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Stakeholder theory has been a popular heuristic for describing the management environment for years. but it has not attained full theoretical status. Our aim in this article is to contribute to a theory of stakeholder identification and salience based on stakeholders possessing one or more of three relationship attributes: power, legitimacy, and urgency. By combining these attributes, we generate a typology of stakeholders, propositions concerning their salience to managers of the firm, and research and management implications.
Since Freeman (1984) published his landmark book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, the concept of "stakeholders" has become embedded in management scholarship and in managers' thinking. Yet, as popular as the term has become and as richly descriptive as it is, there is no agreement on what Freeman (1994) calls "The Principle of Who or What Really Counts." That is, who (or what) are the stakeholders of the firm? And to whom (or what) do managers pay attention? The first question calls for a normative theory of stakeholder identification, to explain logically why managers should consider certain classes of entities as stakeholders. The second question calls for a descriptive theory of stakeholder salience, to explain the conditions under which managers do consider certain classes of entities as stakeholders.
Stakeholder theory, reviewed in this article, offers a maddening variety of signals on how questions of stakeholder identification might be answered. We will see stakeholders identified as primary or secondary stakeholders; as owners and nonowners of the firm; as owners of capital or owners of less tangible assets; as actors or those acted upon; as those existing in a voluntary or an involuntary relationship with the firm; as rights-holders, contractors, or moral claimants; as resource providers to or dependents of the firm; as risk-takers or influencers; and as legal principals to whom agent-managers bear a fiduciary duty. In the stakeholder literature there are a few broad definitions that attempt to specify the empirical reality that virtually anyone can affect or be affected by an organization's actions. What is needed is a theory of stakeholder identification that can reliably separate stakeholders from nonstakeholders.
Also in the stakeholder literature are a number of narrow definitions that attempt to specify the pragmatic reality that managers simply cannot attend to all actual or...