with the firm.
In this early research, four primary firm-stakeholder relationships are
identified: investors, employees, customers, and communities. More spe-
cifically the stakeholder-related research examined financial returns to
investors (Griffin & Mahon, 1997; McWilliams & Siegel, 1997) and gov-
ernance issues (Johnson & Greening, 1994; Waddock & Graves, 1997);
the impact of fair wages and work conditions upon attracting and retain-
ing employees (Turban & Greening, 1997); providing safe products/serv-
ices for customers or facing the travails of recalls (Clarkson, 1995); and
community building through charitable contributions or political rela-
tions, and quite often focused only on the communities near a firm’s
headquarters (Getz, 1997; Rowley, 1997; Schuler & Rehbein, 1997).
Given the various stakeholder-related adjectives and attributes
amidst the growing body of management research, we found some con-
vergence, but predominantly divergence. Overall, stakeholder research
during this period resembled a shrub, consisting of a wild crown of
branches, buds, and offshoots of stakeholder-related terms grafted onto
a solid stem, with a healthy rootstock bound together by a common defi-
nition of stakeholder. At its roots, stakeholder research draws from mul-
tiple disciplines with deep taproots in sociology, ethics, law,
management, marketing, accounting, philosophy, and human relations.
 GRIFFIN

T A B LE 1 Stakeholder articles analyzed, 1994–1997

AMR AMJ B&S IABS

1994 Meznar, Nigh, and Kwok Carroll Husted Nasi, Nasi, and Savage O’Neil and Pienta
Lerner and Fryxell Baetz and Fleisher Huse Desmarais Mitchell
Toronto Conference Lamb Feyerherm Bigelow, Michael, and Savage

1995 Swanson Buchholz and Rosenthal Dunn and Brady Mallott Cohen
Donaldson and Preston Brown and Perry Mitnick Kennelly Jones Driscoll
Clarkson Cook and Barry Kurland Ryan Di Toro Waddock
Jones Logsdon and Wartick Sodeman Clarkson Polonsky and Ryan Dodd-McCue
Quinn and Jones Mullery, Brenner, and Perrin Johnson Nasi, Savage and Nasi Sachs and Bohi
Shrivastava Brown and Perry Collins and Kelley and Rosenberg Dienhart Stead, and Stead
Wartick Feyerherm and Milliman Turcotte
Morris, Rehbein, Hosseini, and
Armacost

1996 Jones, M. Wood Altman Mahon and McGowan Nielson Cohen

Collins Wicks Barnes Fleisher and Stephan Greening and Turban
Huse and Eide Strong Burton and Dunn Pasquero Agle
Collins Edlund Calton Phillips and Bezold Bansal
Buchholz Logsdon Waddock and Graves Windsor Danley
Nielsen and Bartunek Frooman Meznar Edmonson and Carroll
Quiring Rynning VanBuren Van Buren
Pini and Savazzi Clelland, Fryxell and Wen
Ruf, Muralidhar, Brown, and Paul McKendall
Fleisher and Ross Nasi, Nasi, and Savage Entine
Getz and Cunningham Keogh and Polonsky
Morris, Loney, and Kinlaw Raatikainen Huse
Bendheim, Waddockand Graves
Martello Matusik and Berman Rowley Kennelly
Collins and Wartick Rowley Mock and Hoy

1997 Mitchell, Agle, and Wood Huselid, Jackson and Schuler Schuler and Rehbein Getz Bezold and Wokutch Savage Greve Maly Dunn
Rowley McWilliams and Siegel Lachman and Wolfe Frooman Elms and Berman Stephens, Gerde, and Wokutch
Turban and Greening Griffin and Mahon Gerde and Jones Polonsky Polonsky and Ottman
Baucus and Baucus Sundaramurthy and Rechner Martello Pearson, Shelton, and Andersson Husted
Waddock and Graves Mitchell and Agle Jones and Rowley Strong and Ringer
Nasi, Nasi, Phillips, and Zyglidopolous Kujala Brown and Logsdon
Greening and Johnson Polonsky Lydenburg, and Paul Pasquero
Szwajkowski and Figlewicz Radin McMillan and Duska Caldwell Smith Berry
Antal, Dierkes, and Hahner Rowley Hingston and Driscoll Phillips and Reichart
Sachs, Ruhli and Schmitt Swanson Calton Jones
Nasi, Nasi, and Savage Nasi, Nasi, and Savage

Other articles included: Jones (1980) CMR; Jones (1983) AMR; Hill and Jones (1992) JOMS; Freeman (1994) BEQ; Brenner and Cochran (1991) IABS; Weber (1992) IABS;
Brenner (1993) IABS; Clarkson (1993) IABS; Freeman and Reed (1983) CMR; Waddock and Graves (1997) SMJ
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330 | GRIFFIN

TA BL E 2 Definitions of stakeholders

Dill (1975) People outside. . .who have ideas about the economic and social performance of the enterprise should (be)
include(d).
From Freeman and Reed (1983)

Ansoff (1965) The objectives of the firm should be desired by balancing the conflicting claims of various “stakeholders” in the
firm: managers, workers, stockholders, suppliers, vendors.

Freeman and Reed (1983) Wide sense: any identifiable group or individual who can affect the achievement of an organization’s objectives
or who is affected by the achievement of an organization’s objectives.
Narrow sense: any identifiable group or individual on which the organization is dependent for its continued
survival.

Freeman (1984) Those who affect or are affected by the achievement of the corporation’s objective.

Over time, stakeholder research has interwoven insights across tradi-
tional disciplinary boundaries, built a foundation based upon business
ethics, and added managerial and humanistic-centered insights to man-
agement while explicitly identifying local government, public and civil
society stakeholders [originally depicted as community in Freeman’s
(1984) framework]. As these multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary roots
merge at the base of the shrub, there is a common point of convergence.
Stakeholder research, almost universally, converges around Freeman’s
(1984, p. 23) definition of stakeholders as “those who affect and are
affected by the achievement of the organization’s objective.” Similarly, a
common theme, obscured from time to time yet continuous throughout
the decades, is a focus on relationships in management.
From these points of convergence (i.e., a focus on relationships
and citing Freeman’s original definition), stakeholder literature diverges
into a wild crown of: many disciplines, applications, issue areas, indus-
tries, nation-states/regions with assorted implications for managers,
scholars, citizens, and policy makers. The dense crown of stakeholder-
related research grafted onto a very small common point of conver-
gence encourages a plethora of authors to focus on vastly different
aspects of stakeholder relations without referring to one another. The
still-proliferating stakeholder literature, however, has also seemingly
stunted cumulative learning across disciplines. Consensus seems not to
exist nor to be a sought-after goal, while stakeholder research streams
continuously emerge, as illustrated by yet another recent call for
papers, ominously entitled “Stakeholder Theory at the Crossroads”
(Barney & Harrison, 2015).
Understandably, as with many new areas of research, early stake-
holder research lacked common coherence regarding a basic question:
who or what is a stakeholder? In Clarkson’s (1995, p. 106) original defini-
tion of primary stakeholders, for example, “the governments and com-
munities that provide infrastructures and markets, whose laws and
regulations must be obeyed, and to whom taxes and other obligations
may be due” were included as primary stakeholders. Others also dis-
cussed primary stakeholders (Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Kurland, 1995;
Waddock & Graves, 1997), yet “primary” stakeholders did not include
public stakeholders, government officials and/or community stakeholders
(Feyerherm & Milliman, 1995; Nielsen & Bartunek, 1996). Reflecting the
limited overlap among stakeholder and community-related literatures,
stakeholder terms were slow to be adapted by the community relations,
business-government relations, and corporate political activity literatures
(e.g., Mullery, Brenner, & Perrin, 1995; Schuler & Rehbein, 1997).
From the mid-2000s, stakeholder research began to privilege gov-
ernment as more than a mere stakeholder as it influences, sets the con-
text for, and engages in direct and indirect relationships with
businesses (Matten & Moon, 2008). For some researchers and firms,
government might be THE stakeholder, with information and/or legiti-
macy being the currency of exchange with governments and across
communities. The lack of clarity about who or what is a primary stake-
holder, including questioning whether or not governments are a pri-
mary stakeholder, has led stakeholder research to be depicted as a
“somewhat naïve view of the efficacy of the government and ignore(s)
the reality of governmental and regulatory” impacts on firms (Husted &
de Salazar, 2006). More specifically, stakeholder research at the nexus
of business–community–employee–government relations is focusing
on appropriate mechanisms multiplying the effects of numerous stake-
holders (Griffin, 2016) in multidomestic or international contexts (Doh
& Teegen, 2002; Jamali & Neville, 2011). More recently, research on
networks of stakeholder relations examines the efficacy of cross-sector
partnering (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012a, 2012b), explicitly including gov-
ernments and the importance of location-based stakeholder relations
(Griffin, 2016; Lucea & Doh, 2012).
Freeman (1984), in his original hub-and-spoke depiction, does not
identify primary versus secondary stakeholders or mention public or
governmental stakeholders, yet he does include community as a stake-
holder that creates value with the firm.2 More work is needed. The
concept of community stakeholder, as discussed in later sections, might
charitably be described currently as underexplored, the soft underbelly
of stakeholder research. The type and nature of community-based
exchanges that create and sustain value, as well as understanding
community-level outcomes remains ill-defined at best. The lack of the-
orizing, or rich description with exemplars, about how primary stake-
holders (and more specifically how governmental, community, and
public stakeholders like NGOs) enable value creation/destruction proc-
esses, and conversely, how value creation processes contribute to net
positive community-level solutions, represents a huge untapped oppor-
tunity for future researchers (den Hond, Rehbein, de Bakker, &

