Abstract
This article presents textual evidence which shows some of the ways in which green business corporations and environmental NGOs represent the natural landscape and their relationship with it. It reviews the origin and development of stakeholder dialogue and questions to what extent such dialogue can contribute to a process of corporate change. It shows how the corporations use different language to represent nature than the NGOs and provides evidence suggesting that the green corporations understand their relationship with the natural landscape differently. NGOs that wish to speak up for the natural landscape, face a rhetorical dilemma which has an important implication for their practice. Either they can enter into a stakeholder dialogue with business and risk becoming a party to the exploitive management of nature, or they can refrain from entering into a dialogue and risk becoming marginalised.
Highlights
Business corporations’ recognition of stakeholders would appear to be almost universal; not rigorous, a sampling by the author of 25 websites selected at random from the CNN Global 500 list, revealed that every one of the corporations used the term
It shows how the corporations use different language to represent nature than the NGOs and provides evidence suggesting that the green corporations understand their relationship with the natural landscape differently
Either they can enter into a stakeholder dialogue with business and risk becoming a party to the exploitive management of nature, or they can refrain from entering into a dialogue and risk becoming marginalised
Summary
Business corporations’ recognition of stakeholders would appear to be almost universal; not rigorous, a sampling by the author of 25 websites selected at random from the CNN Global 500 list, revealed that every one of the corporations used the term. Dialogue with stakeholders is often presented by corporations as being a desirable and important factor in effecting change towards more sustainable ways of doing business. The literature review in this article includes research that supports this view; some dialogues can be productive for both corporation and stakeholder. Nature, or the natural landscape – the term I shall use in this article – singles itself out from the other potential stakeholders of the corporation by the simple fact that it cannot speak up for its own rights. It makes a contribution to understanding what stakeholder dialogue’s possibilities and limitations might be for securing the interests of the natural landscape, when it is cast in the role of a stakeholder of the corporation
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