Contemporary scholarship on stakeholders marks its origin with the publication of R. Edward Freeman’s (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. In that work, Freeman defines a stakeholder as ‘any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives’ (p. 46).
Supporting this definition, stakeholder theory is a pragmatic approach to understanding how the interests (including well-being) of a broad, but nevertheless limited, set of organizational constituencies affects, or should affect, leaders’ decisions. Elaborated as a theory of strategic management by Freeman in 1984, it has also gained currency as arguably the leading theory of normative business ethics over the last 25 years.
Freeman is careful to credit predecessors for providing the foundation on which he builds his theory. Giles Slinger (1999) provides additional historical antecedents. Prominent questions spawned by Freeman’s work in general, and...
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Elms, H., Phillips, R.A. (2016). Stakeholder. In: Augier, M., Teece, D. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_270-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_270-1
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