, 2004; Griffin, 2016;
Kooijmans-van Lankveld 2014; Garriga & Mele
Griffin & Prakash, 2014).
GRIFFIN
4 | A FOCUS ON RELATIONSHIPS
At its core, stakeholder research remains fundamentally about relation-
ships. Value creating relationships occur in any place with multiple
stakeholders simultaneously (Harrison & Freeman, 1999), at multiple
levels of analysis (Aguilera, Rupp, Williams, & Ganapathi, 2007; Agui-
lera, Williams, Conley, & Rupp, 2006), and across multiple venues
(Orlitzky et al., 2017) over time (Griffin & Mahon, 1997). Further, rela-
tionships involve nodes connected by ties with interactions (beyond
dyadic ties) occurring at multiple levels of analysis (Aguilera et al.,
2007; Rowley, 1997). Relationships among individual managers
(Mitchell et al., 1997), organizations (McWilliams & Siegel, 1997) and
their subunits (Nielsen & Bartunek, 1996), or eco-systems composed of
societies or organizational systems/networks (Rowley, 1997) remain
underexplored.
That relationships are inherently integral to the value creating pro-
cess is a critical insight from stakeholder theory. Rather than viewing
the firm as a team production function creating tangible products (Blair
& Stout, 1999), or as a nexus of contracts engaged in explicit transac-
tions (Coase, 1937), a focus on relationships suggests a humanizing
aspect to value creation, explicitly incorporating intangible, tacit, and
perceptual qualities of numerous actors and institutions including
whims, wishes, hypocrisy, and (ir)rational behavior. In short, current
depictions of business as merely transactional are undersocialized
(Ghoshal & Moran, 1996). While early research on nodes (operational-
ized as organizations, firms, communities, or for-profit entities) is quite
prolific, a more recent re-emergence of research examining linkages
among stakeholders reveals nuances in the relationships, dependencies,
and/or interdependencies (Aguilera et al., 2007). Carefully distinguish-
ing between the nodes and the relationships is a lasting challenge
within stakeholder literature.
One early example of the shifting emphasis toward the stakeholder
as an actor, rather than relationship(s), was highlighted in Mitchell et al.
(1997). Legitimacy, in their seminal article, is conceptualized as an
attribute of the claim between stakeholders (p. 866). As such, legiti-
macy is an attribute of the relationship: the specific type of claim made
by the stakeholder on the firm. Yet, most research that invokes Mitch-
ell et al. focuses on the legitimacy of the stakeholder rather than the
claim of the stakeholder. In this instance, legitimacy of the stakeholder
becomes focused on a node, an actor, or a group. Thus, depending on
how legitimacy is conceptualized and operationalized, legitimacy can
be, and often is, an attribute of the claimants, the stakeholders, rather
than the claim, as originally intended. Mitchell et al. (1997, p. 866)
helped confound the differences between attributes of stakeholders
and the relationship by combining legitimacy of the actor and legiti-
macy of the claim in the following statement: “(a)n entity may have
legitimate standing in society, or it may have a legitimate claim on the
firm.” In our organizing framework, we explicitly separate the stake-
holder having a legitimate standing in society from the relational com-
ponent, legitimacy of the claim, to better understand how the
stakeholder (in this case, with legitimate standing in society) is different
from the relationship (in this case, the legitimacy of the claim).
| 331
Similarly, trust is an attribute of a relationship, but trustworthiness
is an attribute of an individual actor involved in the relationship (Barney
& Hansen, 1994). As such, trust, morals, values, and norms may be
attributes of individuals (or entities) or exist within a relationship. Val-
ues and norms might also be part of the governing norms (the context,
the ethos) of the relationship or refer to the values of the stakeholders.
By confounding characteristics of stakeholders (e.g., trustworthiness)
with characteristics of the relationship itself (e.g., trust based on the
claim), cumulative knowledge remains stymied.
To promote cumulative learning, we separate research examining
characteristics of stakeholders and the stakeholder relationship(s) as
described below in the organizing framework. We acknowledge that
parsing characteristics of stakeholders from the relationships and con-
text of the relationships creates a synthetic, academically derived
divide as the stakeholder(s), the context, and the relationship(s) are
tightly interwoven. Stakeholders, context, and relationships are not
mutually exclusive nor selectively exhaustive. Nevertheless, for illus-
trating opportunities for ongoing cumulative and new learning, we
focus on a highly inter-related three-part framework described below.
5 | ORGANIZING FRAMEWORK ABOUT
S T A K E H O L D E R S A N D T H E I R RELATIONSHIPS
A preponderance of early stakeholder research can be sorted into three
broad, recurring themes focused on: (a) stakeholders (e.g., who or what
is a stakeholder, including relevant contextual conditions); (b) mecha-
nisms underlying the relationship (e.g., explicit, implicit, voluntary, or
contractual relationships; how stakeholders are linked; or how they
affect and are affected by a focal organization, etc.); and to a lesser
degree, a third category: (c) the outcomes of stakeholder relationship(s)
(e.g., stakeholder satisfaction, firm performance, meaningfully creating
impact, appropriately addressing relevant issues, new business models
that co-create value, etc.). See Table 3 for the organizing framework.
As one might imagine, all three components of the model (stake-
holders, relationships, and outcomes) are highly inter-related in theory
and in practice. To illustrate how tightly intertwined stakeholders, rela-
tionships and outcomes are in the value creation process, let’s examine
Unilever’s handwashing campaign, which was started in India in 2009
to improve children’s hygiene, prevent diseases, and in turn lower the
infant mortality rate.
The World Health Organization estimates that every year diarrhea
results in 1 in 10 child deaths. Many of these diseases can be
prevented through improved sanitation. Unilever, a health and hygiene
company, crafted a simple yet effective campaign to encourage
20 seconds of handwashing with soap. Unilever focused on reaching
one billion people worldwide with their handwashing message by 2020
—a far larger population than consumers that might be willing and able
to buy their products. Having viable goals, with dedicated leadership
and locally adapted messages and program, the positive effects of
handwashing multiplied: a buzz about the company when YouTube vid-
eos went viral, improved public health results that multiple levels of
332 | GRIFFIN

TA BL E 3 Organizing framework: structural, relational and outcome-oriented stakeholder research

STRUCTURAL RELATIONAL OUTCOMES

Focus: the stakeholder (ee) the relationship satisfaction and effectiveness

Perspective: Individual mechanisms: other-oriented:

Subunit Mergers & Acquisitions social justice

Organizational Outsourcing social welfare

System trust sustainable development

Associated Terms: ethics trust, expectations evaluation

primary stakeholders policies, norms effectiveness

Critical Questions: Who or What? How related? For what purpose?

What of the relationship? outcome/who benefits?

How should relations be managed?

