By R Edward Freeman, Robert Phillips, & Rajendra Sisodia
“If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.”
–H. Abelson (attributed to his Princeton roommate Jeff Goll)
In 2015, a group of influential strategic management scholars convened a workshop in Utah to discuss and debate stakeholder theory. One outcome of this meeting was a list of supposed tensions emerging from that group’s understanding of stakeholder theory and its relationship to mainstream strategic management. Our piece is a reaction to this list of tensions.
We argue that these tensions are a largely self-imposed by-product of how strategic management has been understood since the last quarter of the 20th c. Tension relies on at least one fixed point against which something else pulls – like tether or a leash. We argue that several of the fixed points holding this leash are merely apparent and could be constructively discarded. Achieving stakeholder theory’s full potential requires dropping this leash and moving past the limitations of these self-imposed fixed points.
In addition to addressing the tensions emerging from the Utah workshop, we note additional supposed tensions seen by some as limiting stakeholder theory’s usefulness. Among these is the idea that the theory is an “essentially contested concept.” According to W.B. Gallie, essentially contested concepts are “concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users” (1955: 169). The implication is that there will never be agreement among the contestants about the precise parameters of the concept. Some see counsel of despair in this essential contestability. If agreement is forever out of reach, why bother?
As with other tensions on the list, concern over stakeholder theory as essentially contested implies that there is an essence to other concepts that can be scientifically discovered (e.g., is this substance made of earth, air, fire, or water?), whereas other concepts must remain forever the subject of disagreement.
Pragmatists recoil at the thought of something having an “essence” beyond its understanding among “users” (to borrow Gallie’s language). For the pragmatist, everything is contestable. Contest can be relatively robust or dormant at any given time or for particular uses, but disagreement is a constant. Some concepts within stakeholder theory remain subject to contest, but we take this as a feature rather than a defect.
Viva Contest!!
References:
Freeman, R.E., Phillips, R., Sisodia, R. 2020. “Tensions in Stakeholder Theory.” Business & Society, 49(2). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0007650318773750
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0007650318773750
Gallie, W. B. 1955. “Essentially Contested Concepts.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Vol. 56, pp. 167-198). Aristotelian Society, Wiley.