Abstract

As business takes on an increasingly important role in many modern societies, stakeholder theory has become a central theme in the literature on business ethics/business & society. There are, however, a number of theoretical problems with stakeholder theory as currently understood. Among these are: the lack of a coherent justificatory framework and the problem of stakeholder identification. In this essay, I propose that a possible source of obligations to stakeholders is the principle of stakeholder fairness as discussed in the political philosophic literature of Rawls, Simmons, and Cullity among others. From Rawls's work, a principle of stakeholder fairness is derived. That is, ;The principle of stakeholder fairness. Whenever persons or groups of persons voluntarily accept the benefits of a mutually beneficial scheme of co-operation requiring sacrifice or contribution on the parts of the participants and there exists the possibility of free-riding, obligations of fairness are created among the participants in the co-operative scheme in proportion to the benefits accepted. ;By way of defending and explicating a fairness-based stakeholder theory, the project is laid out as follows: Chapter One provides an overview of the essay, Chapter Two argues for the need for organizational-level moral theory, Chapter Three describes and critiques the current state of the art in stakeholder theory and a number of conceptual gaps in the current stakeholder literature, Chapter Four discusses Rawls's principle of fair play and the derivative principle of stakeholder fairness as well as comparing and contrasting the fairness model with other similar models of business ethics, Chapter Five elaborates on a discursive method for testing the content of stakeholder norms. Chapter Six provides an in depth discussion of the problem of stakeholder identity and the determination of legitimate moral stakeholder status, and Chapter Seven suggests some ways in which stakeholder theory may be enriched through considerations of the social psychological studies of justice, fairness, and equity and provides some preliminary propositions for future empirical testing