Theoretical Basis: Cognitive, Leadership Agency theory, TCE Social Movements, Sociology

Decision-making, institutional theory Inter-organizational Community impact,

Research, Corporate political engagement

government officials, non-profit groups, and public health communities
could not achieve by themselves.
By choosing an important outcome (reducing child mortality)
accomplished via a “simple” mechanism (e.g., regular handwashing),
Unilever’s message is easily understood across dialects and transcends
national, tribal, and cultural boundaries. Through the community hand-
washing campaign, Unilever credibly recast its traditional customer and
employee relationships beyond individualized, arms-length, value-chain
oriented transactions into a network of communities dedicated to pre-
venting diarrhea and improving infant mortality. It went from “pushing
product” involving suppliers and manufacturers through wholesalers
and retailers to focusing upon a solution-oriented community outcome
(healthier lives and promoting lifelong healthy behaviors), enabling a
network of relationships. By creating a connected network focused on
everyone trying to be a bit healthier one day at a time, Unilever ulti-
mately focused on improved community health, going beyond name-
less, faceless stakeholders (McVea & Freeman, 2005).
As Unilever deepens its commitment to improving community
health through multiple mechanisms (e.g., employee engagement,
newsletters, and social media as well as financial investments), the
handwashing campaign has continually reinvented itself year after year.
Unilever benefits from the campaign in several ways. They can attract
and retain employees willing to join Unilever over rivals; receive
ongoing cross-sector recognition through the Global Handwashing Day
(October 15); and partner with multiple international aid organizations,
like PSI or UNICEF, allowing Unilever to become known as a partner of
choice. Who can be against preventing diarrhea? Policy makers, devel-
opment specialists, community groups and citizens line up to help Uni-
lever spread the word and save a life—becoming voluntary
ambassadors for a good cause rather than being paid celebrities pitch-
ing a single product.
Applying the stakeholder framework to Unilever’s handwashing
campaign illustrates a couple of interesting points. Of specific note:
Unilever is focused on a solution-oriented community-level outcome—
preventing diseases such as diarrhea. In doing so, Unilever began with
a broadly applicable focus on outcomes. A focus on outcomes is the
third, and least developed, pillar of the stakeholder framework. Rather
than proceeding from a “who or what is a stakeholder?” approach that
early researchers took, Unilever focused on the solution and then
sought relevant stakeholders, while other stakeholders “found” Unile-
ver. Unilever also developed multiple means to communicate its mes-
sage, amplify its intent, and work through cross-sector partnerships to
achieve its desired outcome. These mechanisms (communications, con-
necting employees with customers and community officials across mul-
tiple stakeholder sets, cross-sector partnering) are mutually reinforcing
with a long-term commitment to handwashing and preventing diarrhea.
In doing so, Unilever has identified and involved several relevant stake-
holders in India and Indonesia: employees, suppliers, clients, customers,
local/regional/provincial governments, multilateral organizations, end
users, as well as the general public. Handwashing as one means to
achieve a viable solution (preventing diseases) can create a mutually
beneficial, self-reinforcing win–win–win for the company, citizens,
infants, municipal leaders, employees, and investors. By casting a wider
net, Unilever is signaling that it affects and can affect far more lives
than just its customers’. Time will tell if the campaign will have an
appreciable role in preventing diseases, selling more washing-up pow-
der, or helping Unilever (and presumably its rivals) in selling more of
their other products.
In the following three sections, we return to the framework to fol-
low the step-wise academic progression of the management field,
starting with the classical economic and rational examination of who or
what are stakeholders, and documenting only recently increasing
GRIFFIN
attention to the mechanisms underlying the relationships, and solution-
oriented outcomes.
5.1 | The nodes: Who or what is a stakeholder?
Within context
Who or what is a stakeholder dominates the early stakeholder litera-
ture (Toronto Conference, 1994; http://www.utoronto.edu/stakehold-
ers). Stakeholders were identified or classified based upon attributes
such as: power (Emerson, 1962), legitimacy (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;
Oliver, 1991; Phillips, 1997), and urgency (Mitchell et al., 1997).
Another series of papers examined how stakeholders are positioned
relative to one another (Rowley, 1997), often highlighting owners and
non-owners (Donaldson & Preston, 1995) with inherent or instrumen-
tal demands (Berman, Wicks, Kotha, & Jones, 1999). We examine both
the categorization of stakeholders per attributes and the prioritization
of stakeholders through a narrow and broad approach: a stakeholder
by stakeholder approach as well as groups of a variety of stakeholders.
Between 1994 and 1997, stakeholders were categorized according
to type (Brenner, 1993), value matrices (Brenner & Cochran, 1991),
salience based on combinations of power, urgency, and legitimacy
(Mitchell et al., 1997), or separated into internal (Jones, 1995) and
external (Griffin & Vivari, 2009; Huselid, Jackson, & Schuler, 1997)
stakeholders. Stakeholders exist in a group (Carroll, 1994), grid (Huse &
Eide, 1996), set (Freeman, 1994), network (Rowley, 1997), environment
(Toronto Conference, 1994), and universe (Mitchell et al., 1997). Stake-
holders were considered through theory (Brenner, 1993), model (Jones,
1995), analysis (Jones, 1980), audit (Freeman & Reed, 1983), frame-
work (Rowley, 1997), map (Strong, 1996), or approach (Clarkson, 1995;
Freeman, 1984). Still others called for managing multiple stakeholders
simultaneously, focusing on the interactions among customers, employ-
ees, investors, and the community (Harrison & Freeman, 1999). More
broadly, stakeholder research streams were categorized as normative,
instrumental, and descriptive (Donaldson & Preston, 1995). By the late
1990s, contrary to Carroll’s (1994) Delphi study, stakeholders had their
own literature (Hill & Jones, 1992) and set of scholars (Mitchell et al.,
1997).
Overall, no single classification schema determining who or what is
a stakeholder dominates. Further, synthetic distinctions aligned with
neoclassical economics between internal and external stakeholders
(e.g., make vs. buy distinctions) has seemingly stunted our understand-
ing of the value creation process as organizational boundaries ostensi-
bly demark who captures value rather than who creates value
(Freeman, Harrison, Wicks, Parmar, & Colle, 2010).
5.1.1 | Single stakeholder approach
Traditionally, a single stakeholder approach in management research
meant focusing solely on shareholders. As Milton Friedman (1970)
famously suggested, the responsibility of business is to create share-
holder value without fraud or deception. Broadening a shareholder-
only view of business to examine benefits accruing to individual stake-
holders or stakeholder sets beyond shareholders is often where the
1994–1997 stakeholder literature starts.
| 333
A deep dive to examine and understand the interests of an individ-
ual stakeholder or a group of like-minded stakeholders (a stakeholder
set such as consumers, employees, and the like) of an organization is a
recurrent theme in the “who or what is a stakeholder” literature. An in-
depth examination of a stakeholder group in isolation from other rela-
tionships allows for deeply understanding underlying motivations, com-
mon or myriad interests, and expected outcomes. Gaining depth of
knowledge, some studies subdivided stakeholder sets into subsets to
segment customers (Nielsen & Bartunek, 1996), salaried versus non-
salaried employees (Kurland, 1995), or institutional investors versus
other shareholders (Ryan & Schneider, 2002). This fine-grained
research created clarity as some stakeholders occupy multiple roles
(Wood & Jones, 1995); for instance, full-time or part-time contract
employees might also be owners as well as consumers of the firm’s
products and services. Thus, some employees’ interests might closely
align with owners’ or consumers’ interests under different conditions.
A single stakeholder approach allows for longitudinal insights such
as shifting expectations on employee engagement and how employees
are treated (e.g., human rights, child labor, workplace safety, volunteer-
ism, wages, etc.), which in turn significantly impacts the ability to
attract and retain employees (Greening & Turban, 2000; Griffin, Bryant,
& Koerber, 2015; Orlitzky et al., 2017; Turban & Greening, 1997) and
presumably, directly affects the value creation process.
Increasingly, how actions toward or with single stakeholders affect
other relationships through spillover, halo, masking, or multiplier effects
has been of significant scholarly interest (Chernev & Blair, 2015;
Delmas, Hoffman, & Kuss, 2011; Godfrey, 2005). Irresponsible actions
toward one stakeholder can affect the organization’s other relationships
and limit its ability to redress past irresponsible practices (Bhattacharya
& Sankar Sen, 2004; Bhattacharya, Sankar Sen, & Korschun, 2011; Cher-
nev & Blair, 2015; The Economist, 2015; Healy & Griffin, 2004; Kang,
Germann, & Grewal, 2016; Smith, 2003). Conversely, a business can
limit regulatory actions by developing a reputation for responsibility (The
Economist, 2015). Similarly, supply chain research suggests business-to-
