Stakeholder theory: Pictures, the environment and sustainable development – do we have a good enough picture in our heads or do we need something different?

Purpose This paper is a critique of stakeholder theory, a critique that builds towards outlining how if sustainable development is a desired aim then stakeholder theory is a tool that may not be adequate and may require consignment to the archives. Consigning something to the archives is a similar argument to that which Freeman (1984) used to introduce stakeholder theory 27 years ago in 1984. At that time he outlined how ‘we manage based on our understandings of the past, rather than the future’ (Freeman 1984, p. 1) and as such a new tool (the stakeholder concept) is required to help managers engage in ‘a new way of thinking about strategic management – that is, how a corporation can and should set and implement strategic direction’ (ibid., p. vi). To make the case that there is a requirement to move past the stakeholder concept the paper proceeds through four parts before summarising and briefly discussing possible alternatives. The first part is a review of stakeholder theory to help set context, it discusses how the theory has developed and been discussed across academic literature. The second part critiques stakeholder theory drawing upon the prompts piqued by the pictorial representation of it. The third part draws upon the pictorial representation but focuses on the challenges of putting managers in the central role of arbitrators. These second and third parts essentially highlight the illusion of equity that is offered in the pictorial representation of stakeholder theory and how this illusion has behind it inequity. The fourth part discusses arguments that have been offered for and against including the natural environment as a stakeholder, prior to the concept of sustainable development being introduced and the difficulty of the stakeholder concept within a desire to pursue sustainable development being cemented. The paper then closes by discussing a potential alternative concept from which to begin a new understanding before summarising and closing. Prior to continuing the reader should note the history of this paper. The original version of this paper was presented by the author at the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research Conference at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom in 2006. 1 That paper was developed to explore a hypothesis of whether including the natural environment as a stakeholder was viable as a method of improving a firm’s environmental performance. It contained the four key parts of this current paper as outlined above. Following that presentation little was done with the paper until 2009 when it was reviewed again. At that time a literature search revealed that many of the arguments made within the original 2006 version of this paper regarding the difficulties of the pictorial representation of stakeholder theory had now also been made and published in an academic journal by Fassin (2008, 2009), albeit Fassin (2008, 2009) does not take a sustainable development focus. 2 In 2011, I shared the paper’s key arguments with the Asia Pacific Centre for

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