By Matthias Wenzel, Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich, Laura Marie Edinger-Schons, Itziar Castelló, & Frank de Bakker

Employees, consumers, business partners, activists, citizens: An ever-broader scope of stakeholders is actively engaged in organizational activities such as strategy-making, product development, work coordination, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Yet, despite its prevalence, stakeholder engagement remains poorly understood. Therefore, as part of a Business and Society Special Issue Call for Papers, we invite submissions that seek to shed light on facets and dimensions of stakeholder engagement. But what is stakeholder engagement, and why is it relevant? We shed light on these issues so as to pave a way for potential submissions to this topical special issue.

What is Stakeholder Engagement?

“Stakeholder engagement” refers to the process of involving stakeholders within organizational activities in which they are interested, or by which they are affected. This process becomes manifest in terms of three dimensions:

• “Participation”, i.e., the provision of input by stakeholders to an organization’s programs, policies, and strategies
• “Inclusion”, i.e., giving voice to stakeholders through the cocreation of an organization’s issues, priorities, and procedures
• “Democracy”, i.e., handing over some degree of formal decision-making power to stakeholders.

In contrast to the more conventionally examined “management” of stakeholders, stakeholder engagement can be initiated, directed, performed, and contested by an organization’s managers, its stakeholders, or both. That is, organizations and their representatives may open up opportunities for stakeholders to contribute to organizational activities. Conversely, stakeholders may also engage themselves as individuals or representatives of societal actors such as nongovernmental organizations.

Why is Stakeholder Engagement Relevant?

In spite of nascent efforts to gain an understanding of participation, inclusion, and democracy in organizational activities, research on stakeholder engagement remains an underrepresented and underdeveloped field in business and society research in particular, and management research more generally. Mainstream management research continues to reproduce a managerialist bias by implicitly foregrounding corporate elites as decision-makers who act in the best interest of all stakeholders, without challenging the limits of this taken-for-granted assumption.

In the face of associated outcomes such as creativity and innovation, efficiency and efficacy, value creation, and a social license to operate, stakeholder engagement is an ever-growing phenomenon in business and society. Furthermore, in light of an emerging plethora of tools for engaging stakeholders in organizational activities, the use of such tools creates new opportunities and challenges, many of which remain poorly understood. Therefore, we need a better understanding of how stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy are performed, and with what consequences.

Call for Papers on “Stakeholder Engagement”

Therefore, we invite paper submissions that shed light on how actors in and around organizations perform stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy, and with what consequences.

Some sample questions to guide submissions include, but are not limited to:

• What are the mechanisms, practices, tactics, strategies, and forms of organizing through which stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy are performed in and around organizations?
• How are different dimensions of stakeholder engagement interrelated?
• How is stakeholder engagement performed over time?
• How do actors cope with or work through the polyphony, tensions, and open-endedness that arise in stakeholder engagement?
• Which stakeholders get engaged in organizational activities, who does not get engaged, and why?
• Which outcomes, both desirable and problematic, both expected and unexpected, both individual, organizational, and societal, does stakeholder engagement produce? Do these outcomes differ for symbolic vs. substantive forms of stakeholder engagement?
• How do national or regional contexts shape the emergence and outcomes of stakeholder engagement? How can multinational corporations harmonize potential conflicts?
• How does stakeholder engagement differ across different types of firms, such as small and medium-sized enterprises vs. multinational corporations or social ventures versus for-profit corporations? Why is this so?
• Which individual, organizational, or societal factors and conditions enable, constrain, or disable effective stakeholder engagement?
• How does stakeholder engagement relate to current topics such as social intrapreneurship, corporate social innovation, collective impact, participatory governance, new forms of organizing, and open strategy?

We welcome submissions that unpack the enablers, dynamics, and outcomes of stakeholder engagement in its manifold manifestations and dimensions on any or even across multiple levels of analysis. Given the rather limited attempts to integrate stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy, we particularly encourage submissions that examine these concepts in concert. This fascinating area of research invites not only conceptual, but also empirical work in all of its facets, including qualitative, quantitative, configurational, and experimental research designs, among others.

The deadline for paper submissions is January 31, 2022. Find out more about the Call for Papers here.

In order to help authors develop their ideas, we offer two PDWs – one at EGOS 2021 and one at AOM 2021. Find out more about the EGOS PDW here. The details about the AOM PDW will be announced soon.

We look forward to reading your submissions!