business and business-to-consumer relationships are motivated by dif-
ferent mechanisms (Hoejmose, Grosvold, & Millington, 2013). Recent
research on another important stakeholder group, financial analysts, sug-
gests information asymmetries and prosocial voluntary behavior have a
positive effect on analysts’ perceptions over time (Cheng, Ioannou, &
Serafeim, 2014; Eccles, Ioannou, & Serafeim, 2014; Henisz, Dorobantu,
& Nartey, 2014; Ioannou & Serafeim, 2015). These spillover and multi-
plier effects from one stakeholder to another are also being studied as
part of managing competing stakeholder interests, as discussed below.
5.1.2 | Managing multiple stakeholder interests
simultaneously
Managing multiple stakeholder interests simultaneously often pits one
type of stakeholder against another with a focus on trade-offs (for
instance between employees and customers). Examining multiple
stakeholders simultaneously embraces a broader view of stakeholder
relations lending itself to emphasize enterprise-level relationships: har-
monizing, weighting, coordinating, or prioritizing across stakeholder
interests given scarce resources (Flammer, 2013; Frynas & Yamahak,
334 | GRIFFIN
2016; Griffin & Prakash, 2014; Hillman & Keim, 2001; Tanega et al.,
2016). Hillman and Keim (2001), for example, found that primary stake-
holders created value whereas stakeholder interests that were broadly
associated with social issues did not contribute to value creation.
Tanega et al. (2016) confirmed complementary and competing interests
within and across different primary stakeholder groups in their relation-
ships with Indian businesses. As one might imagine, theorizing about
and testing multiple stakeholder groups simultaneously is difficult due
to measurement issues such as weightings, convergent validity, con-
struct validity, and sample selection bias, among other issues (Orlitzky,
Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003; Orlitzky et al., 2017). Overall, incorporating
multiple stakeholders simultaneously creates research complexity, but
more closely mirrors the reality faced by managers every day.
Managing multiple stakeholders simultaneously, for example, might
necessitate examining complementary, not just competing, interests
across stakeholders, such as disease alleviation in the example of Unile-
ver (Arenas & Ayuso, 2016; Frynas & Yamahak, 2016). Taking comple-
mentary interests one step further, the potential for positive spillover,
halo or multiplier effects would expand this research stream (The Econ-
omist, 2015). Unilever’s ability to attract and retain millennials or its
ability to enter new emerging markets with its handwashing products
and solution-oriented disease prevention campaigns might make it rela-
tively more attractive than its rivals in the view of a government grant-
ing permits. In a related argument, Campbell (2007) recently proposed
examining a firm’s regulatory context rather than regulations per se to
examine business behavior. Juxtaposing pressures from multiple stake-
holders simultaneously (including the media, NGOs, shareholder acti-
vists, and community members) alongside formal mechanisms of
governance and oversight such as regulations might be a better way to
understand how myriad stakeholder relationships simultaneously add
up to affect firm behavior, and vice versa.
Examining multiple stakeholder interests simultaneously to assess
corporation’s social responsibility (Jamali, 2008) has reinvigorated
research on CSR, strategy, social impacts, and, in turn, stakeholder
research. Studies examining multiple stakeholders simultaneously and
cross-level studies have been accelerated using third-party databases
that aggregate multi-stakeholder behaviors for small, medium, and large
organizations such as the Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini (KLD) database and
more recently the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 database (MSCI ESG
Research, 2013). While KLD has been named the de facto multi-
stakeholder database (Deckop, Merriman, & Gupta, 2006), its utility is
limited by only including U.S.-based organizations, as well as by issues
with convergent validity, construct validity, etc. (Carroll, Primo, &
Kelleher, 2016; Flammer, 2013; Hart & Sharfman, 2015; Mattingly &
Berman, 2006; Shahzad & Sharfman, 2017; Sharfman, 1996); therefore,
the universe of databases is likely to expand. New databases and meth-
ods will only improve our ability to test useful, interesting research ques-
tions and develop our empirical understanding of stakeholder
relationships.
In addition to examining single stakeholders and competing stake-
holder interests, this first theme of the stakeholder framework includes
the context of stakeholders’ relations, as discussed below.
5.1.3 | The context of stakeholder relations
Quite simply, stakeholder relationships do not exist in a vacuum. The
context of the relations (e.g., path dependency, managerial orientations,
organizational conditions, and legacies of past relations as well as the
industries, and nation states, etc.) has been critical in identifying who is
a stakeholder, and how they affect and are affected by the organization
(Prakash & Griffin, 2012). Examining stakeholder relations within their
context explicitly acknowledges various managerial and organizational
constraints and contingencies placed on stakeholder relationships
(Thompson, 1967). Cognitive limits and bounded rationality, for exam-
ple, constrain individual managers (March & Simon, 1958; Simon, 1976
[1945]), while top management philosophies (Miles, 1987) and manage-
rial orientations toward stakeholders (Berman et al., 1999) are instru-
mentally and inherently important at organizational levels. Similarly,
fiduciary and legal considerations (Cyert & March, 1963) constrain
CEOs and Boards of Directors, and affect interorganizational relations.
Further, at the institutional level, rules, norms, and policies (DiMaggio
& Powell, 1983; Prakash, 1999, 2001) either constrain or enable stake-
holder relations. New forms of organizational governance such as b-
corps (i.e., benefit-corporations created with the explicit purpose of
benefiting or creating value for stakeholders) are, in part, a response to
new ways of organizing and new contexts within which organizations
and individuals create value (Griffin, 2016).
The ways in which business shapes and is shaped by its context
through organizational history, legacy, reputation, and strategy as well
as organization-specific resources, have been proposed as important
factors affecting stakeholder relations (Barney, 1991; Fombrun &
Shanley, 1990; Harrison & Freeman, 1999; Healy & Griffin, 2004;
Miles, 1987; Penrose, 1959; Porter, 1985). Recent research examining
the context of stakeholder relations is increasingly examining small or
medium-sized business (SMEs) (Williamson, Lynch-Wood, & Ramsay,
2006), entrepreneurial new ventures (Casson & Pavelin, 2016; Spence,
2016; Wang & Bansal, 2012) and family firms (Van Gils, Dibrell,
Neubaum, & Craig, 2014). At the same time, macro-level stakeholder
research is examining industries, eco-systems and constellations of
relationships (Aguilera et al., 2006, 2007; Moura-Leite, Padgett, &
Galan, 2012; Short, McKenny, Ketchen, Snow, & Hult, 2016).
Alternatively, viewing the context of stakeholder relationships
before, during or after crises has remained a popular topic. Sadly, busi-
ness crises crop up on a frequent basis. Major crises like the 2010 BP
oil spill, the 2015 VW diesel engine defeat devices, the 2001 collapse
of Enron and Arthur Andersen, the Ahold scandal (the “Enron of
Europe”), the child of a CEO’s “nut rage” in Korea (Kirk, 2014) and
others have created opportunities for examining stakeholder relations
and creating new theories and models of how businesses create value
(Donaldson & Walsh, 2015).
In addition to issue- or crisis-based studies, industry-level analyses
are growing in number and importance (Griffin, 2000; Griffin et al.,
2015; Orlitzky et al., 2017; Short et al., 2016). French and Wokutch
(2005), for example, examined employee relations and specifically child
labor within the shoe industry in Brazil. Miles, Snow, and Sharfman
(1993) examined different industries, suggesting a variety of firm
GRIFFIN
actions/responses (to stakeholders) was indicative of a growing indus-
try, while Mahon and McGowan (1996, 1998) explicitly incorporated
sociopolitical pressures from stakeholders into competitive strategy at
the industry level. Industry characteristics such as growth, capital inten-
sity, dynamism or peers’ behavior significantly has been found to affect
a focal firm’s stakeholder activities (Berman et al., 1999; Griffin et al.,
2015; Moura-Leite et al., 2012; Schuler, Rehbein, & Cramer, 2002) and
competitiveness (Rumelt, 1991).
Another way to view the context of stakeholder engagement is to
look within specific industries such as mining and extraction (Henisz et al.,
2014), alcohol (Griffin & Weber, 2006), or gambling (Mahon & McGowan,
1996, 1998). Hoffman (1999), for example, examined the chemical indus-
try via in-depth studies, and found that addressing complex, entrenched
issues such as pollution requires a systematic approach involving manag-
ing multiple stakeholders simultaneously (Chatterji, Levine, & Toffel,
2009; Chatterji & Toffel, 2010; Dahlmann & Brammer, 2011; Delmas
et al., 2011; Hart, 1995; Hoffman & Bansal, 2011; Reinhardt, 1999).
Expanding the stakeholder context from an issue- or industry- to a
country-level of analysis is another area of research that has recently
received more attention. Matten and Moon (2008), for example, pro-
pose that national business systems affect multiple stakeholders. At
the country level, stakeholder research regarding developing countries
might focus on different stakeholder relations such as indigenous rela-
