A Strategy-as-Practice Perspective on Stakeholder Management

Abstract

Stakeholder management is part of the day-to-day activities of managers. Yet, we currently know much more about stakeholder management outcomes than how managers actually consider and balance stakeholder needs. Drawing on an inductive analysis of mixed-methods data from 353 Dutch philanthropic organizations, this paper unpacks the practice of stakeholder management. Informed by a strategy-as-practice lens, which has fruitfully advanced other branches of strategy research, it unpacks what stakeholder management practices look like, how and why managers enact them, and the consequences for stakeholders in terms of prioritization versus harmonization of their needs. We contribute to stakeholder theory by developing a new descriptive and empirically informed understanding of how managers deal with stakeholder demands. By identifying distinct ways in which managers deal with stakeholders, while moving beyond opposite cultural or moral pre-configurations as the foundational explanation, we take important steps towards explaining variation within as well as across stakeholder management approaches.