Stakeholder: Essentially Contested or Just Confused? [Book Review]
Journal of Business Ethics 108 (3):285-298 (2012)
Abstract
The concept of the ‘stakeholder’ has become central to business, yet there is no common consensus as to what the concept of a stakeholder means, with hundreds of different published definitions suggested. Whilst every concept is liable to be contested, for stakeholder research, this is problematic for both theoretical and empirical analysis. This article explores whether this lack of consensus is conceptual confusion, which would benefit from further debate to try to reach a higher degree of elucidation, or whether the stakeholder concept is essentially contested, rendering the quest to seek a singular definition unfeasible. The theory of essentially contested concepts was proposed by Gallie (Proc Aristot Soc 56:167–198, 1956 ). The seven criteria Gallie prescribes for evaluating essentially contested concepts are applied to the stakeholder concept. The analysis suggests that this concept is an essentially contested concept and this explains the degree of definitional variation.DOI
10.1007/s10551-011-1090-8
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Citations of this work
Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage: The Theory and Practice of Stakeholder Engagement in Scandinavia. [REVIEW]Robert Strand & R. Edward Freeman - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 127 (1):1-21.
Corporate Social Responsibility in China: A Corporate Governance Approach.ChungMing Lau, Yuan Lu & Qiang Liang - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 136 (1):73-87.
Stakeholder Theory Classification: A Theoretical and Empirical Evaluation of Definitions.Samantha Miles - 2017 - Journal of Business Ethics 142 (3):437-459.
Shale gas debate in Europe: Pro-and-con dialectics and argumentative polylogues.Marcin Lewiński - 2016 - Discourse and Communication 10 (6):553-575.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Stakeholders.Heather Elms, Shawn L. Berman, Hussein Fadlallah, Robert A. Phillips & Michael E. Johnson-Cramer - 2022 - Business and Society 61 (5):1083-1135.
References found in this work
IX.—Essentially Contested Concepts.W. B. Gallie - 1956 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1):167-198.
The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions.R. Edward Freeman - 1994 - Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (4):409-421.
Value maximization, stakeholder theory, and the corporate objective function.Michael C. Jensen - 2002 - Business Ethics Quarterly 12 (2):235-256.
Business Ethics and Stakeholder Analysis.Kenneth E. Goodpaster - 1991 - Business Ethics Quarterly 1 (1):53-73.