tions in Australia (Allen, 2007; Griffin, 2008), family-owned business
groups (chaebols) in Korea (Choi & Aguilera, 2009; Choi, Lee, & Park,
2013; Kim, Amaeshi, Harris, & Suh, 2013; Youm, 2016) or state-owned
enterprises and new ventures created in heavily regulated China
(Wang, Dou, & Jia, 2016; Wong, Ormiston, & Tetlock, 2011).
Alternatively, applying a country-level analysis to managing multi-
ple stakeholders simultaneously often focuses on development by inte-
grating insights across multiple disciplines (Jamali, Lund-Thomsen, &
Khara, 2017; Jamali & Neville, 2011; Jamali & Sidani, 2012). Context-
oriented insights within and across countries are proliferating, as repre-
sented by special issues such as the recent Brazilian Review of Business
Management issue on ‘Stakeholder Theory in Multiple International
Contexts’ and the ‘Scandinavian Contributions to CSR’ in the Journal of
Business Ethics.
Overall, research examining “who or what is a stakeholder” and
the conditions under which stakeholder relations, practices, attitudes,
and behaviors flourish, has been expanding. We now turn to the sec-
ond theme in the stakeholder organizing framework, focused explicitly
on stakeholder relationships and the mechanisms underlying them.
5.2 | Mechanisms underlying stakeholder relationships
A second area stemming from early stakeholder research focuses on
the mechanisms underlying the relationships between and among the
focal organization and its stakeholder(s). Within an almost exclusively
firm-centric literature, attributes of the relationship might be voluntary
or involuntary (Clarkson, 1993, 1995), with implicit or explicit claims
(Quinn & Jones, 1995), or confrontational and fraught with conflict
(Freeman & Reed, 1983). Relationships might be one-way (e.g., govern-
mental agencies enforcing regulations) or reciprocal (Clelland, Fryxell, &
| 335
Wen, 1996; Cook, 1977); or with or without repetitive interactions
(Parkhe, 1993). Pressures such as media exposure (Wokutch &
Spencer, 1987), the presence of alternative relations (Cook, 1977), or
trust (Das & Teng, 1998) may or may not affect the claim or the legiti-
macy of the claim (Mitchell et al., 1997). A relationship might be an
exchange or transaction (Williamson, 1985) based upon the traditional
flows of finances, employees, products, and services (Evan, 1966),
enhanced by communication (Lincoln, 1982). Increasingly, researchers
are focusing on information-centered mechanisms, relationships, and
interactions (Griffin, 2016; Phillips, 1997; Rothaermel, 2015).
According to Emery and Trist (1965) interactions are likely to hap-
pen in three places. Relationships can occur within an organization
(internal interdependency), between an organization and a stakeholder
in its environment (transactional interdependency), or among stake-
holders external to the focal organization (interdependencies that
belong within the environment itself which in turn affect the relation-
ship, the focal organization, and/or the stakeholder). As interdependen-
cies increase for organizations in turbulent environments (Emery &
Trist, 1965; Terreberry, 1968), the number and type of internal, trans-
actional, and interdependent interactions directly, indirectly, or compli-
citly involving an organization grow at an increasing rate, providing
even more fodder for continued stakeholder research.
Firms seeking to reduce uncertainty are likely to develop even
more cooperative activities and interorganizational stakeholder rela-
tionships (Terreberry, 1968). For example, governmental and media
scrutiny of VW after the discovery that its default devices erroneously
recorded vehicle emissions are important for many stakeholders. Many
auto manufacturers and their suppliers, dealerships, consumers, cred-
itors, and investors, are involved—through direct, indirect, or complicit
scrutiny—and increasingly via lawsuits to recover damages (The Econo-
mist, 2015).
Studies within the stakeholder literature focused upon relation-
ships often draw from intraorganizational and interorganizational theo-
ries focused on exchanges or transactions including agency theory
(Eisenhardt, 1989) viewing Boards of Directors through the principal-
agent lens, transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1985), or resource
dependency (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) focused on supply chains, and
boundary spanning (Adams, 1976; Aldrich & Herker, 1977) literatures
focused on community relations or business-government relations.
Thompson (1967), for example, proposes three types of interdepend-
ence: pooled, sequential, and reciprocal. These are, in turn, coupled
with three types of coordination: standardization, coordination by plan,
and coordination by mutual adjustment. These nascent insights reap-
pear in Wood and Jones’ work on matching stakeholder relations
(Wood & Jones, 1995) and research on reciprocity expected/received
in relationships (Bonaventura, Barakat, Griffin, Mascena, & Monzoni-
Neto, 2016; Bosse, Phillips, & Harrison, 2009; Harrison, Bosse, &
Phillips, 2010; Tantalo & Priem, 2014). Gleaning more insights from
intraorganizational and interorganizational theory remains an avenue
for deepening our understanding of relationship-oriented value crea-
tion processes. The interaction of boundary spanning literatures such
as business-government relations, business-community relations
336 | GRIFFIN
including NGOs and the media, and social entrepreneurship on value
creation and value destruction is an area ripe for future research (Aus-
tin & Seitanidi, 2012a, 2012b; Griffin, 2016; Yaziji & Doh, 2009).
5.2.1 | Financial-related mechanisms
The role of financial resources is another popular mechanism studied
through a stakeholder lens. Of particular interest has been the perpet-
ual conversation regarding corporate social performance–corporate
financial performance (CSP–CFP), as well as the many articles on share-
holder primacy. All too often this strand of research is reduced to
studying trade-offs between shareholders and other stakeholders
(Fama & French, 2001; Freeman, 1994; Friedman, 1970; Harrison &
Wicks, 2013; Jensen, 2002). Examining innovations rather than trade-
offs stemming from the friction created among competing stakeholder
interests is an emergent area of interest (Barney & Harrison, 2015;
Freeman et al., 2010; McWilliams & Siegel, 2000), as is the role of
greenwashing in papering over this friction (Bansal & Clelland, 2004;
Bansal & Roth, 2000; Delmas et al., 2011).
During the mid-1990s, the CSP–CFP debate continued, with
aggregated studies (Griffin & Mahon, 1997; Waddock & Graves, 1997)
followed in rapid succession by McWilliams and Siegel (2000), Margolis
and Walsh (2001, 2003), and Hillman and Keim (2001), and questions
of a simple binary relationship between stakeholders (lumped alto-
gether) and shareholders. A meta-analysis by Orlitzky and colleagues
(2003, 2017) suggests a complex, multilevel, multifaceted set of rela-
tionships between satisfying a firm’s stakeholders and shareholders.
Other researchers have proposed and found support for a U-shaped
curve (Barnett & Salomon, 2006, 2012; Brammer & Millington, 2008)
or reciprocal, mutually reinforcing, yet nonlinear relationship between
shareholders and stakeholders (McWilliams & Siegel, 2000; Surroca,
Tribo, & Waddock, 2010).
After decades of research, no simple relationship exists between
prosocial behavior and firm performance, but many studies are moving
beyond simple correlations to examine more fine-grained mechanisms
and nuances to build theory and understanding of the value creation
process. Consistency of effort toward stakeholders is seemingly impor-
tant across stakeholders, across levels and across issues (Flammer,
2015b; Oikonomou, Brooks, & Pavelin, 2014; Orlitzky et al., 2017;
Surroca et al., 2010), and to do good and do well (Meyer, 2015). With
more research in press, the narrative is likely to continue to change in
the coming years.
The timing of prosocial behavior toward stakeholders has also
been a frequent, at times implicit, mechanism in stakeholder research
(Griffin & Mahon, 1997; Kang et al., 2016; Orlitzky et al., 2017). The
influence of irresponsible actions preceding responsible action
(Godfrey, 2005; Kang et al., 2016) as well as a recursive relationship
between prior slack resources to invest in prosocial behavior, and vice
versa, remains ripe for additional research (Hillman & Keim, 2001; Kang
et al., 2016; Surroca et al., 2010). That is, when prosocial investments
emerge only after a crisis (Kang et al., 2016) or if prosocial activities
reflect the ebb and flow of a firm’s financial fortunes (Oikonomou
et al., 2014), limited benefits accrue to the firm. Conversely, positive
halo and multiplier effects (The Economist, 2015; Kang et al., 2016) can
occur over time (Griffin & Mahon, 1997; Orlitzky et al., 2017; Short
et al., 2016) when firms persistently invest in prosocial behavior
(Oikonomou et al., 2014).
Other mechanisms significantly affecting stakeholder relationships
have included: the impact of rivalry (Griffin et al., 2015), the desire for
improved ratings and rankings (Chatterji & Toffel, 2010; Chatterji et al.,
2009; Porter & Kramer, 2006, 2011) which in turn might lower the
cost of capital or grant recognition, legitimacy or reputational effects
(Bitektine, 2011). Symbolically managing relationships through green-
washing (Delmas et al., 2011), bluewashing3 (Berliner & Prakash, 2015),
or decoupling (Hawn & Ioannou, 2016) continue to be scrutinized.
5.2.2 | Information-related mechanisms
In addition to financial-based mechanisms, scholars examining
information-laden relationships are drawing insights from communica-
tions, lobbying, grassroots collective action, advocacy, and information
arbitrage to discuss stakeholder relationships (den Hond et al., 2014;

