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The Role of Dynamics in Stakeholder Thinking

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Abstract

Dynamics concerns the process of change in variable conditions through time at any level of analysis. Various important issues or topics in stakeholder theory and practice involve consideration of change over time and thus unavoidably involve dynamics. While dynamics has received explicit recognition in stakeholder literature, dynamic analysis remains partly tacit and suffused through the literature. One reason is that dynamics remains difficult to model even in economics. This article provides a basic orientation to stakeholder dynamics as a key conceptual and methodological issue for stakeholder thinking. This article identifies current literature concerning stakeholder dynamics and evaluates future directions in dynamic reasoning that would help build stakeholder theory and improve practice of stakeholder management. Notions of competition, influence strategies, change in stakeholder networks, mindsets, salience or values, learning, creative destruction, long-term sustainability, stakeholder reciprocity, sustainable development, and value creation all embed change and thus time dynamics. Static complexity and heterogeneity across units-of-analysis are not the same as dynamics but do also change over time. Dynamics concerns how change process influences consequences (later in time) in relationship to antecedents (earlier in time). Management copes with change process, as much as with complexity and variation in antecedents and consequences.

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Notes

  1. F. Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical psychics: An essay on the application of mathematics to the moral sciences (1881), developed a two-axis illustration, subsequently reformulated into a box diagram by V. Pareto, and used in Pareto’s form (Tarascio 1972) by A. L. Bowley, The mathematical groundwork of economics: An introductory treatise (1924).

  2. Päivi Myllykangas, 2009-03-20, SIDOSRYHMÄSUHTEET LIIKETOIMINNAN ARVON LUOMISESSA — Palveluyksiköstä liiketoiminnaksi, episodi yrityksen elämää. Doctoral dissertation (in Finnish except for English abstract), Tampere University Press, Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1387, Acta Electronica Universitatis Tamperensis 814, http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/978-951-44-7623-5.pdf.

Abbreviations

CSR:

Corporate social responsibility

NGO:

Nongovernmental organization

RBV:

Resource-based view

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  1. Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, MS-531, P.O. Box 2932, Houston, TX, 77252-2932, USA

    Duane Windsor

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Correspondence to Duane Windsor.

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Windsor, D. The Role of Dynamics in Stakeholder Thinking. J Bus Ethics 96 (Suppl 1), 79–87 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0937-3

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