Value Creation and Appropriation in Firms: Methodological Challenges and Research Opportunities

Abstract

The stakeholder value creation and appropriation (VCA) approach is a new lens for understanding how the economic value created through the firm’s activities is shared among its immediate stakeholders—employees, customers, suppliers, government, and capital owners. A series of recent articles in the Strategic Management Journal have conceptualized the approach, developed the method, and shown its application in comparative case study analysis (Garcia-Castro and Aguilera, 2015; Lieberman, Garcia-Castro and Balasubramanian, 2017; Lieberman, Balasubramanian and Garcia-Castro, 2018; Kern and Gospel, 2020). The approach holds potential beyond the Strategy field: as a tool for investigating how firm-level decisions and practices create winners and losers, but also as a new way of linking these micro-level patterns to macro-level pressures and outcomes, thereby helping Management scholars contribute to addressing one of the world’s grand challenges. The need to better understand inequality in and around organizations has been acknowledged in recent years (Suddaby, Bruton and Walsh, 2018; Amis, Mair and Munir, 2020; Bapuji, Ertug and Shaw, 2020) but has been laid bare in particular during the Covid crisis (Bapuji et al., 2020; Munir, 2020). The goal of this panel symposium is therefore to take stock of how the stakeholder VCA approach has been used so far, reflect on considerations and practicalities of applying it to new empirical settings and research questions, and engage in a discussion of how it could be used to help us unpack the complex relationship between organizations and inequality. To this end, we bring together scholars who are experts on the approach with those who are pursuing research that could stand to benefit from it.