, 2004; Mahon & McGowan, 1996,
Doh & Guay, 2006; Garriga & Mele
1998; Schuler & Rehbein, 1997; Schuler et al., 2002). Insights drawn
from business-government relationships (e.g., transactional vs. rela-
tional behaviors) are being brought to bear on the type, nature, and
engagement strategies for creating value with stakeholders (Hillman &
Hitt, 1999; Schuler et al., 2002).
Information-laden disclosure and accountability mechanisms (e.g.,
information designed to improve transparency and accountability) are
also contributing to the burgeoning stakeholder literature (Choi et al.,
2013; Jain & Jamali, 2016; Kacperczyk, 2009; Mazutis & Zintel, 2015).
Explicit links between formal global governance, disclosure require-
ments, and voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiatives focused on account-
ability and transparency are increasingly viewed as important
mechanisms in stakeholder relationships (Marquis & Lee, 2013).
5.2.3 | Governance-related mechanisms
Enterprise-level governance mechanisms such as the composition,
diversity, and policy making/shareholder resolution mechanisms of
Boards of Directors comprise another lens to viewing stakeholder rela-
tions. Building upon principal-agent insights from agency theory,
boards have traditionally been viewed predominantly as representa-
tives of shareholders, overseeing the CEO and top management team
while retaining loyalty to the overall organization.
Serving as a mediator of shareholder interests and organizational/
stakeholder interests, the Board sets the tone at the top and (re)defines
the purpose of a firm by implicitly or explicitly including those affected
by the firm’s decisions (Evan & Freeman, 1993; Marcoux, 2000).
Donaldson and Preston’s (1995, p. 87) insights regarding the tension
between the purpose of a stakeholder-oriented firm and codification of
the rules that govern the organization still hold true today: “to be sure,
it remains to implement in law the sanctions, rules and precedents that
support the stakeholder conception of the corporation; in short, it
remains to develop the legal version of the stakeholder model.”4
More recently, Jain and Jamali (2016) examine corporate gover-
nance mechanisms at individual, organizational, and institutional levels
of analysis. They offer considerable insights into mechanisms
GRIFFIN
underlying stakeholder relations, affecting important social issues such
as human rights, corruption, etc., across multiple forms of organizing
businesses (e.g., SMEs, family-firms, transnationals, etc.). Yet recent
studies suggest that Board-level consideration of stakeholder issues
(e.g., social issues such as sustainability) are a low priority receiving lim-
ited attention from the Board (Aguilera et al., 2006, 2007; Orlitzky
et al., 2017; Post, Rahman, & Rubow, 2011; Walls & Hoffman, 2013)
beyond specific requirements codified into legal tenets.
Global governance mechanisms include multilateral organizations
and multi-stakeholder initiatives and forums (MSIs and MSFs) in addi-
tion to important enterprise-level governance mechanisms discussed
above. Multilateral organizations are creating governance guidelines
such as ISO 14001 and ISO 26000, the Global Reporting Initiative and
AA1000, which in turn are increasingly active in monitoring, enforcing,
and sanctioning business behaviors toward stakeholders (Doh &
Teegen, 2002; Gilbert & Rasche, 2008; King & Lenox, 2000; King,
Lenox, & Terlaak, 2005; Porter & van der Linde, 1995; Prakash, 1999;
Prakash & Potoski, 2014; Russo, 2009; Waddock, 2008). Standards
stemming from these multilateral organizations are increasingly exam-
ples of what Emery and Trist (1965) would recognize as interdepend-
ent interactions occurring among stakeholders with an explicit goal of
improving prosperity for people, which do not directly include the focal
firm, but might affect the firm over time.5
In sum, mechanisms focus on internal, transactional, and interde-
pendent relations affecting the value creation process. Future research
on the boundaries, limitations, and mechanisms underlying value crea-
tion at the individual, organizational, and institutional levels across and
among stakeholder relationships are central to continued theory devel-
opment and real-world understanding of how stakeholders affect and
are affected by value creation. Turning to the third and least developed
theme in the stakeholder organizing framework, in the next section we
examine stakeholder outcomes.
5.3 | Outcome-oriented stakeholder research
A third, although smaller, theme emerging from early stakeholder
research focused on the outcome(s) of stakeholder relationships in the
value creation process. Outcome-oriented stakeholder research
focuses on how organizations create value for and with others. Unile-
ver’s encouragement of handwashing to prevent diseases is one exam-
ple of an outcome-oriented focus. This research stream includes firms’
contributions to solving (or exacerbating) issues such as: poverty allevi-
ation, developing peaceable societies, sustainable economic develop-
ment, or preventing treatable diseases through everyday business
decisions. We start by defining outcome-oriented research and discuss
the importance of distinguishing outcomes from outputs.
Outcomes are different from outputs. Outcomes are other-
oriented results which might include satisfaction or effectiveness (Lenz,
1981) and may be intended or emergent (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985).
Outputs, conversely, are often firm-centric or task-oriented activities,
policies, products, and services. Outcomes focus on how others per-
ceive or are affected by a firm while outputs focus on what the firm
does or does not do. Scott (1992, p. 143, italics in original) describes
| 337
the difference between outcomes and outputs as: “Organizations pro-
duce outputs—goods and services—over whose characteristics they
typically exercise considerable control, but outcomes represent the joint
product of organizational performance and environment response. The
surgeon may perform flawlessly, but the patient may die; the automo-
bile may be well built but fail to sell. In this sense, environments
directly influence outcomes.”
Examples of early outcome-oriented research focused on satisfying
(Donaldson & Preston, 1995) or minimizing the dissatisfaction of stake-
holders (Clarkson, 1995), the betterment of society (Margolis & Walsh,
2003), and specific societal issues such as social justice, social welfare,
income inequality, or sustainable development (Margolis & Walsh,
2003; Russo & Fouts, 1997; Toronto Conference, 1994). An outcome
orientation might entail examining how residual profits sent to share-
holders or saved as cash in the firm’s treasury might be better used to
increase wages, as income inequality becomes exacerbated by rising
CEO pay.6
Output-oriented stakeholder research, conversely, focuses on
firm-centric advantage such as reputation (Fombrun & Shanley, 1990).
Alternatively, a firm’s transactional responses to external stakeholder
demands (Wood, 1991; Wood & Jones, 1995), such as examining prof-
its distributed to investors, or supplying bed nets to local communities,
are output-oriented.
Interestingly, early research on philanthropy (Sharfman, 1994;
Smith, 1994, 2003) has changed, in part, from asking about how much
a company gives away its residual profits (an output-oriented question)
to how a company makes money or makes a difference within a com-
munity via its discretionary, voluntary efforts (Chernev & Blair, 2015;
Godfrey, 2005; Godfrey, Merrill, & Hansen, 2009; Lev, Petrovits, &
Radhakrishnan, 2010). That is, rather than using philanthropy as a give-
away or as a greenwashing mechanism creating a halo effect, or paying
a penance, or as an insurance policy through discretionary engagement
with time, talent, or money (Kang et al., 2016), some firms, including
award-winning firms, are re-focusing philanthropic efforts on improved
community outcomes (Yoo & Pae, 2016). Unilever’s handwashing cam-
paign, for example, has direct as well as significant indirect spillover
effects on employees, consumers, and local governments, among other
important, influential stakeholders.
One outcome-oriented research stream might be investigating a
firm’s contributions to income inequality within the firm and across var-
ious communities. Combining outcome-oriented research on income
inequality with a hot button societal topic such as CEO pay might spark
some new stakeholder-related research. Deckop et al. (2006), for
example, found short-term CEO pay structures were negatively related
to a firm’s contributions to income inequality, whereas long-term pay
structures were not. As a McKinsey award recipient observed: “even
when adjusted for inflation, the compensation of top U.S. executives
has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, when it was
already widely viewed as excessive; (m)eanwhile, overall U.S. economic
performance has faltered” (Lazonick, 2014, p. 49).
Another emerging stream of outcome-oriented research is examin-
ing cross-sector partnerships. Partnering to develop infrastructure in
338 | GRIFFIN
emerging markets results in important community-level outcomes. For
example, building bridges, airports, and roads and focusing on increasing
education and literacy encourages businesses to thrive while creating a
healthy, educated community that may be self-reliant once infrastruc-
ture projects are completed (Austin & Seitanidi, 2012a, 2012b) and the
construction jobs move on to the next project in another town.
More recently, alleviating extreme poverty in India through wom-
en’s entrepreneurship (Trivedi, 2014) demonstrates how transnational
firms can promote entrepreneurship while simultaneously creating
mutually beneficial, self-sustaining outcomes. Coca-Cola’s 5by20 pro-
ject, which aims to promote millions of entrepreneurs along its value
chain by 2020, is one such multi-stakeholder initiative (Jenkins, Valikai,
& Baptista, 2013). Alternatively, using microfinance to meaningfully
improve the plight of the poor (rather than to redistribute wealth or as
a symbolic mechanism for large multinational banks to improve their
own legitimacy) would shift stakeholder relations toward outcome-
oriented results (Khavul, 2010).
The opportunities to examine outcome-oriented stakeholder
research are limited solely by one’s imagination. Contrasting the effects
of bed net distribution with a mining company’s direct intervention for
malaria prevention with employees, their families, and the local commu-
nity might highlight the importance of passive or active company
involvement in preventing malaria and reducing absenteeism. Alterna-
