Stakeholder Influence Strategies: The Roles of Structural and Demographic Determinants (original) (raw)
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Stakeholder influence strategies and stakeholder-oriented management
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When paying attention to environmental management and issues of corporate social responsibility, firms are broadening their scope to a range of stakeholders. Therefore, the relevance of different stakeholder interests to firms is growing, requiring these firms to develop and maintain specific organisational capabilities for handling stakeholder issues in order to operate effectively. In stakeholder research, much attention has already been paid to characterising stakeholders and considering their aims, leaving the influence strategies ...
Adopting proactive environmental strategy: the influence of stakeholders and firm size
Journal of Management Studies, 2010
While smaller firms are less likely to undertake as many environmental practices as larger firms, extant literature suggests that smaller firms may be more responsive to stakeholder pressures. This paper contributes to the development of stakeholder theory by deriving a size moderated stakeholder model and applying it to a firm’s adoption of proactive environmental practices. The empirical results show that smaller firms are more responsive to value-chain, internal and regulatory stakeholder pressures. These findings suggest that researchers evaluating organizations and the natural environment should be cautious about associating stakeholder pressures directly with firms’ environmental strategies. Rather, the relationship between stakeholder pressures and environmental strategy tends to vary with size.
Stakeholder influences on the design of firms' environmental practices
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While prior literature has emphasized that stakeholders can influence a firm's decision to adopt environmental practices that lead to competitive advantage, most scholarship has assumed that stakeholders influence the design of firms' environmental practices similarly. We challenge this notion and suggest that stakeholders affect not only the decision to adopt environmental practices, but also managerial decisions about the design of these practices. We consider the case of firms' strategic decisions about the design of their environmental practices, and in particular their degree of comprehensiveness and visibility. We then develop a classification of four design strategies: movers and shakers, backroom operators, wannabes, and passivists. Using multinomial regression techniques for a sample of more than 1700 firms worldwide, our research shows that while stakeholders exert pressures on firms, managers' perceptions of these pressures vary, and these variations appear to influence the design of their environmental practices. These findings offer important evidence that the scope of stakeholders' influence appears more far reaching (and nuanced) than previously considered. Managers who respond to these influences may therefore be in a better position to satisfy stakeholder expectations, thus enhancing their organization's overall credibility.
Pathways of stakeholder influence in the Canadian forestry industry
Business Strategy and the Environment, 2005
We draw on the stakeholder influence literature to propose and empirically test hypotheses regarding the direct and indirect pathways of perceived influence that stakeholders exercise within the domain of corporate sustainability. Our results allow us to examine the interaction between different types of stakeholder pressure and different types of stakeholder influence strategy. We show that stakeholders who do not control resources critical to the focal firm's operations are able to pressure a firm indirectly via other stakeholders on whose resources the firm is dependent. We contribute to the stakeholder perspective by showing how stakeholders who are affected by the focal firm's operations can enhance their salience via stakeholders who can affect the firm.
Introducing the Politics of Stakeholder Influence
Business & Society, 2008
If stakeholder theory is to become a full theory of business-society relationships, it will have to develop a better understanding of processes by which stakeholders may gain and hold influence over firms. A better understanding of the political processes involved is required. This paper-as well as the papers in this special issue-takes a political 'view' to addressing the issue, and thereby extends the currently dominant demographic and structural approaches. It suggests that the influence of stakeholders over firms is the temporary outcome of processes of action, reaction, and interaction among various parties. Consequently, the further advancement of stakeholder theory would benefit from the adoption of process-research methods and thinking.
Proactive environmental strategies: a stakeholder management perspective
Strategic Management Journal, 2003
This paper includes an empirical analysis of the linkages between environmental strategy and stakeholder management. First, it is shown that several simultaneous improvements in various resource domains are required for firms to shift to an empirically significant, higher level of proactiveness. Second, more proactive environmental strategies are associated with a deeper and broader coverage of stakeholders. Third, environmental leadership is not associated with a rising importance of environmental regulations, thereby suggesting a role for voluntary cooperation between firms and government. Finally, the linkages between environmental strategies and stakeholder management, based on a sample of 197 firms operating in Belgium, appear more limited than expected. Country-specific characteristics may to a large extent account for these results.
This paper aims to advance theory by deepening our understanding of the processes and specific actions aimed at influencing and shaping business practices through dynamic stakeholder relationships. We conduct an inductive, longitudinal study of all players involved in a regional stakeholder conflict that reached international scope and we present two sets of findings. First, we find evidence for four clusters of influence tactics used by both secondary stakeholders and their target firms: issue raising, issue suppressing, positioning and solutionseeking. Second, through our examination of the processes and patterns underlying influence strategies, we discover that stakeholders build elaborate influence chains and work to direct influence flows. The paper contributes to stakeholder theory in a number of ways. We offer a refined understanding of both bilateral and mutual influence tactics, expanding the theory’s focus beyond bilateral relationships. We further uncover the deliberate use of dependence relationships among multiple embedded organizations to build influence over a specific target, and more generally, an organizational field. We discuss our findings in light of work on social movement organizations and institutional theory, thus integrating our empirical findings with insights from three bodies of literature to advance stakeholder theory.