The Stakeholder Strategy Interest Group promotes scholarship that embraces a multi-stakeholder perspective of firm strategy, its antecedents, its boundaries, roles, and values, and its diverse forms of impact and performance. We welcome work from a variety of disciplines and national settings.
If you are interested in this domain, regardless of your other interests, we welcome you to join with us as we attempt to answer questions such as the following:
Review of Literature
We are excited to share the latest Stakeholder Strategy Literature Review by Jeffrey Harrison. To view this document or others, click here.
The Stakeholder Strategy Community Book Talk launched Spring 2021 as a new initiative by Stakeholder Strategy IG to help connect with and engage our members.
Held on April 1, 2021 from 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT (UTC -4).
Members were invited to join and discuss “Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism” with author Christopher Marquis, Cornell University. This 1-hour virtual event took place on Thursday, April 1, 2021 amd featured a 30-minute book talk by the author, followed by a lively community discussion between the author and attendees. This event was targeted at Stakeholder Strategy IG membership and is open to all 2021 SMS Members*.
Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism
Businesses have a big role to play in a capitalist society. They can tip the scales toward the benefit of the few, with toxic side effects for all, or they can guide us toward better, more equitable long-term solutions. Better Business tells the story of the rise of a new corporate form, the B Corporation, that aims to embed stakeholder principles in companies’ DNA. These companies undergo a rigorous certification process, overseen by an independent NGO B Lab, and commit to putting social benefits, the rights of workers, community impact, and environmental stewardship on equal footing with financial shareholders. Informed by over a decade of research and animated by interviews with the movement’s founders and leading figures, Better Business explores the rapid growth of companies choosing to certify as B Corps around the world and explains how and why researching accountability systems and corporate transparency is important to realize stakeholder capitalism.
Held on June 15, 2021
The second Stakeholder Strategy Community Book Talk featured author Sarah Kaplan (University of Toronto) presenting her recent book "The 360° Corporation". 
About the book:
Companies are increasingly facing intense pressures to address stakeholder demands from every direction: consumers want socially responsible products; employees want meaningful work; investors now screen on environmental, social, and governance criteria; “clicktivists” create social media storms over company missteps. CEOs now realize that their companies must be social as well as commercial actors, but stakeholder pressures often create trade-offs with demands to deliver financial performance to shareholders. How can companies respond while avoiding simple “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing”? Suggesting that the shared-value mindset may actually get in the way of progress, bestselling author Sarah Kaplan shows in The 360° Corporation how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation. This book lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them.
Held on August 17, 2021
The Stakeholder Strategy Interest Group held their third Stakeholder Strategy Community Book Talk with author Edward Freeman (University of Virginia) presenting his recent book "The Power of And: Responsible Business Without Trade-Offs."
About the book:
The idea that business is only about the money doesn’t hold true in the twenty-first century, when companies around the world are giving up traditional distinctions in order to succeed. Yet our expectations for businesses remain under the sway of an outdated worldview that emphasizes profits for shareholders above all else.
The Power of And offers a new narrative about the nature of business, revealing the focus on responsibility and ethics that unites today’s most influential ideas and companies. R. Edward Freeman, Kirsten E. Martin, and Bidhan L. Parmar detail an emerging business model built on five key concepts: prioritizing purpose as well as profits; creating value for stakeholders as well as shareholders; seeing business as embedded in society as well as markets; recognizing people’s full humanity as well as their economic interests; and integrating business and ethics into a more holistic model. Drawing on examples across companies, industries, and countries, they show that these values support persevering in hard times and prospering over the long term. Real-world success stories disprove the conventional wisdom that there are unavoidable trade-offs between acting ethically and succeeding financially. The Power of And presents a conceptual revolution about what it means for business to be responsible, providing a new story for us to tell in order to help all kinds of companies thrive.