tively, testing energy consumption via three different mechanisms: infor-
mation campaigns, installing new technology, or creating competitions to
reduce energy might highlight the effectiveness of each mechanism.
Bundling programs to create effective outcomes is another oppor-
tunity for additional research. Unilever’s handwashing campaign
focused on treating diarrhea might simultaneously measure changes in
employee absenteeism, productivity gains, children’s mortality rates,
and attendance at school as examples of community and organizational
health-based outcomes. Certainly, many factors contribute to reducing
diarrhea and improving infant mortality rates, yet Unilever is making a
small, consistent contribution that is likely to have a positive outcome
for households and communities.
Another example would be corporate foundations teaming up to
systematically replace wood-burning stoves by providing solar paneled
stoves, which can help alleviate disease, improve hygiene, and reduce
pollution in developing countries. Future stakeholder research oriented
toward outcomes might focus on income inequality, eliminating human
trafficking, improving literacy, disease mitigation, or alleviating poverty.
Outcome-oriented research might also examine multiplier effects
of business decisions beyond direct impacts of finances, wages,
employment, and community donations. Observing multiplier effects
through the entire supply chain from end-to-end might help elucidate
impacts of specific issues7 on business. Examining how Unilever, for
example, recast its supplier relationships to create smaller sachets more
cheaply to implement its handwashing campaign suggests many deci-
sions far from the spotlight of the handwashing campaign have helped
ensure Unilever’s ongoing success in improving infant mortality rates.
Overall, an outcome orientation reinforces how it is in an organiza-
tion’s self-interests to be a problem solver. Organizations can be part
of a solution, in conjunction with other stakeholders, to create an eco-
system approach to addressing complex and enduring problems. As
one might imagine, outcome-oriented stakeholder research is complex,
without clear causal links between the actions of a company and
stakeholder-based responses. Yet, progress on outcomes and impacts
is needed. Whether an organization such as Unilever orchestrating a
collective response to improving hygiene also receives intangible bene-
fits via reputation, loyalty, halo effects or prestige remains an open-
ended question. Yet, the inherent worth of these efforts for employees
(e.g., pride, retention) or consumer purchasing behavior or governmen-
tal reception when entering new markets might be more easily cap-
tured. More broadly, if you are a manager, is another organization
gaining reputational chits with employees, for example, while your firm
is being left behind? By using managerial discipline, convening power,
information sharing, and selectively deploying capital or specialty skills,
some firms are radically reconfiguring the value creation process and
meaningfully moving the needle for the firm and its stakeholders.
6 | THE OVERALL FRAMEWORK
Acknowledging complexities inherent in a stakeholder-centric view of
value creation (Freeman, 1984), we unpacked extant stakeholder
research. We examined three components of extant research highlight-
ing: (a) the stakeholders involved (directly, indirectly, and complicitly)
within their context; (b) the relationships; and (c) the outcomes, felt or
perceived, by the firm, the stakeholder, and others such as commun-
ities or the general public.
As the Unilever handwashing campaign illustrated, by creating via-
ble outcomes, feedback loops reinforce “who or what” is a stakeholder
with self-reinforcing mechanisms to deepen the relationships between
stakeholders and organizations. Once institutionalized (Selznick, 1957)
as a part of the fabric of the business (i.e., inherently integral to the ori-
entation, mission, vision, and values), creating value with stakeholders
can create new relationships and new ways to create value. Adopting
solution-oriented outcomes can redefine preexisting stakeholder rela-
tionships (e.g., hiring, firing, and promotion policies to attract and retain
top talent to serve customers). In doing so, firms can increase the satis-
faction and effectiveness of employees, customers, the media, and
financial analysts (Aguilera et al., 2006; Ioannou & Serafeim, 2015;
Johnson & Greening, 1999; Kang et al., 2016).
In short, moving beyond three well-established dyadic stakeholder
relationships (financial returns to shareholders; jobs and workplace
conditions for employees; safe products/services for customers) to
include information sharing across communities, a more nuanced, net-
worked view of stakeholder relationships illustrates the complex web
of interactions between and among stakeholders, mechanisms, and
outcomes.
6.1 | Community as stakeholder(s)
Compared with many stakeholder relationships, relatively few studies
have examined community relations (Allen, 2007; Dunham, Freeman, &
Lietdka, 2006; Griffin, 2008). In addition, all too often, community
GRIFFIN
stakeholder relations are reduced to neighbors (a stakeholder) geo-
graphically adjacent to a firm (Dunham et al., 2006) with limited, often
passive, engagement (relationships) as a recipient of redistributed value
rather than as an integral part of the value creation process (output-ori-
ented). Reimagining the contribution of communities could potentially
be influential in the value creation process, adding increased clarity
about the roles, relationships, and satisfaction as illustrated in the
framework. Community might be conceived as: homogeneous or heter-
ogeneous stakeholders at multiple levels of analysis; a context varying
across issues, industries, and nation-states; an integral aspect of gover-
nance and engagement mechanisms; and/or as an outcome rather than
myopically depicting communities as a default residual (local, place-
based stakeholders passively bearing the brunt of externalities stem-
ming from a firm’s value creation process).
Reimagining communities as community-based entities with com-
mon interests might spark studies examining sets within a community
such as: a firm’s tier-1, tier-2, and tier-3 suppliers; the customers of its
customers; to focus on being thought leaders with regional or national
governmental officials, the media, NGOs and civil society organizations
as trusted partners. Reimaging community groups in lieu of a generic,
catch-all “community” group with interests indiscriminately lumped
together based on geography which charitably designates community
groups as “anyone who can bugger up the business”8 (McVea &
Freeman, 2005) is needed. Understanding how communities are part of
the value creation and value destruction processes is needed.
Alternatively, examining competing community interests might
focus on the various “communities” affecting a transnational extraction
company’s ability to gain approval, or receive permits, for a controver-
sial project (e.g., offshore drilling in the Great Australian Bight). Local
citizens, numerous international NGOs, and national governmental offi-
cials might coalesce into communities over multiple years across
numerous jurisdictions, as a “community” issue of granting a permit can
create multilocal “horse-trading.” Examining communities that cross
municipal boundaries with actors having global aspirations not focused
solely on local, geographic-specific “community” interests is an emer-
gent trend (Doh & Teegen, 2002; Lucea & Doh, 2012; Yaziji & Doh,
2009). Rather than conceptualizing communities as merely geographi-
cally bounded, passive stakeholders endowed with resources (e.g.,
skilled labor, affordable housing, good transportation), a firm might
begin imagining relations with its communities in terms other than “tak-
ing,” “contracting,” or “bargaining for.” For instance, workers becoming
ambassadors to the community as in Unilever’s handwashing campaign
is just one part of the multiplier effects creating a win–win–win: a win
for the employees (increased pride and motivation), a win for the orga-
nization (being part of the solution), and a win for the community
(achieving a positive outcome it could not achieve on its own). In short,
reimagining the vital role of communities as contributing to the value
creation process, rather than being merely tax collectors or endowed
with important resources, is needed.
9
Virtual communities of special interests, tied together by common
concerns or issues (e.g., water scarcity, congestion, food security, human
trafficking), are likely to play a variety of potentially active roles in firm’s
| 339
value creation process. Virtual communities might weigh in as experts,
or amplifiers, on an issue, changing the arena of discourse and shining a
bright spotlight on a “local” community issue while actively shaping
opinions and preferences (e.g., the shooting of black U.S. police officers
across multiple neighborhoods throughout the summer of 2016).
Communities provide, in part, the context in which business trans-
actions and business relations are embedded. Juxtaposing different lev-
els of analysis, micro-level (an individual, a neighbor), meso-level (a
geographically adjacent neighborhood), or macro-level (a region or an
eco-system of community-based organizations) is likely to highlight
how different community groups affect or are affected by the value
creation process.
Alternatively, community-based stakeholder research can improve
our understanding of engagement mechanisms (e.g., proactive, shaping,
or coping mechanisms) by examining under what conditions society-
level interactions are reciprocal, conflict-laden, and/or how repetitive
relations affect future actions (e.g., game theoretic lens). Focusing on
communities defined by common interests instead of defined by com-
mon geography might highlight time-based benefits of early and active
engagement (proactive vs. coping), the importance of reciprocal dis-
course, using authenticity to build trust, or the role of information in
building trust (rather than using information asymmetries to create
advantage), when examining traditional community-relations contribu-
tions of voluntary employee engagement or arms-length philanthropic
contributions to communities (Smith, 1994).
Further, community-based research might emphasize governance
mechanisms based upon mutual adjustment rather than contracts, prod-
uct and financial exchanges, or mandates through regulations (Flammer,
2015a; Flammer & Kacperczyk, 2015). Communities with oversight
