Texcnologia De Humanidades

The Stakeholder Theory

Charles Fontaine
Antoine Haarman
Stefan Schmid

- December 2006 -

Stakeholder Theory of the MNC

Index
1. Introduction ........................................................................................ 3
2. Basic idea of the Stakeholder Theory and Definition .................... 3
2.1.

The stakeholder concept – popular andtrendy..........................................................................4

2.2.

Different definitions of Stakeholder .............................................................................................5

2.3.

What is a Stakeholder? ..................................................................................................................6

2.4.

Who are Stakeholders?..................................................................................................................6

2.5.

History of the Stakeholder Theory................................................................................................7

3. Contribution of Freeman to the stakeholder literature .................. 9
3.1.

Freeman Strategic Management...................................................................................................9

3.2.

Freeman’s essential book: A stakeholder approach .............................................................. 10

4. Normative, instrumental, and descriptive stakeholder theory....13
4.1.

Introduction................................................................................................................................... 13

4.2.
Normative theory .......................................................................................................................... 14
4.2.1.
Objective ................................................................................................................................ 14
4.2.2.
The action of a company should be ‘ethic’........................................................................... 15
4.2.3.
Freeman’s normative theory ................................................................................................. 15
4.3.
Analytic theory.............................................................................................................................. 17
4.3.1.
Introduction............................................................................................................................ 17
4.3.2.
Strategic management: Freeman (1984) and Savage et Al. (1991) ................................... 18
4.3.3.
Stakeholder identification: Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997)................................................ 21
4.3.4.
Friedman and Miles (2002)................................................................................................... 22

5. The stakeholders: from theory to practice....................................24
5.1.

The Corporate Social Responsibility theory ............................................................................ 24

5.2.

The three main current of the CSR............................................................................................ 26

5.3.

The different CSR strategies ...................................................................................................... 28

5.4.

The Limits of the theory and its application ............................................................................ 30

6. Conclusion.......................................................................................33

2

Stakeholder Theory of the MNC

1. Introduction
In our work we want to explain the principle ideas of the stakeholder theory.
The fact that the stakeholder concept has achieved widespread popularity among
academics, media and managers we think that it is an important task to bring some
system into all those confusing approaches around to the stakeholder concept. At the
beginning...