capabilities (e.g., public safety, permit officials) are likely to exert differ-
ent types of influence at different points in time, directly affecting the
ability of a community to voice, mobilize, connect, or accelerate value
creation. In addition, multilateral communities convening MSIs on
human rights, for instance, are not likely to identify with a single place-
based community focused on traffic abatement. Yet they might coa-
lesce in the same community. Thus, community-based groups focused
on international human rights or local traffic abatement might share
common goals yet differ in their means or mechanisms.
Alternatively, community might be conceived of as an (informal,
imprecise) proxy for official governmental stakeholders that are absent,
focused on other issues, or overburdened with many responsibilities
and scarce resources. Engaging with community members might high-
light community issues and forestall governmental sanctions. That is,
community-based issues raised through community governance mech-
anisms in a cooperative manner might create viable solutions that pre-
vent issues from escalating into newsworthy public fights mandating
legislation. Engaging with a local community forum composed of neigh-
bors, local/state government officials, and local media and NGOs might
help in understanding the conditions under which different governance
and engagement mechanisms create effective outcomes.
And finally, emphasizing community-based outcomes (e.g., commu-
nity satisfaction, community resilience, community growth, or
340 | GRIFFIN
prosperity) might create new insights for creating value. Rather than
relying on traditional community outreach efforts (e.g., employee vol-
unteer hours or philanthropic donations), firms might ensure
community-centric outcomes such as: employability, training and edu-
cation, easing congestion, or disease prevention as illustrated by Unile-
ver. Honeywell, a $50 billion industrial company based in the United
States, has one of the largest portfolio of legacy Superfund sites based
on its history of being a chemical company. These Superfund sites
required extensive soil remediation and accounted for billions of dollars
in legal, regulatory, and community activism costs. Once remediated,
prime real estate such as Baltimore’s Harbor Point community gener-
ated new sources of revenue with significant goodwill of the public
officials (generating a new tax base) and new residents of these walk-
able, centrally located communities (Wheeler & Cox, 2013).
Defining community as more than merely a “local” stakeholder or a
passive context as well as more carefully examining underlying mecha-
nisms creating or destroying value in different communities across dif-
ferent issues, might bring much needed clarity to the community
contributions within the value creation process. Further, examining the
multiple roles of community in the value creation process (e.g., as a
stakeholder with multiple interests, as the focal “organization,” as a
context for enabling businesses, a specific engagement or governance
mechanism, or new outcomes such as community well-being and com-
munity resilience) might unlock new ways in which businesses create
value.
7 | IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
AND CONCLUSIONS
Taking an initial step toward examining the early days of stakeholder
research and its rapid growth over the past two decades, this paper
develops an organizing framework reflecting three components under-
lying the stakeholder literature. The framework and analysis is not
meant to capture all stakeholder research; rather, the intent is to illus-
trate themes emerging from existing stakeholder research and to iden-
tify fruitful gaps for future research.
Implications for future stakeholder research are only limited by the
creativity of researchers. Focusing on the stakeholder, per se, for exam-
ple, suggests future research regarding the constraints and contingen-
cies posed by organizational and institutional levels on specific
stakeholders. Analyzing interdependencies using multilevel analyses is
likely to be a productive avenue of future research. Initiatives like Uni-
lever’s handwashing campaign illustrate the importance of understand-
ing and addressing what is important to stakeholders (e.g., preventing
treatable diseases so one’s child can survive past their fifth birthday).
Similarly, at a macro-level, analyzing structural and positional changes
within stakeholder networks (Rowley, 1997) as constellations, or eco-
systems, of multi-stakeholder initiatives highlights the changing nature
of stakeholder constraints. In addition, theory development is needed
to thoughtfully combine different stakeholders and the natural environ-
ment (as it is synonymous with, yet different from, stakeholders). More
research is needed into weightings between and among stakeholders
(Hillman & Keim, 2001).
Mechanisms addressing increased expectations for more transpar-
ency, accountability and communication are likely to be excellent
choices for deeply understanding the explosion of stakeholder relation-
ships. In addition, much can be gleaned about the mechanisms underly-
ing the relationships between the firm and its stakeholders at the
boundary of organizations: Boards of Directors representing investors,
employee relations’ hiring, promotion, and firing policies, governmental
relations specializing in regulatory compliance or community stakehold-
ers, communications (internal newsletters and external outreach) as
well as call centers/marketing specializing in advertising and customer
feedback, or procurement/purchasing (specializing in supply chain rela-
tionships) can be plumbed for additional insights.
Outcome-oriented research is likely to focus on important issues
that affect and are affected by businesses: income inequality, urban
poverty, literacy including financial literacy, privacy/cybersecurity, dis-
ease alleviation, and food or water scarcity. These community-level
issues are business issues. How businesses use their resources (e.g.,
time, talent, technology, capital, convening power) and creativity to be
a part of the solution requires additional inquiry. Iteratively examining a
firm-centric and other-oriented perspective will allow researchers to
identify gaps in how stakeholders affect business outcomes and are
affected by businesses. Analysis is likely to occur at multiple micro-,
meso-, and macro-levels: individuals, teams, organizations, sectors, and
systems. Examining how businesses are or are not directly or indirectly
involved or complicit in these issues can contribute to an understand-
ing of firms’ impact on society (Margolis & Walsh, 2003) beyond jobs,
wages, and producing desirable goods, so that business outcomes are
in tune with the way we wish to live, work, and play.
ACKNOWLEDG MENTS
Research assistance of Alexandre Bringer, Rochelle Rediang, and
Murtizan Nassar is greatly appreciated. Special thanks to current and
past doctoral students: Josiah Drewry, Smita Trivedi, Andrew Bryant,
Lili Yan, Yoona Youm, Viviane Clement, Jennifer DeBoer, Chuck
Koerber, and Michelle Westermann-Behaylo, among others who
have provided ideas along the way. Of course, to the Business
Ethics: European Review editor, Dima Jamali, and anonymous
reviewers—thank you for your insights.
NOTES
1
The Toronto Conference articles (Business & Society, 1994) were counted
as one article.
2
In a later, co-authored, article, Freeman and colleagues identify the lack of
specificity regarding community stakeholder as a shortcoming (Dunham
et al., 2006) of stakeholder research.
3
Symbolically adopting UN principles, such as the UN Global Compact
4
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for sharpening this section and sharing
this quote from Donaldson and Preston (1995).
5
By definition: “stakeholders affect and are affected by the achievement of
the organization’s objective” (Freeman, 1984, p. 23). Growth in MSIs
infers stakeholders’ ability to affect a firm’s achievement of its objective(s)
GRIFFIN
and is, in part, outside the direct control of the firms. MSIs, by creating
thresholds of appropriate business behavior towards suppliers or employ-
ees, for example, are changing the context, mechanisms, and expected
outcomes in the value creation process.
6
And vice versa: a strong employee union, for example, might exact super-
ordinate wage or workplace concessions, raising significant questions
about the ongoing financial viability of the enterprise (e.g., GM in the first
decade of the 21st century).
7
The issues might range from climate change, the digital divide, income
inequality, homelessness, literacy, privacy, or other business issues. The
key point here is answering the question: how does (fill in the blank with
the issue) impact a business across its financial, employee, product/serv-
ices, and information-sharing activities or aspirations?
8
As colorfully relayed to the author by an IPSOS/Mori executive in
London.
9
These broad-based communities are likely multiple stakeholder commun-
ities, as discussed earlier, coming together to form a larger community
based on common interests, common means, or common ends rather
than merely being a community of neighbors living nearby.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jennifer J. (Jenn) Griffin, Raymond C. Baumhart, S.J. Professor of Busi-
ness Ethics at Loyola University Chicago, examines how managers craft
corporate strategy to innovatively (or not) address critical business
impacts. A recognized educator, Jenn earned top educator awards
including the Teaching Excellence Award and the MBA Teaching
Award at The George Washington University School of Business and
was nominated by students for the National Inspire Integrity Award, as
well as nominated eight times in the past ten years for the outstanding
doctoral professor of the year award. Author of the 2016 Cambridge
University Press book, Managing Corporate Impacts: Co-Creating Value,
she has won numerous research awards including Ave Tucker Fellow
Awards and a competitive grant from the GW Regulatory Studies Cen-
ter. Her articles are published in: Public Administration Review, Group &
Organization Management, Business & Society, Business & Politics, Journal
of Public Affairs, Corporate Reputation Review, and Public Relations Quar-
terly, among others. Jenn is a past Division Chair of the Academy of
Management’s Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division.
How to cite this article: Griffin JJ. Tracing stakeholder terminol-
ogy then and now: Convergence and new pathways. Business
Ethics: A Eur Rev. 2017;26:326–346. https://doi.org/10.1111/
beer.12158